(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Mon 8 December 2025 20:30, UK
By 2011, Lou Reed had nothing left to prove as a musician. After all, he had spent the final decades of the previous century defining avant-garde rock.
Whether it was with his glam-rock turn in Transformer or the truly game-changing art-rock masterpiece The Velvet Underground & Nico, he was perennially on the edge of innovation. With that was an uncompromising attitude that saw an artist thriving in the coalfires of confrontation. His sole purpose as an artist was to provoke and defy, and so rarely did he take the easy option out.
However, at the turn of the millennium, he was offered one on a silver platter. Hang up your plectrum, enjoy the mastery you laid down in the century gone by and ride off into the sunset as an undying musical hero.
But would a true musical innovator take that option? Of course not. It would be inherently contradictory to Reed’s artistic disposition were he to accept greatness at face value and refuse to push further at its boundaries.
In 2011, he didn’t see that opportunity through the lens of his own music. Lou Reed, as a musical name, had perhaps done all he could have, and so to combat that, he recruited the help of Metallica to lay down an ambitious, albeit slightly misguided, album. Acting as both producer and artist on the record, Reed sought to create an experimental clash that brought Metallica’s weighty riffs to his idiosyncratic vocal timbre.
It turned out to be Reed’s final music project, before his sad death two years later in 2013, and so bookended a career of wild and wonderful experimentalism. By all accounts, it’s the one he looks back on with most fondness, not only labelling it the very best of his work but the very best of humanity as a whole.
He said, “The version of the Lulu music I did with Metallica is awe-inspiring. It’s maybe the best thing done by anyone, ever. It could create another planetary system. I’m not joking, and I’m not being egotistical.”
Reed’s frequency was so otherworldly, perhaps, that it failed to register with us earthlings, as Lulu was one of the worst-reviewed albums of all time. With one critic labelling it, “Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result”, and another calling it a “gruelling” 90 minutes of listening, it failed to land with any reverence on this planet.
However, his fellow extra-terrestrial innovator David Bowie defended it, viewing it with a similar supernaturality as Reed. He said, “Listen, this is Lou’s greatest work. This is his masterpiece. Just wait, it will be like ‘Berlin’. It will take everyone a while to catch up.”
Some 14 years on from Lulu and we’re still trailing quite far behind these two musical aliens, having not yet registered the full genius they supposedly claim exists within it. Because to the rest of us, it sounds like a harsh crashing of ideas that bounced off as opposed to blending in with one another. But beneath that does exist a silver lining, which is Reed bowing out from a career in the way that only he can: with uncompromising bravery.
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