Lou Reed breaks wall down on Berlin album

WHEN Lou Reed released his Berlin album 35 years ago, it was considered a complete commercial and critical failure. Now, having been made into a film by Julian Schnabel, it is being hailed as his masterpiece.

Although much of Reed's work seems finally to be getting the long overdue respect it deserves, the chances of his hotly anticipated show at the Edinburgh Playhouse next Wednesday being what most people would call fun are as remote as the man himself.

Only Reed could explain why he always seems to come across as being so incredibly uncommunicative and grumpy, but he has been locked within the prism of his petulant public persona since he first emerged fronting the Velvet Underground in the mid-60s.

When it comes to talking to the media, he clearly revels in his reputation as the most difficult and disagreeable man in rock and roll – when Vanity Fair magazine recently asked him to give his definition of abject misery, Reed's response was simply, "Being interviewed by an English journalist." Today, he is talking via a speaker-phone from his New York office, and for the first few moments his voice is so faint that he sounds as if he is conducting the interview from the other side of a very thick wall.

I panic, and for a second or two consider asking him to speak up a bit, but then I remember a friend of mine who dared to ask him to talk a little louder and politely pointed out that the line was atrocious: "Your f***ing problem, not mine,"' said Reed obligingly.

Although many of his albums have been commercial disasters, Reed has received widespread acclaim for his recent tour, when he performed Berlin in its entirety for the first time – as he will again at the Edinburgh Playhouse.

After his best-known album, 1972's Transformer (produced by David Bowie and his guitarist, Mick Ronson) had provided him with his biggest solo hit, Walk On The Wild Side, his fans were hungry for another serving of infectious glam rock detailing the lives of Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Sugar Plum Fairy and the supporting cast of eccentric characters Reed had encountered during his time inside Andy Warhol's studio, the Factory.

Did Reed think people expected him to come up with Transformer Part II?

"Well, I never understood what anybody expected. You know, I have no idea. If it had sold, everybody would have been happy. They would have said I'm a genius. But it didn't, so I was a schmuck," Reed explains with a wry chuckle.

"Most of the things that I've done, I've considered so obvious that it doesn't even qualify as anything you'd notice."

At the time his record label RCA had been keen to build on his new-found commercial success, but instead, Reed had delivered Berlin, the desperately depressing story of two junkie expatriates living in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. The record was panned by the press and largely ignored by the buying public.

"I'm very proud of Berlin, but I always was," he mumbles. "As far as I was concerned, it never got a chance, so that was that. And then, lo and behold, there you go, and here it is - better than ever."

Throughout a career that stretches back more than 40 years (although so much of Reed's groundbreaking music has been derided or ignored), more recently many of his albums such as Berlin and Metal Machine Music have been reassessed and are now recognised as being ahead of their time. It's just a shame that it took people several decades to realise just how influential and innovative some of Reed's key albums are.

"Yeah, well, it can't get much slower, really, can it?" he agrees. But surely he must be incredibly proud that his music has had such a huge influence on successive generations of musicians?

"Well, I hope it does. I don't really know exactly what goes on out there, but it's always nice when someone tells me, 'You must realise, I really like your stuff, people must tell you that all the time, blah, blah, blah, blah blah'," Reed spits in a weary, whiny voice. "But people don't tell me that all the time."

Berlin has now been made into a film by artist and director, Schnabel, who dubbed the original album Reed's "masterwork about love's dark sisters: jealousy, rage and loss." It's a description Reed embraces. "Well, that's quite wonderful," he says, sounding pleased as punch. "Love's dark sisters? That's pretty good, Julian. Oh, I'll settle for that."

He adds, "Julian and I have been friends and fans of each other for quite a while, and he has often told me how much this album personally means to him.

"Jealousy is the major theme in this thing, and that's what people relate to. I've never met anyone who hasn't felt jealousy at some point, and that's one of the main issues among the other difficulties going on with these people.

"You can reel off so many plays and books on that one subject. You know, with this, I'm always thinking of Othello and Desdemona."

When Reed was recording the album in London with producer Bob Ezrin, their original plan was for Berlin to be a 'film for the ear'.

"Well, that was an Ezrin catchphrase," he offers. "Yeah, that was the idea, and we had also wanted to actually stage it, but the reaction was just so bad that we never had to even deal with the possibility of putting it on somewhere until 30 years later, oddly enough."

But then Reed has always looked at his songs as being novels in musical form.

"I've always liked acting," he says, warming to the subject. "I was never really talented enough to be an official stage actor, but I really enjoyed writing these little musical playlets with me in main role, doing some kind of musical monologue. Whatever is being sung should be really visual. I think it's nice to luxuriate in the story."

Reed has repeatedly cited the indelible mark literary figures such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Raymond Chandler have left on him. The biggest influence of all was Delmore Schwartz, who taught Reed creative writing at Syracuse University.

"I would say I owe 100 per cent to them. To this day, I think In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz is one of the greatest short stories ever written, and that changed my life.

"I did try to write a detective novel at one point, but I wasn't good at it; anything that went along those lines ended up as a song. Some of it is on the Raven album, and some of it is on Street Hassle - the perfect little piece of film noir."

Like all great novelists, Reed draws inspiration from his surroundings – not least New York City.

"New York is always very, very inspiring, but one of the things about New York that's always so interesting is that it changes so much all the time, and I think that's the whole point of it.

"But it's really a rich person's city right now, although the economy is so bad that maybe things will change in time. Every last piece of land in New York has been built on, and you can't rent anything anymore, although I think the vibe and eccentricity still exists down in Brooklyn."

Over the years the singer/ songwriter has created several astonishingly adventurous avant-garde musical projects, most of which have enjoyed far less mainstream exposure than his song-based albums.

A couple of years ago he recorded an intriguing album called Hudson River Wind Meditations. He describes it as an "adjunct to meditation, T'ai Chi, bodywork" and as "music to play in the background of life".

"I made that for myself, and you can use it for a bunch of things," he says. "It actually seems to absorb outside sounds into it, so something that might be annoying just gets eaten up by it, no problem. I'm not sure why it works, but I love that thing."

When I mention the idea of music as a mood-altering artform, Reed's enthusiasm is palpable. "That idea really is fascinating. It's what music can do that only music can do. It's the only artform I know that can make you hop up and down, where you hear something over the radio and you just feel happy. It makes your body respond.

"I'm sure it has to do with the love of the rhythm of the heartbeat. I think there's a book out now about it called This Is Your Brain On Music by a guy named Daniel Levitin."

Reed's most-celebrated mentor was, of course, Andy Warhol, who happened to pop into a Greenwich Village cafe in 1965 where the then unknown Velvet Underground were playing. Reed's bandmate, John Cale, remembers one of Warhol's entourage, Gerard Malanga, performing 'an exquisite reptilian whip dance' to Venus In Furs, Reed's ode to sadomasochism.

"Warhol immediately asked the Velvets to meet him at the Factory, where he offered his services as their manager and producer.

"I thought I had gone to heaven," Reed says, his voice suddenly filled with emotion. "I couldn't have been in a righter place at a righter time. Without Andy, I probably wouldn't have a career. He was right there saying everything that you do is fine; don't let anybody change it and keep it exactly the way it is. And that was Andy Warhol saying that, so that was enough for me, and it's been enough for me up to this day. Andy said it was OK, so it was."

Is the idea of a musical legacy something that is important to him? "I don't actually care about that," Reed replies after a moment's thought. "I care that maybe my music makes someone feel better, that would be nice.

"I went to the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and they had a showing of Warhol's Shadow paintings. I think there's 89 variations on what he did with the shadows, and they surrounded the whole room, and it really made me laugh.

"I said to myself, 'You've got a long way to go if you wanna get to that point'. I've not even got close."

• Lou Reed performs Berlin, Edinburgh Playhouse, Greenside Place, Wednesday, 8pm, 35-50, 0844-847 1661