Sunday 27 October 2013

Despite All The Amputation, You Could Dance To A Rock 'n Roll Station


When I was little my favourite band was my dad's band. My favourite songs were Rock 'n Roll and Visjes. If you had asked me whose songs they were, I would have proudly said 'my dads!', until I harshly learned about the concept of 'coverbands' when I asked him why someone was singing one of their songs on the radio
It took me a while longer to find out that 'Vicious' was not a Dutch song about small fish.

As a teenager I got into glamrock and eagerly obsessed over Bowie and Bolan, Slade and Sweet, and movies like Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig And The Angry Inch, and it lead me back Lou Reed. I listened to Satellite Of Love, Walk On The Wild Side and Rock 'n Roll a million times. I bought the Velvet Underground banana album and I wanted to live inside it.

I listened to nothing but Perfect Day for days after I spent the perfect day with my girlfriend.

Your favourite songs become a part of you after a while. When you hear just one note of a song and a warm, familiar feeling runs through you. The first second of Walk On The Wild Side feels like coming home, taking of my shoes and petting my dog.

"If Lou is doing Bowie, and Bowie is doing Lou, Lou is still doing Lou" - Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. 

Lou was the coolest guy on earth, and now he's going to be the coolest guy in rock 'n roll heaven.

 RIP Lou, artsy glam king, bisexual hero of grumpy weirdness

I will never get to ask you which different kinds of organic soup you talked about with Chuck in his Genghis Khan suit, but if I had you probably would've rudely ignored me and left.





*Lulu did not happen, I repeat Lulu DID NOT HAPPEN it was a figment of our imagination

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