The Jesus & Mary Chain - "In a Hole" (1985) Old Grey Whistle Test

Aside from being the coolest clip ever (wait for the ending!), this song couldn't describe any more accurately the unbearable sadness and isolation dancing through my mind right now.

The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Just Like Honey" (1985)

jlw

"Listen to the girl
As she takes on half the world
Moving up and so alive
In her honey dripping beehive
Beehive
It's good, so good, it's so good
So good"

The Velvets- Fragments of a History, Chapter 2: Peel Slowly & See

Simply put, The Velvet Underground's debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, was a game-changer that, over the course of the four+ decades since its release, has served as a precursor to everything from glam-rock to punk to industrial and beyond, a deceptively unassuming album whose particular effect was best summed up in Brian Eno's famous pronouncement: "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." As the album cover suggests, the back-story of The Velvets' debut is very much about their brief stint as members of Andy Warhol's Factory, for it was through Warhol's mentoring and patronage that they were able to record (a now legendary) album that they themselves never thought would materialize. However, from the beginning of their association with Warhol, there was conflict. Paul Morrissey, an avant-garde filmmaker and factory regular, convinced Warhol that The Velvets needed a more appealing lead singer, as Lou Reed was prone to appearing withdrawn and abrasive on stage. German fashion model and fledgling singer Nico, whom Warhol had used in a few of his films, most notably Chelsea Girls, was Morrissey's recommendation to Warhol, who in turn set about convincing Reed and John Cale to accept Nico as the band's "chanteuse." Despite their initial resistance to the idea, Reed and Cale were eventually persuaded to not only accept Nico into the band, but to write a few songs specifically for her; being the intelligent opportunists that they were, they likely realized that being given new instruments, free rehearsal space, food, drugs, sex (of all kinds), and Warhol's pop-art cache were perks that few, if any, bands could ever dream of enjoying.

Despite much evidence to the contrary, Sterling Morrison has suggested that the band was actually quite open to Nico's participation: "She was around because of Andy, but he couldn't talk us really into anything. We thought it would be a good idea. I mean that's how the whole thing was worked on the first album: The Velvet Underground and Nico. In other words, we were a unit with or without her. And she could do some things we really like, so we said do some songs. It was a complicated working arrangement because she said if I don't sing, I don't do anything. So it was always a question of how many songs Nico would do, should she do all of them, which we didn't want, and that was the only cumbersome aspect of it." Whether or not the band was initially receptive to Nico, her lack of musical experience had a divisive effect. At their first rehearsal with their new vocalist, the band reportedly drowned her voice in guitar noise every time she tried to sing. As Sterling Morrison has also revealed, after joining, Nico was often a detrimental force within the band: "There were problems from the very beginning because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all [....] And she would try and do little sexual politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you'd find Nico close by. So she went from Lou to Cale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long."

Warhol's first major project involving The Velvets was a multimedia exhibition called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which involved the band playing in front of a silent 70 minute black & white film entitled The Velvet Underground & Nico: A Symphony of Sound. Performing in the EPI allowed The Velvet Underground to regularly explore and indulge their interest in musical improvisation, a trait that would be put to use soon thereafter while recording their debut album. In 1966, the first step a band would typically take before recording an album was securing a recording contract. In the case of The Velvets, Warhol decided instead to finance the album himself with the help of Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records Sales Executive who hoped Columbia would ultimately agree to sign the band and distribute the record. In mid-April 1966, after much rehearsing and endlessly working on new arrangements intended to accurately reflect the innovative approach they had honed earlier that spring playing in the EPI, The Velvets entered Scepter Studios, an old, decrepit recording studio in New York City, with Warhol as ostensible producer to record an acetate that would be peddled to various record companies. Lou Reed has clarified Warhol's role during the recording sessions: "Andy was the producer and Andy was in fact sitting behind the board gazing with rapt fascination at all the blinking lights. He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense he really produced it because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren't large enough to be attacked. As a consequence of him being the producer, we'd just walk in and set up and did what we always did [....] Of course, he didn't know anything about record production, he just sat there and said, 'Oooh that's fantastic,' and the engineer would say, 'Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic isn't it?'"

Despite the austere recording conditions, The Velvets made the most of the opportunity. Norman Dolph: "Most of the actual tracks, there was only one good unbroken take, maybe two of some of them. I'll say this: at no time did anybody on either side of the glass say, well, we'll fix it in the mix. That was never said. They performed it, and they'd come in, and we'd play it back end-to-end. If there was not a simultaneous agreement, they'd go back and do it over. But usually, anything that sounded like rough or iffy or from an engineering point of view didn't please John, he or I would break it down. We'd never even finish the take. Then they'd start a new one over, and then they'd come in and say, yeah, that's it, next case. And there was never any 'I'll play it back tomorrow, see if I like it tomorrow, and if I don't, then I'll redo it.' None of that. It was all just like they'd just sung it live, and they couldn't go back and redo it, because it was live. Because we were paying for the tape at probably $125 a roll, usually the broken takes were backed up and recorded over. Otherwise there would be some interesting scraps lying around [....]  It seems to me that "Heroin" was either done last, or the very first of the second day. 'Cause I remember that that was the one where Lou Reed needed to kind of get his head in the right place for that. And I remember in that one, in the control room, nobody moved a muscle when he was singing that song. And you didn't want anything to go wrong with that take at all, because if it had, he would have torn a wall down. Every bit of the energy in the song, you experienced in his persona at that point." The result, known as the Norman Dolph Acetate, ended up being roundly rejected by Columbia who didn't feel the band had any talent (ditto Atlantic and Elektra); however Morrissey managed to sell it to Verve/MGM, who promptly decided to sit on it until the following year because they had just released another "weird" album, Freak Out  by The Mothers of Invention and weren't quite sure how to market The Velvets. The delay gave the band a chance to re-record a few songs under better conditions in Los Angeles while on tour as part of the EPI and to record some new material (including "Sunday Morning") with Verve staff producer Tom Wilson in New York.

The Velvet Underground - "Heroin" (1967)

An absolute fucking masterpiece, that one is. Part two of The Velvets series coming very soon...

The Jesus & Mary Chain (with Hope Sandoval) - "Sometimes Always" (1994)

William & Hope doing the Nancy & Lee thing, and doing it well. I'm really feeling this song right now, except for that last line- he's a bit of a presumptuous twat if you ask me....

Swell Maps - Jane from Occupied Europe (1980/2004)

In many ways, the early post-punk movement was a reaction to the overly simplified aesthetic (as well as ideology) of a UK punk scene that had quickly become a caricature of itself by the end of the 1970s. While the term "post-punk" has, over the years, become synonymous with the moody, scratchy, dub-reggae and funk-influenced approach of bands such as Gang of Four, the movement was/is actually quite diverse. This is best exemplified by Swell Maps, who integrated the original Punk D.Y.I. aggression with more "arty" influences such as kraut-rock legends Can, and did so while casting a thick layer of cheeky irony over everything. While their debut, A Trip to Marineville, wasn't always able to integrate these different sonic palettes together seamlessly, their follow-up and swansong, Jane from Occupied Europe, stands as one of the most singular-sounding albums of "The New Wave." From the first few seconds of "Robot Factory," the lead track, it is clear that we have entered uncharted territory. With eerie psych organ, strange clicking effects, and distant mumbled voices, the song sets the tone for what's to come. Standout track "Cake Shop Girl," with its combination of guitar crunch and Kraftwerk-style synth-lines practically writes the book on integrating punk and pop, a book bands like The Meat Puppets would be memorizing soon enough. Though it proved to be the end of Swell Maps, Jane from Occupied Europe is, without a doubt, an essential document of post-punk's first wave. Bassist Jowe Head: "The best Maps experiences included the thrill of feeling empowered by our realization that we could seize the means of production without needing a deal from a conventional record company or management. Also, we had a hell of a lot of fun together! We used to laugh so much it hurt sometimes."

Swell Maps - A Trip to Marineville (1979/1991)

Even though brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks (not their real names in case you were wondering) had been tinkering in a band together for several years under the name Sacred Mushroom, it was not until the rise of the British Punk scene of 1976-1977 that they (along with several friends) began gigging and eventually found their way into a studio as the Swell Maps. The Maps had a hand in creating the D.I.Y. ethos of early punk, as bassist Jowe Head recalls, "We didn’t actually invent the DIY punk scene, because The Buzzcocks released “Spiral Scratch” before that. They had management though, so I don’t think that they really count! Also, Television Personalities and the Desperate Bicycles were getting their own labels together at the same time. We all became aware of each other, and supported each other's efforts- it was a shared sense of pride and pioneering spirit!" When the Maps finally got around to recording a full-length after a 1978 John Peel session created some buzz around their first single, "Read About Seymour," the result was A Trip to Marineville, a mad scatter-shot of an album that manages to offer some of the most challenging music of the British punk movement, but be forewarned: for the most part, this is not punk of the simple three-chord-thrash variety. Mixing in surf guitar, kraut-rock flourishes and some glammy overtones, there is simply nothing else from the original (post) punk era that sounds quite like Swell Maps. This is especially evidenced by songs such as "Gunboats" and "Adventuring in Basketry," which demonstrate the band's obsession with kraut-rock legends Can, creating a unique mash-up of anarchic sonic textures that Swell Maps would explore to even greater affect on their next album (and swan-song), Jane from Occupied Europe. Along with Wire, Swell Maps practically invented the template for art-punk, and are, in many ways, undeserving of their "badness to madness" reputation. Nikki Sudden: "We knew we were good, and despite what is still being written about us we could actually play. Listen to the records and you'll hear that we had a very good idea of what we were doing. Epic and I came to regret all the in-jokes we put about, but the music still stands up [...] We weren't 'conscious innovators' though. We just did what we did."

The Velvets- Fragments of a History, Chapter 1: Andy and the Factory

John Cale: "When we went up to the Factory it was a real eye-opener for me. It wasn't called the Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly-line for the silkscreens happened. While one person was making a silkscreen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Every day something new. I think he was dipping into anything he fancied."  Andy Warhol had immigrated to New York City from Pittsburgh in 1949 and spent much of the fifties slowly gaining fame as a commercial artist for his innovative shoe drawings. By the early sixties, Warhol had begun opening eyes in the fine arts community with his silkscreened paintings featuring the repetition of images adopted from popular culture such as 100 Soup Cans  and the Marilyn Diptych, but in truth, Warhol's use of such images was anathema to the conservative critical watchdogs of the art establishment. For example, at a symposium on pop art held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, Stanley Kunitz argued dismissively, "If the pop artist is concerned with creating anything, it is with the creation of an effect. Consider, for example, the celebrated rows of Campbell's Soup labels. We can scarcely be expected to have any interest in the painting itself. Indeed, it is difficult to think of it as a painting at all."  Despite the critical resistance, by 1963 pop art had come into vogue, and Warhol, now using a gang of assistants (including Gerard Malanga) in the silkscreening process to expedite the production of prints, moved to the midtown Manhattan studio that would come to be known as the Factory. This is where, over the next several years, Warhol would begin collecting his so-called "superstars": Billy Name, Rotten Rita, the Duchess, Ondine, Paul Morrissey, Ultra Violet to name but a few and socialites such as Edie Sedgwick and Susan Bottomly. Added to these was a revolving cast of prospective artists, musicians, exhibitionists, hustlers, transvestites, and anyone else able to contribute to the Factory's air of cultivated decadence, all of which was ultimately fodder for Warhol's voyeuristic predilections. It was in the middle of this strange mélange that The Velvet Underground would opportunistically find themselves in late 1965.

Warhol at Work in the Factory, 1964

By the time the Velvets had come under the aegis of Warhol, their now-iconic lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker had only been together for a short time, but it was clear from the beginning that this band was a different breed altogether. As their first manager, Alan Aronowitz once recalled, "They were just junkies, crooks, hustlers. Most of the musicians at that time came with all these high-minded ideals, but the Velvets were all full of shit. They were just hustlers." Depending on whom you ask, it was either Gerard Malanga or Paul Morrissey who happened to catch one of the first gigs Aronowitz had secured for his presumptive band of hustlers at a Greenwich Village dive called Cafe Bizarre, and knew right away that Warhol and the Velvets would be a good fit. Morrissey: "Andy didn't want to get into rock and roll [....] he never would have thought of it. Even after I thought of it, I had to bludgeon him into doing it. My idea was that there could be a lot of money managing a rock and roll group that got its name in the papers, and that was one thing Andy was good for- getting his name in the papers." It also didn't hurt that this was no ordinary rock band. John Cale, a classically-trained Welshman who wielded an electric viola, had been playing in minimalist composer La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, an experimental collective also known as Dream Syndicate, which focused on drone music. Lou Reed, after graduating from Syracuse University, had worked as a tin-pan alley songwriter at Pickwick International, but his aesthetic tastes pulled in far less mainstream musical directions. First introduced by Pickwick employee Terry Phillips, as he was looking for a backing band for a potential hit Reed had penned called "The Ostrich," these musical and cultural polar opposites were initially resistant to working with each other, but they shared a fascination for the use of a drone effect in music composition. This eventually brought them together, along with Reed's former Syracuse classmate Sterling Morrison, in a short-lived band called The Primitives, which, after adding drummer Angus MacLise, who had played with Cale in the La Mont Young collective, quickly metamorphosed into The Velvet Underground.

Andy with His Band of Velvets

When Paul Morrissey returned to Cafe Bizarre a few nights later with Warhol in tow, the latter was treated to a surreal scene comprised of the Velvets (now with Maureen Tucker on drums, as MacLise had quit on the grounds that they weren't avant garde enough), playing their tales of S&M and heroin highs to a crowd made up of tourists nervously sipping exotic drinks. Ironically, the band was fired that night, but Warhol had been sufficiently impressed with what he had seen and heard and invited the Velvets to join his Factory and work under his tutelage. Lou Reed: "To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real. It wasn't slick or a lie in any conceivable way, which was the only way we could work with him. Because the very first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real." While the Velvets benefited immediately from Warhol's patronage in the form of new instruments, rehearsal space, and the rigorous Factory regime, the relationship soon grew strained as a result of Morrissey's insistence that the band needed to be fronted by a singer more visually appealing than the often recalcitrant Lou Reed. A German model and fledgling singer, Nico, who had visited the Factory the week before, was Morrissey's choice and Warhol agreed.

Andy Ascending to the Factory

Predictably, Lou Reed and John Cale hated the idea of Nico fronting the band, but given the significant career perks that came with being aligned with a figure such as Warhol, they eventually acceded, and Reed was even persuaded by his benefactor to write songs specifically for Nico. Several of these would appear on the Velvets' debut album, funded and ostensibly produced by Warhol himself (more on this in Chapter 2). During their stay at the Factory, The Velvet Underground was used in a number of ways by Warhol, including providing largely improvisational soundtracks for some of his films and multi-media presentations, the most famous of which was the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, featuring the band accompanying a silent film directed by Warhol, titled The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound, along with dancers, strobe lights, slide projections, etc. Nevertheless, the Velvets never fit comfortably into Warhol's "superstar" coterie, as they were more akin to restless students of his rigorous methodology. Lou Reed: "His work ethic, what he was about, the way he turned things around, anti-slick. Genius. An enormous, insane talent, brilliant with colors and composition. Ideas. He'd look at something that you'd be looking at, and then you'd hear what Andy sees. He was so receptive to your ideas; he made you feel like he really believed in you, and he did. He believed in us, and that's why he made us part of it all. He got it. He really got it. Then you look at what he did and you say 'Wow! If he says it's okay, then it must be okay. Because as far as other people were concerned (at that point), we were less than a Campbell's Soup can. We weren't even the paper bag it comes in. 'Some Warhol toy.' They didn't think that for long after we came in and really hauled off and batted them."

Dean & Britta - "Not a Young Man Anymore" (2010): Lou Reed 1966 Screen-Test for Andy Warhol

Lou Reed was the coolest mother-fucker who ever walked the face of the earth. Still coming to terms with the fact that he is gone. Stay tuned for the first installment of The Velvets: Fragments of a History...

Cindytalk - Wappinschaw (1994)

On Camouflage Heart, Cindytalk's 1984 debut, Gordon Sharp created a hopelessly dark, yet starkly beautiful, proto-industrial descent into psychic despair that made many of the goth albums of the time sound like little more than cartoonish attempts to paint facile forms of despair in shades of cheap black paint. Central to the effect of this truly singular album is Sharp's harrowing vocal performance, ranging from the despondent to the cathartic, sometimes within the same song. A decade later, Cindytalk released its second masterpiece, Wappinschaw, which seems, on the surface, to emanate from emotional regions far calmer than that of its heady predecessor, but on repeated listens reveals itself as being constructed from the same emotionally wrenching cloth. Wappinschaw was to be the last album Cindytalk would release for 15 years, and as such, it can be seen as both a culmination and integration of the various elements comprising Sharp's first three albums. Wappinschaw starts with a song as surprising as it is stunning: Sharp's beautifully sung a capella cover of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face." Elegant, raw, austere, and sounding like a sodden angel, Sharp masterfully sets the tone for the album's dynamic exploration of the extremities of emotion, a tone which moves into more familiar Cindytalk territory on the second track, "A Song of Changes." Mournfully melodic while eschewing anything resembling traditional song structure, Sharp creates a strange dirge-like atmosphere for another of his beautifully-wrecked vocal performances. Perhaps the biggest highlight is "Return to Pain," which features Sharp's heavily reverbed voice backed by some wonderfully moody experimental guitar noodling. Wappinschaw is easily one of the most under-appreciated albums of the 1990s, and though it is not a comforting listening experience, it is an exquisitely dark corner offering its own kind of recompense.

Cindytalk - Camouflage Heart (1984/2007)

Exceedingly dark, cathartic, and at times, virtually unhinged, Gordon Sharp's early-80s incarnation of Cindytalk was a dazzlingly self-indulgent gloom-fest that anticipated the industrial-rock movement years before the genre even had a name. Best known for his fine contributions to the first This Mortal Coil project, It'll End in Tears, Sharp's work in Cindytalk is far more visceral and far less ethereal than what was emanating from the 4AD label at the time. While Gothic in mood, Camouflage Heart, Cindytalk's 1984 debut, has a dirty, gritty undertow that makes it sound something like Peter Murphy in full vampire-mode fronting The Birthday Party (in fact, Mick Harvey appears on "Under Glass"). On the standout track,"The Ghost Never Smiles," Sharp's eerie, wailing vocals sound like they are emanating from the bottom of a well as a dull tribal beat and guitar feedback carry the song toward what feels like a free-fall into the abyss. Truly harrowing stuff. Want to join me there?