Rock and Roll Stories #81 - White Light/White Heat

The False Dots next gig

 The Velvet Underground. The proto punk band? Where it all started? One of the biggest influences on my early tastes in music was my eldest brother Laurie. He signposted many bands and artists to me and when I started playing guitar, showed me a few tricks (most of which became the foundation of my playing style). He had a wide taste in music and a record collection to die for. Laurie is far more intelligent than me and he was very open to anything that he thought was interesting. He played in a band that performed traditional Irish music, when he was at school studying to be a priest. When he discovered psychedlic music and culture, he got into things like Pink Floyd, Country Joe and The Fish and The Electric Prunes. 

When I told him I was into punk, he said "Oh that all started with The Velvet Underground" and lent me a compilation abum of their tracks. I was quite intrigued. It was unlike anything else in his collection. The band went from sheer noise to the tenderest of love songs, but all had a dark edge. There was something indefineably interesting about them. Oddly, although I loved supercharged punk, with them it was the softer songs, many with Nico singing that really did it for me. In many ways, it was as much the forerrunner of Indie pop as punk. Jangly pop songs about being ravaged by heroin, wrapped up in a sugar coated topping worked for me. 

Around that time in 1978/80, I did a lot of babysitting for Laurie and my mate Pete, who I was putting the band together with would come along to keep me company. Laurie would buy us a bottle of cider and tell us to play records, so long as we didn't wake up the kids. When we hearad The Velvet Underground, we both agreed this was the way to go. Dark edged songs, that had very poppy overtones. We decided that we'd overdub an acoustic guitars to give it that feel.  I don't know what people were expecting, but it certainly wasn't what they heard. I guess as cunning plans go, trying to sound like one of the least commercially successful bands of all time is not the best. But for us it was a liberation. We were no longer trying to sound like every other punk band and it gave us a degree of freedom lyrically that had disappeared from punk.

It is odd how many people cite the Velvet Underground as an influence, but clearly never really listened to them. We'd occasionally see bands do covers of VU songs, but invariably if it was a rock band it will be heroin, or occasionally White Light/White Heat. These days there are some cracking covers (check out this article) but I used to find it depressing that people didn't see beyond the obvious. 

When the False Dots did our tour of Sweden, we needed to add extra songs to the set. We decided to do  a VU song. We decided on Sweet Jane. Paul Hircombe suggested i, because his girlfriend was called Jane. By th time we got it together, he'd left her for a girl called Christine. It's a great song. We did a version of it at a bikers rally in 1982. A huge biker made eye contact with me at the back of the hall. He looked terrifying. He marched up to me and put a large spliff in my mouth. After the gig, he told me it was his favourite song. His wife was Jane and she'd recently passed away. He hadn't been expecting to hear it. He told me that for a moment, she was with him, holding his hand as we played. It was, perhaps, the moment that I truly realised that music is spiritual. 

The False Dots had many influences over the years. When we first started concieving the band, I think we envisaged a cross between Wire (Pink Flag era) and Anarcho punk band Crass. "Wrong", from our last album is the best recorded example of this era. I then discovered 2 Tone and The Specials. I really wanted that sort of set up, but we didn't know any brass players. We expermented with Reggae but  it sounded wrong. When we discovered the Velvet Underground. we realised that it was within our capabilities to achieve that sound. I was never into their worship of narcotics, but there is no dount Lou Reed and John Cale were musical geniuses.

I could never really figure out the total lack of commercial success of the VU. Perhaps that is why the False Dots never acheived a mass following.  Lou Reed eventually received the recognition for his talents when David Bowie produced Transformer. It may be the best aalbum ever made. It is truly awesome. People started revisiting his earlier work. Punk artists were especially keen to explore the back catalogue. This was partly because when the punk movement started, there were no records. You had to see the bands to find out what they sounded like. Actually having something you could listen to at home was rare, so obscure bands like the VU, who shared the nihilism and minimalism of punk were influential. Another band in this genre were the Stooges, but they were far more a rock and roll band. The VU were far darker and deeper. 

In 1980, we had a meeting with an A&R guy at a major record company and played our demos. He asked about our influences, when we mentioned the VU, he said "Have you actually listened to them? Have you heard 'waiting for the man'. I replied  "Actually we were going for the vibe of beginning to see the light", he was bemused. I guess that quoting an obscure album track from a commercially unsuccessful band was not going to win any arguments. But for me, it was what we wanted to sound like. 

Last night, The False Dots rehearsed our set for our next gig at "The Camden Rocks Festival". We will be doing a slightly different set and we will be doing one of our 1980 tracks, Not all She Seems, which was perhaps the song most influence by The Velvet Underground. The song has had many incarnations, and is probably the song the band have played most times live (I have no record of this though). As I was playing it, I recall sitting in my bedroom with Pete who I formed the band with, working out the chords and lyrics. I never imagined I'd still be playing it 46 years later. We wrote it to be as shocking as possible, very influenced by the VU and Lou Reeds obsession with people of a non binary sexual orientation. It was based on a conversation we had with trans prostitute, who told us they'd been sleeping with a Tory MP for cash. We used to see the said individual at gigs, then one day they disappeared off the face of the earth. A mutual friend said "She met someone she used to know, she packed her bags, she had to go". We assumed it was a violent pimp she'd been trying to escape from.

I think that it stands up well for a song written 46 years ago. It is funny to think that without the VU, it wouldn't be there.