“Do you want to see Elvis Costello with a fucking nail through his head?”

epub or azw3, with thanks to the original sharer

Relations between Lou Reed and Ian Dury’s camps were precarious over the six weeks of the tour. Surly and aloof, Reed spent the whole time in his hotel room watching old videos of himself.  “Arista thought we’d get an open-minded audience supporting this famous American lounge lizard Lou Reed,” commented Dury. “But he had a pot belly and trainers and was about as subversive as a packet of crisps.” The tour included a week of shows at a club in San Francisco and among the celebrities who came along were Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood. “Rod came in and I said, ‘They’re a bunch of cunts, they think they're the bollocks and because we get a good reception, the band’s getting the hump’. He said, ‘We’ll sort them out then. Come in here Fred and watch the door’. He twisted all the knobs they tuned the guitars with and that was great because when they went on, it was an awful fucking sound. Rod had done it and Reed was fucking livid.”