Lou Reed was not a fan of the Beatles. “They were just painfully stupid and pretentious,” he said in 1987, “and when they did try to get, in quotes, ‘arty’, it was worse than stupid rock’n’roll.” Compared with the music that he made with his band of New York nihilists the Velvet Underground, the Fab Four “couldn’t come up to our ankles, not up to my kneecap”, he argued. In a later interview he was even blunter: “I have no respect for those people at all . . . it’s absolute shit.”
If the Beatles are the Greatest Pop Story Ever Told, then the Velvet Underground are the shadow narrative of the 1960s – swinging, yes, but like a bike chain or noose. Never mind
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