And the lullaby dreaminess of Sunday Morning, with its chiming celesta, nearly obscures the notion that it’s about the paranoia that follows a night of chemically-induced escapism. I’ll Be Your Mirror was as beautiful as any song released in the ‘60s.

But there was also tenderness, sadness, reflection. The music pummeled and droned, a nightmarish swirl of viola, distorted guitars, and tribal drums struck with mallets. Though pop-art maven Andy Warhol endorsed their first album and provided its iconic, banana cover image, it wasn’t enough to smooth over the band’s sharp edges: the darkly humorous rituals of the drug trade in Waiting for the Man, the sadomasochism of Venus in Furs, the horror of Heroin, the chill of The Black Angel’s Death Song. The Velvet Underground wanted to participate in musical society, but on their terms. Some people say, ‘Well, it’s just about a junkie.’ But why is he a junkie? What are the alternatives? What would make someone want to nullify his life, as the song says, rather than participate in society?” Because if I did take action, then the implications are dire’. It says, ‘I don’t care about any of it, and you’re better off. “It’s a protest song – it protests everything. “We were aware at the time that this was the most unusual ‘drug song', if that’s what you want to call it,” Morrison said. Heroin provides insight into the narrator’s motives, a mini-movie about the nature of hard drugs and hard times. Indeed, Reed’s lyrics empathised with and humanised these societal underdogs. It is among the first examples of a recurring motif in Reed’s lyrics: an ability to describe the lives of outsiders, misfits and outcasts without judging them. Though dismissed as 'porn rock' by some, the song is also poignant and frightening. To title a song after a deadly narcotic was in itself a form of commercial death, a sure way to risk censure and blackballing by record company executives, radio programmers and concert promoters. On the doorstep of the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, the Velvets regularly performed an epic, ebb-and-flow song called Heroin that chronicled the travails of a junkie in almost nauseating detail. “We were the original alternative band,” Morrison told me in 1993, “not because we wanted to be, but because we were shunned into it. The roots of underground and experimental music, indie and alternative, punk, post-punk and art-punk all snake back to the four Velvet Underground studio albums: The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground and Loaded. But in strictly musical terms, the Velvets – Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and, later, Doug Yule were new rock’s future, the band that launched a dozen musical subgenres and movements. There’s no arguing the decades-long ubiquity of the Beatles, the extraordinary impact they had on not just music, but on the counterculture and the way their generational peers thought, spoke, dressed and cut their hair. When Lou Reed died a few weeks ago at the age of 71, I wrote an obituary asserting that Reed and his band The Velvet Underground influenced rock’s future as much or more than any ‘60s band, including The Beatles.

The velvet underground poster