The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Scene — Sound

There is a famous line about this record — that hardly anyone bought it when it came out, but everyone who did went and started a band. Like most famous lines it is too neat to be quite true, and like most famous lines it is pointing at something real. The Velvet Underground & Nico sold almost nothing in 1967 and rearranged the next sixty years of music anyway.

Made in New York under the wing of Andy Warhol — whose banana adorns the sleeve — the album was utterly out of step with its moment. 1967 was the Summer of Love, all flowers and optimism. This record was about the city at night: heroin, leather, hard glamour, the comedown. It sounded like the opposite of its time, and the future arrived through the gap.

WHAT IT GETS RIGHT

It refuses to choose one thing. The album holds, side by side, sounds that should not share a record — a delicate, almost medieval ballad next to a squalling seven-minute drone, a sweet pop song next to a piece of pure menace. Lou Reed’s plainspoken, deadpan writing and the European chill of Nico’s voice make the beauty and the ugliness feel equally true.

And it widened the idea of what a song could be about. Reed wrote about the city’s hard corners with neither judgment nor glamour — just a novelist’s flat attention. That permission, to write the unbeautiful plainly, is a large part of what so many later bands actually took from this record.

THE RECORD THAT STARTED BANDS

It is not always an easy listen, and it is not trying to be. But its influence is almost impossible to overstate — the album is a seed crystal, and a remarkable amount of everything spiky, arty, and honest in the decades since grew out of it.

Put it on and hear the future being invented quietly, in a city, by people the rest of 1967 was not listening to.

Build an evening around it with our Date Night guide: The Debut Album.

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POUR — A martini, cold and a little severe. The record would approve.

MOOD — Nocturnal. Severe. Decades ahead of itself.

An album worth hearing in full. Find it on vinyl.