"Any Velvets album can be the best Velvets album. Any Velvets album can be the best album by anyone. You can't make a wrong choice. Max’s Kansas City is today's winner because it has the best story. It has multiple stories. It's a play. It's not an album. Layered narratives are fighting for your attention. First, there’s the stories in Lou’s songs: wastrels, vagabonds and dealers. Second, there’s the story of this being the Velvet’s last gig with Lou. He’s tired and listless between the songs; he knows it’s over. “This is a song about, ooh when you've done something so sad, and you wake up the next day, and you remember it. Not to sound grim or anything. Just once in a while, you have one of those days. I seem to have them nearly every day.” There’s the story of the band itself at this point – no Cale, no Nico, no Tucker. They don’t sound like the Velvets anymore. New drummer Billy Yule sounds like he’s never heard Mo Tucker and never intends to. Then there’s this strange story in the foreground. The show is an official bootleg recorded by Brigid Polk who is sitting next to Jim Carroll. They sound like they’re having a terrible night and he is an arse. He makes her get him Pernod from the downstairs bar and talks over the band about songs he doesn’t know. It’s all perfect because nothing is remotely perfect. I go out on this lousy date with Brigid and Jim over and over again."

"This was probably the most important pop album for me in that I think it's the moment where I realised that I could be a musician. It was partly that this band was semi-non-musicians, but it was also because the songs borrowed a lot from what I knew about experimental music at the time. I'd been playing experimental music with various outfits in England and with Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff and all these people that had come over from America to visit us, 32 people who were into the experimental music scene in England. La Monte Young was one of the big figures in everybody's cosmology at the time and The Velvets, both Lou [Reed] and John [Cale], had worked with La Monte. So the first album came out, I thought, ""Fantastic, amazing."" Second album I thought, ""Great, amazing."" But the third album was the one that really killed me. The first album was quite wild and dark and weird, the second album was mad and intense. But the third album was so gentle and beautiful, but because you knew their history there was that undertone of violence and rage, something trying to burst out. Even on the love songs on this – and many of them are love songs – you hear that real tension. What made me think I could do it too was that the songs were simple and the playing was so simple. There's very little artifice at all in this. But also the mood was something that I thought I could kind of connect to. The difficult thing about pop music as I was growing up, and I was 20, I think, when I first heard this, was that it dealt with young teenage emotions mostly, and that just wasn't interesting to me. I loved the music but what the songs were about was sort of childish and it was all about 'me' and 'you' and 'love', and I just wasn't interested in that really. At the same time I'd been working with Cornelius Cardew and all these kind of quite heavyweight experimental composers. But I didn't want just that. I wanted that [pop music] and that [experimental]. So I was always looking for anywhere that somebody was making some blends that started to be interesting. I didn't own this record for years and years. I just didn't buy this album because I never wanted it to become casual for me. I bought this one about five years ago. I never owned it before then. I would only hear it at other people's places because I always wanted it to be special."

"Now, some people give you shit for picking a best of over a studio album but The Who are totally one of those bands. I do not dig any of their albums. The only album that isn’t a hits collection that I can sit through from start to finish is Live At Leeds. On their studio albums there is always some half-arsed concept hung on a few good tunes. But, The Ultimate Collection is… fucking hell. If you’re of a certain age and you play guitar based music, they’re up there with the Beatles to me. You just have to look at the singles, ‘My Generation’, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ all the way through to ‘Pinball Wizard’ and even ‘You Better You Bet’ is fucking good. The thing about best-ofs is right from the time when I was a teenager right up until the point I actually earned some proper money, all I could afford was best-ofs. I’m not interested in David Bowie’s albums, do you know what I mean? Give me ChangesOneBowie and ChangesTwoBowie. When you can only afford to buy one album a fortnight or whatever it’s too much of a gamble to buy an actual album. Give me a best of. It’s the best… of… that person!"