Cloudland Blue Quartet - Twenty Four Paintings
Tosca - Odeon
Depeche Mode - Delta Machine
Lou Reed/Metallica - Lulu
Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground - Selection
Lou Reed - NYC Man
Up early and creating new "details" of the twenty two new soundscapes - splitting a further two into two to take me to the required 24...
Meg the Black Cat was helping out...
The details take things down from over fifteen hours to "just" four...
A three CD set, eight pieces on each disc...
Symmetry...
Out to Patisserie Florentin for breakfast and then down to the market...
...for some tasty German bread...
Back home for some listening back and to undertake a quite some time overdue back up of files and programmes...
Out to my mum's for coffee and chat - in good spirits today....
Over to Anne's mum's for the family tea...
As we sat chatting at the table, nephew Olly came through with his dad's phone and said "Uncle David, do you know Lou Reed? He's dead"...
Dead at 71, complications from a liver transplant carried out in May...
No-one's going to live forever but, when one of your "special ones" departs the planet...
Like most people who'd never heard of the Velvet Underground at the time, I was introduced to Lou Reed by the single "Walk on the Wild Side", in 1972 (the classic "Perfect Day" was "just" the "B" side)...
From there, there was the album from which the track was culled, "Transformer", produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson - which rescued Lou from the dumper...
And he trumped his old mate by thirty years by revamping the "Transformer" cover...
...for his 1982 cracker, "The Blue Mask"...
We listened to "Transformer" recently in the car, coming back from Northumberland...
It's not that great really - apart from those two tracks above and "Satellite of Love" and "Vicious" (which should of course have been the theme for the Jacobi/McKellan vehicle from earlier this year)...
Mind you, four good tracks on any album is pretty good going in anyone's book...
I didn't buy "Berlin" in '73...
In the summer of '74 though, in Berchtesgaden on a school trip, I bought the single "Sweet Jane" from the live album "Rock'n'Roll Animal" and it was one of my all time favourite singles from that point on...
It was this 7" record that really turned me on to Lou Reed...
The album soon followed into the collection, with it's quasi heavy metal renderings of Velvets songs like "Rock'n'Roll", "Heroin" and "White Light/White Heat"...
At the end of the year, the kind of funky single, "Sally Can't Dance" was good but a bit of a disappointment after the brilliance of "Sweet Jane"...
The "B" side of that was "Ennui" - another of my all time Reed faves...
And of course there was the purchase of an old scratched up copy of the Velvet's debut - with the banana peeled off - which I found again in sister Pam's collection last year and rescued - having given it to her on the purchase of a pristine new copy, in the hope that it might somehow lure her away from Paul McCartney, David Essex and the Osmonds (all of whom, in hindsight, have their place in any broad based collection)...
In '75 I finally bought the "Berlin" (probably my favourite Reed album) and "Sally Can't Dance" albums, on the same day - and that started me off on buying every album he did thereafter, while collecting the entire pre solo Velvets back catalogue...
So yes, I am a fan of Lou Reed...
And, without the influence of that first Velvet's album ("if they can do that why can't I?") there'd be no work today on the next (or indeed any before that) CBQ album...
So, so long Lou...
Lights out...
Lowlight of the Day : Lou gone...
Along with the many usual suspects re the Reed/Velvets canon, here are a couple lesser known solo Reed tracks to perhaps seek out...
"Ennui" ("Sally Can't Dance")
"Who Am I" ("The Raven")
"Junior Dad" ("Lulu")
"The Bells" ("The Bells")
"The Blue Mask" ("The Blue Mask")
"Metal Machine Music" ("Metal Machine Music")
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