Songs For Drella

Whether the name Andy Warhol suggests one of the most influential and innovative movers in the arts and popular culture this century, or just some chancer who made pots of money painting soup cans, Songs For Drella stands in its own right as a highly compelling piece of work. Indeed Lou Reed - who even collaborator John Cale admits did the lion's share of the work on this album - is currently hitting such immaculate creative form that he could probably make a triple album based on the Dublin Bus timetable compelling.

What we get is a roughly chronological retrospective on Warhol's life from his disaffected 'Small Town' beginnings through his infiltration of the N.Y. art world. The Factory with its menagerie of oddballs, artists and dropouts, the Velvet Underground, the movies. Valerie Solanis' murder attempt and Warhol's subsequent years of isolation before his death.

Songs... is subtitled 'A Fiction' and for the most part represents Reed and Cale's attempts to narrate from inside their former mentor's head. On another level, thanks to the LP's methodical structure and Reed and Cale's first-hand experience of their subject *Andy said a lot of things, I stored them all away inside my head* - 'Work') there's an almost documentary feel to the album. The virtual absence of any sentimentality lends Songs... a further ring of truth. While Reed and Cale were obviously inspired by a deepfelt admiration for Warhol's audacious intellect, they never shy away from dragging out the brightest spotlight available to show up his many warts - he fares particularly badly, portrayed as a sort of callous, pimpish, amoral bloodsucker on 'It Wasn't Me' in which he rejects, unconvincingly, any responsibility for the frightening mortality rate amongst his Factory inmates, pleading *It wasn't me who hurt you/I showed you possibilities*.

The instrumentation of Songs... is kept down to just guitar, piano, viola and vox. The arrangements are correspondingly spartan but the album possesses such a strong internal dynamic that even a song with such an unpromising title as 'Trouble With Classicists' delivers more real rock'n'roll fire than you're ever likely to find on a dozen Wembley Stadium benefit bills.

Songs For Drella is articulate and accessible, cerebral yet lively, a remarkable portrait of a remarkable man who, it's suggested, eventually reaped the loneliness and pain which he had sown.

Maybe these two guys should start a band.