01. All Tomorrows Parties (Single A Side July 1966)
02. I’ll Be Your Mirror (Single B Side July 1966)
03. Sunday Morning (Single A Side December 1966)
04. Femme Fatale (Single B Side December 1966)
05. I’m Waiting For The Man (Velvet Underground & Nico LP March 1967)
06. Venus In Furs (Velvet Underground & Nico LP March 1967)
07. Run Run Run (Velvet Underground & Nico LP March 1967)
08. Heroin (Velvet Underground & Nico LP March 1967)
09. There She Goes Again (Velvet Underground & Nico LP March 1967)
10. White Light/White Heat (White Light/White Heat LP January 1968)
11. Here She Comes Now (White Light/White Heat LP January 1968)
12. Lady Godiva’s Operation (White Light/White Heat LP January 1968)
13. I Heard Her Call My Name (White Light/White Heat LP January 1968)
14. Sister Ray (White Light/White Heat LP January 1968)
15. Stephanie Says (Originally Unreleased Recorded February 1968 from VU LP February 1985)
16. Candy Says (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
17. Some Kinda Love (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
18. Pale Blue Eyes (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
19. Jesus (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
20. Beginning To See The Light (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
21. I’m Set Free (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
22. After Hours (The Velvet Underground LP March 1969)
23. Foggy Notion (Originally Unreleased Recorded May 1969 from VU LP February 1985)
24. I Can’t Stand It (Originally Unreleased Recorded May 1969 from VU LP February 1985)
25. What Goes On (Originally Unreleased Recorded November 1969 from Live 1969 LP April 1974)
26. Lisa Says (Originally Unreleased Recorded November 1969 from Live 1969 LP April 1974)
27. Who Loves The Sun (Loaded LP November 1970)
28. Sweet Jane (Loaded LP November 1970)
29. Rock & Roll (Loaded LP November 1970)
30. New Age (Loaded LP November 1970)
These days there's something incredibly indulgent about listening to an album while doing nothing else. To turn off all other sensory inputs and just concentrate on music feels somehow wrong in a twenty first century where being busy has become a cultural obsession and a somewhat misguided badge of honour. And yet, sitting in an empty house with the curtains closed and the volume turned up to a teeth shattering ten is how I like to listen to The Velvet Underground. No other artist gets the same treatment.
Then again, The Velvet Underground were never about simple entertainment, their albums not exactly the kind of thing you would put on as background music. Arguably my first musical ‘other’, when I heard them for the first time in 1974 on Live 1969 they were like nothing I’d ever heard before. A gloriously clattering, repetitive racket of three chord delirium, not only were they another essential step on my path to musical enlightenment, at fourteen years old Moe Tucker’s deceptively simple, metronomic beat gave me that all-important push to join a group, take up the drums and become an active participant in pop music for the first time.
1969 Live also instilled a need in me to hunt down the Velvets studio albums, which in mid-seventies Britain were mostly deleted and unavailable to a gangly, awkward teen from the Home Counties. In fact, it was only the poorly typed, photocopied catalogue of second hand mail order specialists Cob Records in Porthmadog, North Wales that saved me, initially via the Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico compilation (ordered by mistake instead of the similarly titled The Velvet Underground & Nico), and followed as soon as I’d saved enough cash by similarly dog eared copies of the rest of their small yet perfectly formed catalogue.
In existence for a little more than five years in their truest form, The Velvet Underground came together in 1965 New York’s Lower East Side when John Cale, a charismatic viola prodigy from a South Wales mining village interested in harmonic minimalism, met Lou Reed, a staff songwriter at Pickwick Records who had studied avant-garde jazz, film and contemporary poetry for his degree at Syracuse University. Supported by Moe Tucker’s understated drums and Sterling Morrison’s melodic guitar, they found themselves in direct opposition to their fellow musicians whose sole ambition was to be the next Beatles. Rather than follow a similar path, the Velvets opted to step away from the commercial mainstream and concentrate on the dictates of art and conscience and their aesthetic fascination with simplicity.
As word spread of this extraordinary new group and their confrontational blend of songcraft, noise and dark, intriguing lyrics that read more like literature than pop, they came to the attention of celebrated artist and publicity magnet Andy Warhol who offered his services as their manager and mentor. Setting them up in The Factory, his Manhattan studio and happening space for exotic outsiders and misfits, he introduced them to the possibilities of German born model Nico as a collaborator, secured them a record deal and produced their debut, in so much as he allowed them to do exactly as they pleased.
This was 1966, but it was also 1976, punk before punk and an album so radical it ripped a hole in the fabric of the trad rock continuum. In the year of insipid chart hits like ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘Happy Together’ and ‘Groovin’, The Velvet Underground & Nico‘s ‘Heroin’, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, ‘Venus In Furs’, ‘All Tomorrows Parties’, even the relatively simple ‘Sunday Morning’ and haunting, Nico breathed ‘Femme Fatale’ were laced with odd tunings and taboo tales of drug abuse, sadomasochism, paranoia and tortured emotions juxtaposed with the mundanity of the everyday.
While their peers were extolling the virtues of love, peace and psychedelics, the Velvets were scoring smack and shooting speed in a twilight world of blurred sexuality and urban alienation. And, as if all that wasn’t controversial enough, there was the groups extreme fashion sense, a stylistic approach consisting entirely of black; black turtlenecks, black skinny jeans, black leather jackets and sunglasses after dark.
Over the next three years The Velvet Underground would record three more albums, all of which were significantly different to each other. The most disturbing by far was White Light/White Heat released less than a year after their debut. Recorded in one, long, methamphetamine fuelled, 24 hour session, while it sounded like it was recorded in a garage with the car still running, perversely that’s also what made it so unbelievably great.
Known for the cranked-to-distortion onslaught of the title track and ‘Sister Ray’s the seventeen and a half minutes of delinquent brutality, White Light/White Heat was certainly not for the faint hearted. Conversely, The Velvet Underground, recorded after John Cale’s, Lou Reed enforced departure, was a hushed and holy masterpiece of downbeat pop featuring the quintessential ‘Candy Say’s’ (sung by newcomer Doug Yule), ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes‘.
Despite its outwardly beatific nature, the Velvets eponymous third sold significantly less than its predecessors and their final album Loaded did no better. Not that a few more copies sold would have made any difference. In August 1970, three months before the album’s release, Lou Reed walked out on the group he’d created to take a job as a typist with his father’s accountancy firm. No-one seemed to notice, much less care, even though The Velvet Underground mystique that is so revered today was already in place.
Four years later, my own interest sparked by Bowie’s constant namedropping, I was fortunate enough to discover them when I least expected it. And yet, it wasn’t until the early eighties that their genius began to be truly recognised, the dissonant, hypnotic beauty of their songs and their nihilistic, ultra-cool style copied by everyone from Joy Division to Postcard Records, from the Jesus and Mary Chain to Sonic Youth. And in 2026 it’s literally impossible to imagine any self-respecting music-meister refusing to acknowledge their incalculable influence on the zeitgeist. As one celebrated, cultural commentator whose name escapes me once said: ‘Unpack the last fifty years of pop and the broken fragments of The Velvet Underground are everywhere’. He wasn’t wrong!
May 2026
