Number 57 – Again, thanks Google Images….
Venus in Furs – The Velvet Underground – Chosen by Both of Us – Taken from ‘Velvet Underground and Nico’ LP (1967)
Before I start a quick word for ‘Simon Pieman’…Please stop sending us (well Tim really as it’s his email on the page) angry, slightly racist emails about Kanye West being shit and how he is not better than ‘the Wedding Present’.
Understand.
Anymore lip from you and I’ll publish your email on every spam website that I can find. Also instead of emailing us with insults, comment on the link below with your knuckle dragging views, or better still just don’t read this ‘fatuous self-indulgent bollocks’ (your words), in fact you are barred from this page for ever.
Anyway…..where were we – oh yes The Velvet Underground – and to a story of them via the girl band Eternal and Mr Blobby.
The Velvet Underground were an enigma to me when I was growing up. All the bands I was into spoke very highly off them, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Spiritualized hail them as influences, other bands rave about their brilliance. So one Saturday I found myself in possession of £20 and I went into the new HMV in Maidstone and have decided to purchase me some Velvet Underground.
Now, this store was being opened on this day it was the figure head of a new shopping area of the town. To mark this occasion HMV had pulled out all the stops, they have booked girl band Eternal, who featured a lady called Louise who would later marry Jamie Redknapp to create a new kind of bland not previously thought possible, and Mr Blobby, the pink and yellow slightly phallic object created by Noel Edmonds.
So I am walking up the stairs to the CD section to find myself a CD when there is a commotion behind me downstairs, I turn around and peek through the gap in the stairs and the wall and see two security guards running across the store. I then see Mr Blobby lying prone on the floor and a bloke on top of him holding a chair, which he has just battered Mr Blobby with. Parents with their small children, there to see Eternal and Blobby, are horrified, cooler kids are cheering the bloke with the chair on, the security guard pounce on him and he is frogmarched out of the store. The worried looking manager comes over and helps the poor sap in the Blobby costume to his feet and slowly normality is returned. Eternal come on and lip sync on stage for ten minutes and everything is sort of forgotten
The I bump into my friend Marc, and I’ll just take this down a little side road here, he was massively into American cock rock when I knew him at college, Izzy Straddlin, Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam were all he pretty much listened to, and he refused to accept that any other music was any good. Two years into University and I bumped into him at the Reading Festival. He was wearing a Mani style hat, a Stone Roses T shirt and looked like he’d mistaken the Reading Festival for Spike Island. Turns out he’d always had a soft spot for indie music. Hmm, the leggy blonde on his arm with the Thousand Yard Stare Tshirt and tiny tiny denim shorts had nothing to do with that decision….
So reversing back out of that particular cul de sac….
I bump into Marc in HMV just after purchasing my Velvet Underground CD and we go for a pint (in one of the two boozers I could get served in – Hi Levellers Girl – and discuss Mr Blobby being attacked by a chair in front of screaming children.
It turns out that chair wielding maniac was a guy called Colin that we went to college with, apparently Mr Blobby went up behind him and shouted ‘Blobby Blobby Blobby’ behind him and made him jump and subsequently fall over. So he twatted him with a chair. He was subsequently charged with assault, found guilty and had to do 100 hours community service for his ‘wanton disregard for public safety’. He was also banned for life from all branches of HMV and the Crinkly Bottom Theme Park in Cricket St Thomas, Somerset (some 180 miles away from Maidstone).
Now, I’m not one for condoning violence, but actually, that punishment almost fits the crime I think. I mean I can still imagine Colin in court being read his punishment, thinking, I can deal with the community service, I can deal with the no HMV, there is always Virgin and the indie Longplayer shop but please god, don’t take Crinkly Bottom World away from me you bastards.
Oh yes The Velvet Underground, worth every column inch of the hype, the word legends and pioneers are thrown about with gay abandonment these days, but here are a band that deserve that label. Simple as that.