CityLife

MIF: Back to Berlin

THE Velvet Underground may have been hugely influential but they didn't sell any records.

However, in 1973, Lou Reed was riding high, commercially-speaking, after his second solo album Transformer, produced by David Bowie, which had been a big hit. For once, Reed seemed in sync with pop music taste.

Glitter rock, which was partly inspired by the Velvets, was hot and so was Lou, the so-called "Phantom Of Rock". The sensible thing to do was to produce another album in the vein of Transformer. But Lou had something else in mind. "I had to do Berlin, an adult album meant for adults, by adults and for adults.

"If I hadn't done it, I'd have gone crazy," he recalls of the album that he'll be performing live at the festival, joined by a 30-piece ensemble including his band, a string and horn section, and a children's choir. Berlin turned out to be an elaborate and ambitious song-cycle that charted the grim and terrifying downfall of Jim and Caroline, a couple of American ex-pats resident in the titular German city.

A "film for the ear" about sleazy sex, drugs, violence, betrayal, moral decay and suicide, Berlin so appalled his record company that, before they'd even put it out, they insisted that producer Bob Ezrin cut down the planned double-album to a single disc, editing (or as Ezrin says "butchering") some 15 minutes from the running time.

Hostile

The reviews were, for the most part, breathtakingly hostile. Rolling Stone, for instance, pronounced that the album was "so patently offensive" that they proposed taking "some kind of physical vengeance" on the artist who had perpetrated it.

Now the album is invariably feted as a rare example of rock maturity and sophistication, often touted as a classic.

Still, it surprised even the most stalwart fans when Reed decided to perform it live in New York (then Sydney) last December. Thirty or more years ago, he'd once discussed with Andy Warhol presenting it on stage, so why was the time right now?

"I don't know, I operate on instinct. My friend Susan Feldman, who runs Saint Anne's Warehouse in New York, has always been in love with the Berlin album and every year she asks me, `why can't we stage it?'

"I had been talking to Julian Schnabel and he had been saying how much the album has meant to him and how he wanted to film it. So when she asked me last year, I said `sure'. Getting the musicians together for it was actually a lot of fun and what we do musically is pretty much what's on the album, with maybe a few missing minutes back in, done as a live theatrical concert show. This show is for those people who want to see Berlin done pure."

Lou Reed performs the European premiere of `Berlin' live on June 29 at the Manchester Apollo. Ticket hotline: 0871 230 1888.