Lou Reed, John Cale, Andy Warhol

Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella live in Brooklyn 

The Observer, 22nd April 1990

by Simon Reynolds

A frisson of excitement traversed the rock world last year when it was announced that Lou Reed and John Cale were working together for the first time since their days with Velvet Underground in the Sixties. Since then, Reed has gone on to refine the Velvets' New York street romanticism in an acclaimed solo career and Cale, a Welsh-born academy-trained musician, to production and composition.

What reunited these different characters after 20 years of musical estrangement was the idea of writing an elegy for Andy Warhol, their former mentor and friend. The result is Songs For Drella, a suite of 15 songs, which the two performed for four nights last December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Luckily, Channel 4 had the presence of mind to jet over to New York to film it.

Shot without an audience, but accompanied by Jerome Serlin's sombre back-projections of Warhol and his acolytes, Songs For Drella will be broadcast on Friday, while WEA Records has just released the album. With Reed on guitar, Cale on piano and violin, and both on vocals, the songs chart Warhol's life.

'Smalltown' is about his Pittsburgh background ("When you're growing up in a small town/You say no one famous ever came from here"). 'Images' and 'Style It Takes' describe Warhol's Sixties heyday as manager of the Factory, patron of the arts, and collector of bohemians and freaks, while 'It Wasn't Me' sees Warhol refusing to take the rap for the premature death of some of his creatures, like Edie Sedgwick.

Most of the songs are voiced in the first person singular, and attempt to see events through Warhol's eyes. Others are deeply personal expressions of Reed's feelings about the man/myth. 'I Believe', for instance, concerns Valerie Solanas's attempt to assassinate Warhol and sees Reed howling for retribution ("being sick is no excuse/I would have pulled the switch on her myself"). And the closing 'Hello It's Me' is both a poignant adieu to Warhol, and an expression of regret for not having talked while they could. It ends with an acknowledgement of unresolved bitterness: "There are resentments that can be never unmade... Your Diaries are not a worthy epitaph."

Songs For Drella, says Reed, is an attempt to create a fitting epitaph. "Andy was an extraordinary individual. After he died there was a spate of very negative, gossipy articles about him. The idea on this project was to do him justice. Andy was wonderful to get ideas from. Average ideas are always readily available, but extraordinary ideas you can only get from someone like Andy Warhol. John and I saw this as an opportunity to try to let people know about the real Warhol."

'Drella' was a nickname (a cross between Dracula and Cinderella) that Warhol himself disliked. But Reed is quick to quash the idea that there's anything double-edged in their use of the name. "It was a name that everyone in his intimate circle used and was purely affectionate."

The most moving song, 'A Dream', is an imaginary Warhol soliloquy that wryly incorporates reproaches against both Cale and Reed for giving him the cold shoulder during his twilight years: "I hate Lou, I really do... He won't even hire us for his videos... He got married and didn't invite me." Musically, the song sees Cale and Reed rekindling the magic of their turbulent partnership in Velvet Underground. Does Reed have any plans to work with Cale again soon?

"Every 20 years," smiles Lou Reed, then adds: "Please write down that 'he smiled'."

six songs related to Rip It Up and Start Again

originally written for Largehearted Boy website, 2006

1/ Sex Pistols, “Bodies” (Never Mind the Bollocks, 1977)

Well, without punk, there’d be no postpunk, right? And it was the Sex Pistols (specifically this song and “Anarchy in the UK”) that first snagged me off whatever path I was on aged fourteen and into the world of taking-music-too-seriously. Mainly, because I’d never heard anything that sounded so deadly serious before. Not so much anti-abortion as a protest against life, “Bodies” is a song that reminds you that a big part of punk’s appeal was its pure wanton evil--destruction for destruction’s sake. Almost orchestral in its grandeur (those huge backing vocal chants), “Bodies” sounds appalling and glorious. In Rip It Up and Start Again, part of my rhetorical pitch is challenging punk’s inflated historical status and bigging up “the aftermath”. This involved criticizing punk rock as a backward step, a return to basic rock’n’roll. Which is true for much of it, but the best punk was actually the distillation of rock into something that hadn’t, actually, been heard before. You go back a few years before Buzzcocks and X-Ray Spex, and really there’s nothing that has that monolithic blam-blam-blam-blam feel, even the heaviest metal or hardest-pounding Stooges had more swing to it. Still, there was a sense in which, once punk had staged this reductionist process, it couldn’t be taken anywhere, it could only be repeated with diminishing returns. Hence postpunk’s drive to expand and experiment.

2/ Public Image Ltd, “Death Disco” (single, 1979)

A protest against death: John Lydon singing (although that word seems inaccurate and inadequate for the harrowing noise unleashed here) about watching the light go out in his mother eyes. As much as the sound of the single, which made the Top 20 in Britain, what was life-changing for many, me included, was the matter/anti-matter collision of “death” and “disco” in the title. Disco, subverted by content too heavy and dark for the brightly lit celebration of the dancefloor; “death” (rock’s seriousness, its grappling with “the human condition”) subverted by disco’s hedonism and levity. Ian Dury & The Blockheads--another of my favorites back then--did something similar, albeit in a more accessible and conventionally musical way: “My Old Man” (on New Boots and Panties) was a poignant reminiscence of Dury’s own dead dad over taut funk, while “Dance of the Screamers” (from Do It Yourself) turned disco into primal scream therapy for the interpersonally challenged.

3/ Talking Heads, “Seen and Not Seen” (Remain In Light, 1980)

I got PiL’s Metal Box for Christmas 1979, and Remain In Light for Xmas the following year. I remember spending Christmas morning lying on the carpet in our living room as close to the speakers as I could get, lost in its jungle of glittering texture-rhythm. “Seen and Not Seen,” the least groove-oriented track, is actually my favorite song on the record, though. Although I didn’t realize this at the time, it’s one that bears a really heavy Eno imprint in terms of its near-ambient atmosphere, the way the synths glint and waver like heat-haze rising over a sun-baked highway. It’s similar to the “4th World” music Eno was making around this time with Jon Hassell. I love the lyric--the story of a man who learns how to change his facial appearance by gradual exercise of will, only to realise that he’s made a terrible mistake halfway through the metamorphosis--and the hesitant cadences of Byrne’s spoken delivery. People typically have a fairly limited idea of what postpunk was about--angular, stark, punk-funk, angsty--but there was a whole other side to the music that was ethereal, dreamy-drifty, and gorgeously textured, and “Seen and Not Seen” is an exquisite example. I wanted to get the track for the Rip It Up compilation, which is coming out this spring and showcases the atmospheric, blissy-eerie side of postpunk, but we couldn’t get the rights.

4/ Scritti Politti, “PAs” (from 4 A Sides EP, 1979)

There was just something really mysterious and intriguing about Scritti Politti. Somehow I’d got wind of the idea of them as this fabulously uncompromising outfit skulking in the margins of the UK postpunk scene and operating at some outer limit of politics-in-pop. I guess that was their reputation, their image, their glamour in a way, and it made them both attractive and vaguely intimidating, like a challenge that you ought to put yourself through. And then when I actually heard Scritti for the first time--it would have been “Bibbly-O-Tek,” also from 4 A Sides, on John Peel’s radio show--I was struck both by how unusual it was (the fractured song-structures, the odd chord-changes) but also how instantly beguiling the song was (the sweetness of Green’s voice, the sheer melodic beauty--which came, I realized many years later, from his childhood love of the Beatles). There was a loveliness that I completely had not expected. And when I got 4 A Sides, and the two other early EPs, I gradually became convinced Green was a pop genius. All this was well before he’d made his big turnabout and decided to go “pop” with “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”. I was such a fan that I nearly wrote him a letter telling him that he should just forget all the Scritti ideology about avoiding musical conventions and just go for it, that pop stardom was his destiny. It was “PAs,” this fantastic funk groove with a gorgeously insinuating and serpentile melody, that really sold me on this idea. This would have been the summer of 1980, when Green actually was holed up in a Welsh cottage ruminating over his musical future. But as much as it was great when he did go pop, first with the lover’s rock reggae of “Sweetest Girl” and then with the electrofunk hits like “Wood Beez,” “Absolute” and “Perfect Way”, part of me wishes he stuck with his original band and just kept on making things like “PAs” for ever.

5/ Tenor Saw, “Ring the Alarm”, 1985

I wanted to include something to register the extent to which postpunk depended for its very being on the amazing black music of the late Seventies and early Eighties--funk and disco, reggae and electro. This tune is from just outside the period Rip It Up covers, but, well, I’ve been listening to it a lot this week, and it seems as good an emblem as any for the massive effect Jamaican music had on UK postpunk. I played it yesterday and had one of those moments. It’s a midtempo skank, sweetly sung, but it hit me with the impact of The Stooges; the tension in the rhythm suddenly had this quality of tectonic violence. The line in this song that always slays me, makes my head spin, is “sweet reggae music ‘pon the attack”. If you think about what the song is actually about, it’s grim--the market struggle of sound system against sound system (“ring the alarm, another sound is dying”). It’s pitiless, Hobbesian, and yet there is such exultation in the song, same as in “War in A Babylon” by Max Romeo, another tune I’ve been playing recently.

6/ La Dusseldorf, “Dusseldorf” (La Dusseldorf, 1976)

Not strictly postpunk; indeed this album--the brainchild of Klaus Dinger of Neu!-- was recorded in 1975, making it pre-punk. But I’m including it A/ because I’ve been listening to it incessantly, and B/ David Bowie cited this album, along with Neu 75, as a huge influence on Low, which in turn was a massive LP for the postpunk bands. La Dusseldorf could therefore be seen as the Source in terms of the Neu Europa vibe that swept through so much postpunk, from Simple Minds’ Empires and Dance to The Associates (“White Car in Germany,” etc). There’s this clear-headed atmosphere of nobility and splendor to “Dusseldorf”, panoramic vistas reeling by as you head at speed into a world that’s cleansed and newborn. You get a tiny foretaste too of the glisten and uplift of early U2 and Echo & The Bunnymen, the postpunk breed of bands I call “glory boys” in Rip It Up. In Neu!, Dinger was one of the great rock drummers, he invented the motorik beat, this amazing combination of caveman primitivism and ever-shifting subtlety, a white version of Amiri Baraka’s “changing same.” One of the cool things about La Dusseldorf is that, in what seems like an act of supreme perversity, Dinger handed over the drum kit to his brother Thomas, who then proved to be just as good as Klaus. The latter, meanwhile, took up guitar and almost out-dazzled Neu! guitarist Michael Rother. I think he was trying to prove a point, that he was the real mastermind in Neu! Lyrically, “Dusseldorf” is wonderfully inane, just a chant of the city’s name, a one-word anthem of civic patriotism; sonically it’s 13 minutes of rolling motorik majesty, something I could happily listen to for fives times that length.

Hypnagogic pop and Southern California / James Ferraro interviewed

‘Hypnagogic pop’ and the landscape of Southern California

Frieze, Issue 137 / March 2011

by Simon Reynolds


I’m sitting on the AstroTurf lawn of The Grove, a ‘retroscape’ shopping mall in Los Angeles, listening to 1980s covers band The Copycats deliver immaculate counterfeits of bygone MTV hits. A 19th-century trolley car clanks by, passing the Art Deco movie theatre, and heads towards the Farmer’s Market, a vintage food court with clapboard stalls and hand-painted signs. Wandering over to an ornamental pond, I watch the outsized fish, so shiny they resemble miniature porcelain submarines. As The Copycats launch into ‘Billie Jean’, I suddenly think: this is like living inside a hypnagogic pop song.


Coined by The Wire magazine’s David Keenan in 2009, ‘hypnagogic pop’ is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave mtv pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters. Released as limited-edition cassettes and vinyl but reaching a larger audience through blogs and YouTube videos, hypnagogic pop shimmers with motifs and textures that flash back to the slick hits of artists such as Hall & Oates and Don Henley. The musical and conceptual pioneers of this movement, Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, are both based in LA, as are other rising figures like Sun Araw, LA Vampires and Puro Instinct. Ferraro’s frequent collaborator Spencer Clark lives in another sun-baked Southern California sprawl town, San Diego. Other key hypnagogues such as Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem SoCal in spirit.


Hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep, associated by some with hallucinations that are hyper-real rather than surreal. Life in LA – also the title of an Ariel Pink song, as it happens – does lend itself to a kind of ‘wide asleep’ trance, as your gaze falls under the sway of the sheer numbing beauty of the landscape and the weather – the way a certain slant of late afternoon light makes lawns glow eerily. Even the less attractive aspects of this town – strip-mall vistas that seem so desolate in the non-Sun Belt zones of the US – get softened by the bright lit blue skies (another Pink song) and by the peculiar mingling of utterly denatured built-up zones with outright wilderness.


LA is a city where Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) and the Spectacular (in the geological sense) are freakily entwined. As a recently arrived resident, I’m yet to tire of the juxtaposition of, say, an In-N-Out Burger drive-thru against the near-kitsch splendour of the San Gabriel Mountains. ‘Collage reality’ is how Spencer Clark describes the effect, adding that his music is a byproduct of living in ‘a zone that has beaches and mountains and hills as well as skyscrapers […] A lot of my music I see as landscape music.’


Hypnagogic is a 21st-century update of psychedelia. Like its 1960s antecedent, it looks to the West Coast, but its primary focus is LA rather than San Francisco; ’60s anti-urbanism has been supplanted by an ambiguous exaltation of suburbia. Hypnagogic retains the original psychedelia’s fixation on childhood but this lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture: mtv one-hit wonders and ’80s cartoons replace the Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland references of Jefferson Airplane.

The scrambling of pop time is a culture-wide phenomenon in the West, but it feels unusually strong in LA, where pop radio is dominated by old music: classic rock, New Wave and eclectic stations like Jack fm that mimic a 40-something’s iPod Shuffle. Flicking between stations, there’s a visual analogue to what you hear in the endless interplay of different eras of commercial signage and shop-front décor. In no other city have I had such an overwhelming sense of the erosion of a cultural timecode, that pulse that once synchronized the sectors of the contemporary scene (fashion, design, music, etc.) and constructed a sense of epoch.


Last year James Ferraro posted a YouTube video to promote his albums Wild World (2009) and Feed Me (2010), but which also served as preview of a full-length movie he’s making (Touch Screen Splatter Punks of Digital Tokyo due to be completed in 2013). The excerpt concatenated low-budget horror (Ferraro as decomposing corpse, TV dinners that come alive) with archival snippets of President Reagan and hand-held footage of Hollywood street scenes: leather-booted vamps from the Valley, businesses like Happy Nails and LA Tanning, gossip mags with ‘plastic surgery shockers’ cover stories. By email, Ferraro told me about his future projects, the most striking of which is a ‘live webcam water birth viewable online with interactive chat functions’. The idea was inspired by witnessing ‘a lady give birth in a Starbucks at The Grove in Hollywood, surrounded by smart phones and digital cameras. So you see this reality will always be a part of my work.’


This reality is hyper-reality. In what may be a deliberately ’80s-retro gesture, Ferraro frequently sounds like he’s channelling Jean Baudrillard, talking of wanting to be ‘simulacra’s paintbrush’. Other ’80s totems spring to mind during his patter: David Cronenberg, when Ferraro talks of getting burned out on Hollywood, recharging his batteries in more earth-toned, bohemian zones of LA like Eagle Rock, then ‘jumping back into the movie screen’; Jeff Koons, for the aesthetic of kitsch sublime running through Ferraro’s work and the inscrutable ingenuousness with which Ferraro delivers his lines. He says he moved to LA to become an action movie star, just like his heroes Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone.


Also part of this iconic cluster is J.G. Ballard: Ferraro echoes the late novelist when he talks of movie stars as modern deities embodying qualities that human beings have admired since the dawn of time. High Rise (1975) and Kingdom Come (2006) spring to mind when you read the sleevenote description of ‘Headlines (Access Hollywood)’ from 2010’s album Last American Hero. The song is about people who get trapped in Costco (a bulk-buy, budget-price hypermarket) and devolve into a mutant tribe whose children, ‘born within the settlement’, grow up with ‘no conception of a world beyond’.

Not that you can really derive this from the track, a frayed instrumental that resembles the blues if its foundational figure wasn’t Robert Johnson but Harold Faltermeyer of ‘Axel F’ and Beverly Hills Cop (1984) fame. Elsewhere in Ferraro’s most SoCal-themed releases – Wild World, On Air (2010), and the brand-new Nightdolls with Hairspray (2011) – he explores a sound that draws on ’80s rock at its most artificial: shrill, garish textures like you might at hear in a guitar shop where some Eddie Van Halen wannabe is trying out too many effects pedals at once.


Like a modern-day Devo, Ferraro never lets on whether he’s reviling or revelling in the decadence and grotesquerie of US culture. The cover of Last American Hero is a glossy photograph of a Best Buy store, described in the sleevenotes as ‘the modern Gomorrah temple’. But Ferraro also enthuses about ‘the primal fantasies and fetishes, hedonistic urges, mouth watering narcissism and dreams manifested into plastic surgery in our digital age Whole Foods candy land’.

Shopping malls, celebutainment, cosmetic surgery, a consumer culture orientated around bipolar rhythms of bulimic bingeing and anorexic/aerobic purging – all this really took off in the ’80s. (And was taken to the extreme in California – for Baudrillard, America’s vanguard, a sort of hyper-America.) Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.