the same old shit. Berlin. The Velvet Underground. Who fucking cares?

epub, with thanks to the original sharer

John Cale plunged into Dids’s miniature elf’s lair in Balham. Hiding his wild coke-stary eyes beneath scratched Wayfarers, covering his beer-barrel gut with a stained sweatshirt and a No-Smoking sticker. This was the man who’d directed the aesthetic of New York’s most stylish pop-group. Distanced now, by more than a decade, from the marketing genius of Warhol and the savvy of Reed, he’d had to take on the narcotic, alcoholic and psychic abuse alone. Over the following few days, Cale rambled a broken monologue, referring to things he may or may not have mentioned previously. Blurred by booze, confused by coke, it was hard to follow the sudden leaps of association. I got caught in his mad Welsh rhapsody. He loved to talk plots and intrigues. Paranoid conspiracy theories were his brain-food. A paranoid insomniac with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a wrap of coke in the other. He tried to blanket his high-toned Welshness under that heavy Manhattan overcoat, but those ringing, singing vowels gave him away – like a rotting sheep or a male voice choir, there was no mistaking their origins. Spies were everywhere. Cale’s pathological suspicions of clandestine agents lurking in our midst ensured that we had a twenty-four-hour lockout. No one unconnected with Nico’s album would be allowed to enter the studio. Unless, of course, it was the delivery boy from the pub, bringing the evening’s crates of Grolsch. Sleep cost money. It meant the studio wasn’t being used. We were all in that semi-trance state that the mind gets into when regular sleep-patterns are broken. Cale would stagger off into the night, looking for some action, banging on the doors of some low-rent bacchanal, demanding to be admitted. Instead of rugby, he’d found art, but he still wandered the streets at midnight, like a boozed-up boyo. Back in Brixton Cale couldn’t/wouldn’t sleep. He’d blunder around the flat all night long, playing endless mixes on a ghetto-blaster. Nico gave him a shot to knock him out, he was bugging us so badly. He spent the next day puking up the consequences. The alleyway up to the studio was an archipelago of vomit atolls.