The Velvet Underground Story

If you check out whats available by the Velvets on Amazon, there are far more compilation albums than there are original releases. To me, The Velvet Underground occupy a place in my heart that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones have in other music fans. Their music is resistant to ephemeral passing music trends, and lets face it, The X Factor is never going to do a VU special, where the wannabes since the bands greatest hits. That being said, Id love Cheryl Cole to announce that one of her hopeless charges is going to be performing Venus In Furs, or that Louis Walsh was going to get that risible pair of Jedward twins to do Sister Ray. Right, back to the review. This comp is basically a repackage of the Gold double CD (identical track listing), in an attractive digipak cover with a nice concert photo of the band on the front and a good sleevenote by Record Collector (and others) writer Daryl Easlea. It also includes some solo tracks by Nico, and the sound and packaging makes this a fine entree to the music of the greatest band of the 1960s. Its still music that scares, amuses, entertains, and provokes. There again, you may just want to buy the Peel Slowly And See box set, all the individual albums (and the 1969 pair of live albums) plus things like VU and Another View, which contain much previously unissued material. I did, and I admit that Im a sucker for anything Velvets related. There is no band that you can compare them to; excuse the cliche, but they were in a field of their own. Many bands that have followed in their wake have simply taken a strand of what the band did and made a career out of it. Forget that - the Velvets resonate as strongly and passionately now, some forty-five years after their original formation, as ever.