The Next Big Thing

RIP – Lou Reed

I’ll get to last night’s storming Del Lords show in Newcastle a bit later. I was talking to Scott and Frank about Lou and how he was a great supporter of the band. To come home and find out he’d died was a shocker. Though he never made a record I liked for years, Lou was a huge influence on me. In fact, his was the first and only fan club I ever joined.

The Rock’n’Roll Animal tour show in Glasgow was one of the best things I ever saw. Years later I would discover that my dear friend, Lady Miriam Linna had attended a Lou show in Glasgow I was also at when she and her sister visited Blighty for the first time. I like to imagine the were sitting just in front of where I was but anyways...

Of course the Velvets stuff was great but when they got back together, I couldn’t listen to them for years. I felt they’d diddled the legacy in much the same way as I feel The Stooges are doing.

But “Berlin” is one of the greatest records ever made. It never fails to destroy me. The fact that he went on to play those terrible headless guitars was his perogative but his body of work contains some astonishingly heart-rending stuff. Mi amigo Stewart Cruickshank had an amazing experience making a documentary for Radio 2 about him during which time the famed curmudgeon really came through and I believe created something magical.

So this news is devastating. It marks another landmark of my formative years leaving the theatre. The line “I’m gonna stop wasting my time” from "Sad Song" is ringing in my head and it makes me wonder how the hell long I’ve got.  The life-affirming nature of the show we just saw in Newcastle and the need to hang out with friends at every opportunity suddenly takes on even greater importance.