Quote of the day

"The album had a sonority and mood unlike any before or since: a painful beauty, a languid ennui, a timbre, oddly perhaps, both warm and metallic. To listen to it was - and still is - like having an exposed nerve stroked, sometimes softly, sometimes a little too roughly. ... The entwinement of rock and drone - that unique tonality and timbre - flowed into almost all that followed: punk, electronic-wall-of-sound, even avant-garde jazz and contemporary 'classical'. ... Emotions in The Velvet Underground & Nico are raw and honest, sometimes scalpel-edged, but in an age of idealism, these songs are as far removed from the 'summer of love' as you can get. And perhaps, 50 years on, the record is vindicated as such, as we find ourselves not so much in the aura of an 'age of Aquarius' as in what Percy Bysshe Shelley described two centuries ago as 'an age of despair'. Some people found the album cynical at the time, but the diagonal glance of Cale and Reed saw more accurately into their future - our present - than the lambent gaze of Joan Baez or Grace Slick."

As Ed Vuillamy makes clear in a piece for the Observer, 2017 marks the 50th birthday of two revolutionary records that, put simply, "changed the sound of sound". I wrote about Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band back in June, and Vuillamy's assessment of The Velvet Underground & Nico's remarkable qualities and its legacy is spot on.

I came to it relatively late, at the age of 20, on a stop-off at a friend of a friend's on the way back from Glastonbury 1998. Instantly, I was gripped - the louche ambience, Cale's scraping violin, the drones and occasional descent into noise, Nico's otherworldly voice. Even today, it sounds like the innovative, out-there creation of a band consciously pushing the envelope.

(Thanks to Simon for the link.)