Dreaming With His Eyes Open
I like a lot of punk, but I saw it as the end of rock. Punk was one of those great and exciting epochs. Before then, of course, I liked the Velvet Underground, the subversive element of it, the way they could compress a novel into three or four minutes which links to what I was saying about imagery. I’m not talking about political change in terms of Blair. I’m a complete anti-Blair because what I’m looking for is an imaginative universe. But I think that something like the Velvet Underground, if you take a song like ‘Sister Ray’ you write a novel in four or five minutes which is fantastic because you’ve got to be a good lyricist to do that and Lou Reed was.
Poet, novelist and biographer Jeremy Reed interviewed by Richard Marshall.