Lou Reed | 170 Russell
Lou Reed’s last time in Australia was 2010 when he performed a 20 minute set of high-frequency noise music at the Sydney Opera House. Inaudible to humans, his show ‘Music for Dogs’ received mixed reviews, and he died three years later in his Long Island home age 71.
His music returns to the stage with Celebrating Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground and Nico, bringing together some of the best Australian musicians of the previous generation to pay tribute to Lou’s music, his indefatigable avant-gardism and his long shadow.
Lou and his band The Velvet Underground were introduced to the world by Andy Warhol in 1966. Their debut performance, as recorded in the liner notes to their first album, was described as “a three-ring psychosis”, “non-stop horror”, and “a savage series of atonal thrusts”. “Not since the Titanic ran into that iceberg”, wrote the Los Angeles Times, “has there been such a collision”.
The first show on the Melbourne leg of the tour is at 170 Russell, and a long line of mature-aged music fans stretches around the block. At the desk I give my name and the security says “I know Charlie Hyde, you’re not Charlie Hyde!” and after a bit of playful back and forth he shows me the
instagram of another Charlie Hyde who does music photography in Melbourne, and I’m waved through.
170 Russell moonlights as the club Billboards on Saturday nights and as such they don’t have any beer on tap, and a can of Carlton runs $15. The old fellas still sit around the bar drinking it. I meet up with my cousin who’s up from Tasmania for the show, and we settle in at the front of the stage for the next hour as the crowd slowly pours down the stairs.
At 8:30 the lights finally dim and Dave Graney (Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes) bounces onto the stage to start the night with Rock & Roll Heart, which he sang with Lou’s New York twang. He jumped around the stage, squatting down on one leg and springing back up during instrumentals. He was wearing a novelty tuxedo t-shirt underneath a multilayered, short leather biking jacket and a large-brimmed bucket hat flipped up on one side.
After three songs Dave left the stage and Rob Snarski (The Blackeyed Susans), much more reserved than Dave quietly introduced Sunday Morning, one of Lou’s softest and eeriest songs, and one of my all time favourites.
He introduced Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens), who stood awkwardly, tall and slim at the side of the stage to join in the “bom bom bom” backing vocals in Satellite of Love. This was my first time seeing Robert Forster in the flesh, being a rabid Go-Betweens fan I was starstruck and smiled unrelentingly the whole time he was on stage. He kept looking off into empty corners of the room and seemed to drift in and out of concentration when he stood, sometimes motionless behind the mic.
Later in the show when he played Waiting for My Man after giving a long introduction to the song, delivering the line “hey white boy” he pointed at a random white man in the mass of the very white crowd, much to my amusement, and twice during the night he asked the crowd to give him a ‘one’ so that he could start the song. The second time he asked “somebody call out ‘one’” the crowd laughed, and he repeated “I’m serious somebody give me a ‘one’”, a very funny eccentricity.
Stefanie Duzel performed Femme Fatale, a song Lou wrote about German model and ‘Warhol Superstar’ Nico, who was forced upon the band by Andy Warhol because they “lacked glamour”. Stefanie sang with Nico’s iconic harsh German accent, pronouncing each syllable forcefully and in its entirety.
Mick Harvey (The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds) played Kill Your Sons, a song Lou wrote about his adolescent experience with electroconvulsive therapy that he believed his parents had him
undergo to treat his bisexuality. Mick played a scorching guitar solo and the band smirked at each other after the song ended to rapturous applause. Next they played Venus in Furs, an abrupt shift in tone, and the deep, droning electric viola lulled the crowd into quiet and a group of old fellas in front of us lit up a joint.
After a short intermission we nudged our way back to the front of the stage for the second half of the show. Rob Snarski played The Bed, an incredibly delicate and emotional song from Lou’s rock opera Berlin, and Robert Forster finished off the set with Walk on the Wild Side and Pale Blue Eyes.
The band, made up of excellent career musicians of the 80s and 90s played loose, with a couple of false starts and moments of uncertainty. But as is the joy of a loose performance there were the moments where it all came together. The solos were largely improvised, and they repeated choruses and extended outros where they saw fit.
After a long encore break, a farce that younger musicians tend not to milk for so long, the entire cast returned to the stage to sing Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll off Loaded, the fourth and final Velvet Underground album. The night ended on a rapturous high with Dave Graney jumping around the stage from left to right and Robert Forster standing still and tall, and they all bowed as the curtain came down and everyone piled slowly back up the stairs.
It was frankly euphoric to see so many of Lou’s songs that mean so much to me played by musicians whom I so admire, and to see that such a buzz still surrounds Lou and his work. This concert was everything I could have ever wanted, and if a benevolent God exists he very well may have orchestrated this entire night just for me. A great tribute to both the work of Lou Reed, and to the Australian musicians who brought it together.