In 2014 when the Velvet's record company were celebrating the forty- fifth anniversary of their self- titled third album with a super deluxe box set they went back to the songs that made up VU/ the unreleased 1969 album and remixed them again, this time much more sympathetically. In 1986 the rest of the songs were released as Another VU, a marginally less essential nine song album that rounded the set off. In many ways VU is as vital a Velvet Underground release as any of their four official studio albums and when exploring the group as we all were in the mid- to- late 80s, VU was an essential purchase. Some of the songs were re- recorded for Loaded and some were already known to Lou Reeds' audience due to him recycling them on various 1970s solo albums but these were the source material, the songs as recorded by Lou, John or Doug, Sterling and Mo (with some typically 80s gated reverb on the drums added by Verve to make the recordings more contemporary). As an album it hangs together and sounds coherent despite two of the songs being Cale period songs and the rest Doug Yule period songs. VU is a treasure trove, a record that was partly responsible for the indie boom in the UK in the mid- 80s. Most of the songs were in the master tape, multi- track format so some of Verve's top engineers were able to 'clean up' and remix the songs.

These recordings were re- discovered in the 80s and the 'best' were released as VU. On the shelf they left behind the tapes containing five songs from the John Cale- era Velvets and fourteen for the unreleased album. The Velvets were among those and were released from their contract. A new broom came in at Verve/ MGM, an executive called Mike Curb and he took the decision to drop all the unprofitable groups from their roster. Back in 1969 the band had recorded an album's worth of songs for what was intended to be their fourth album. I like to think a student or former student is responsible.īack in February 1985 Verve records released a ten song compilation of rescued Velvet Underground recordings.

This fine piece of political discourse is painted on the railway bridge behind my place of work (a school in a former mill town in the north west of England that has seen its fair share of post- industrial decline and the problems associated with it and yet inexplicably is represented by a Tory MP).

Pyramids frank ocean arp