"Talking of the modern poet in modern music and listening to Lou Reed as a part of The Velvet Underground, we are really listening to the WH Auden of the modern world. Once again, not existing in print poetry but in recorded noise"

"If you want to persuade people to give Frank Zappa a second go, you play them 'Trouble Every Day', it's one of the greatest songs ever, and it sounds like it could have been off one of the first two Velvet Underground albums. Again this is an album that Mark Smith played me. Just the other day I played 'Concentration Moon' in which he's having a go at the VU. He hated everyone, the Velvet Underground, the beatniks, the hippies… it was a landmark album because it was the end of hippie culture. People say it was after the stabbing at Altamont but musically this was it. It has the Beatles referenced in the pastiche on the cover. It's really fabulous, really cynical."

"By 1972, I’ve finished up in art schools, hitchhiked around the country, and I moved to Providence, Rhode Island. In the mid-’70s, I was in a band with Chris Frantz from Talking Heads, and I wrote a couple songs that stuck during that period, including “Psycho Killer.” We also did a lot of cover songs—Al Green, Velvet Underground, the Sonics, the Troggs. The Velvet Underground were a big revelation. I realized, Oh, look at the subject of their songs: There’s a tune and a melody, but the sound is either completely abrasive or really pretty. They swing from one extreme to the other. “White Light/White Heat” is just this noise, and then “Candy Says” is incredibly pretty but really kind of dark. As a young person, you go, What is this about?"

"A boy I had a crush on gave this to me to read at university. In a way, it was my first taste of America and of New York, where I now live. It really affected me. A tragic tale of the life and death of Edie Sedgwick, the charming, broken, sophisticated, naive, sexy, innocent muse for a generation of geniuses—Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. The Queen of the Scene and its victim, too. I couldn’t stop looking at the photo of her on the cover in all her eye make up, and trying to work her out."

"I was 16 or 17. I'd just started doing Art A Level at school, and this whole world suddenly just opened up. For ages, I'd been playing the flute, playing the saxophone and skateboarding. That was it really and then all of a sudden, I hit that age. My friend Adrian had a ridiculous record collection. He started making tapes for us, me and another friend of mine, and he introduced us to all that stuff: The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. I was getting really into art and really into poetry. I discovered Picasso, Matisse, Magritte at the same time. I also discovered surrealism and surrealist poetry, literally in the same couple of years. It was like an explosion in my head. 
'Run Run Run' was just brilliant because it was so chaotic. I'd been into music for a while - I was really into The Police and various bits - but this was just so different. I just loved how nihilistic it was. Really dirty. Luckily my partner's a massive Velvet Underground fan as well, so we stick it on quite often, even now. I still get the same feeling from it when I listen to it now that I did that very first time. I still get that electric charge of energy from it."

"I was about 16. We had this great art room in school and an absolutely brilliant teacher, Bob White. This art room was really well equipped with dark rooms and screen printing and painting. Bob was quite happy for us to play records. If you were in there, you could hear what other people were putting on. Somebody older than me was hip and put on Velvet Underground & Nico. That was just so influential. I often think that the ones that have lasted really well for me are songs like 'Sunday Morning', some of the kind of quieter, more reflective ones."

"This era of the Velvet Underground is possibly, along with Ray Davies, my favourite kind of singing. It’s sort of weedy and again without testosterone and certainly without force, it was just very, very hip and not trying too hard. It’s interesting, because did a band ever sound as hip, not trying, but still delivering? “Velvet Underground were a real staple of my generation, in that a bunch of kids in the mid-70s’ discovered them retrospectively, probably in a way that I’d imagine kids now discover The Smiths. They sounded genuinely subversive without being obscure, they were real, proper songs and there was a great poetry in there. “Often when you talk about songs to people, most people assume you’re talking about the words - to a lot of people that’s what a song is. But because I got so obsessed so young with the mechanics of the music, the production and how things came together, often I wasn’t really too bothered if the words didn’t make much sense. I’ve had amazing experiences with songs that had words that absolutely didn’t make any sense, like ‘Jeepster’. “‘Foggy Notion’ is a really good example of a song that’s just really rocking - the guitar is really hyped up and swings like crazy - that makes you feel really good and absolutely doesn’t need any serious lyrical content. In fact, sometimes - and I suspect it’s the case with ‘Foggy Notion’ because I know it so well - if the lyrics were snagging your attention too much it would distract from what it’s supposed to do. You’ve got to remember it was for young people in the 60s’ to Frug to, doing these dance moves in cool striped-shirts and cool shades and ‘Foggy Notion’ is all about that and the sound of the voice. I think that’s a great thing and something people who think songs are entirely about meaning and words aren’t aware of. “It’s an interesting thing with The Velvet Underground, because if you imagine The Rolling Stones back then, who were supposedly the baddest of the bad boys and The Beatles who were supposed to be the hippest and most worldly, I wonder what they made of The Velvets at the time or if they’d heard them. I know Dylan was aware of them, but writing songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘The Black Angel's Death Song’, I wonder if you were in The Beatles or The Stones you were just going ‘Oh no, we’re so X-Factor.’"

"The Bizarros are great; I love their self-titled album from 1979. They were going earlier, they did a split 12" with Rubber City Rebels that came out in '77 and some of the songs from that are also on this record but the difference between the two versions is pretty dramatic. The earlier versions of the songs are slower and they drag a little bit, and on this 1979 record they're really driving and kind of scratchy, hyper-Velvet Underground sort of stuff. You can tell there's a Lou Reed influence going on but it's also very much it's own thing. I looked them up a little while ago out of interest and there's a website and they're playing. Next time we go to Ohio we should play with them. They're just so good."

"That moment I had when I was young, listening to White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground… I mentioned there's a song called 'The Gift', and John Cale narrates it. It's about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend as a present. She opens it, and she fucking kills him. I remember… I didn't realise John Cale was Welsh when I was 15. I remember listening to that song and I was like, "Fuck me! That sounds like a Welsh voice!". My mind exploded: one of the pivotal members of The Velvet Underground was a Taff! Anything is possible baby… I really got into John Cale from that moment onwards. I think if you get into John Cale you go to Paris 1919, which is an amazing album and some would say his best, but Slow Dazzle really pushes it for top spot. Number one, it has one of the best covers of all time: he does a cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' which is a brilliant, brilliant cover. And he goes from that to 'Ski Patrol', and there's another song called 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is almost like a Harry Nilsson, beautifully orchestrated, melancholic plea to a lover. So he goes from serrated acuteness of 'Heartbreak Hotel' to the lushness of 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is just one of the great motivational songs of all time. In a strange way it just motivates you so much. This is where John Cale got his game together: he realised he was an experimental musician who could also write amazing tunes. And this is where you actually hear him not scared of his voice anymore. This was the start of his true greatness. As a solo artist he's nearly unsurpassable to me."

"The irony about Berlin is that it was delivered as a concept album, but its component parts are from all over the place. The earliest songs off it are demos for the Velvet Underground. It's intriguing because 'Berlin' the song is from his first solo album, and then you've got 'Stephanie Says' [from VU] which has been changed to 'Caroline Says I'. He rejigged everything and came up with a concept album, but it's a hodge podge really. I interviewed him about Berlin and just about got away with it because I love the album. And I don't think it would have been as good if Bob Ezrin hadn't been producer. As much as David Bowie and Mick Ronson turned Transformer into the album it is, Bob Ezrin turned Berlin into the album that it is. The story goes that Bob Ezrin told his own kids that their mum had died just so he could record them crying for the album, and then when he had that on tape he told them, nah, she's alright really, I just made it up. That's what I heard anyway. You want to know why Lou Reed punched David Bowie that time? Well, I heard it was because Bowie offered to produce Berlin, but on the condition that Reed quit heroin. But Berlin is just an amazing album, especially coming straight off the back of Transformer, and you can tell that Lou Reed is not comfortable with being a pop star as presented by David Bowie. Somebody like Lou Reed [who] actually did reinvent the wheel – with some help from John Cale – with the Velvet Underground, and then one of his acolytes is seen to be helping him on his way. He was probably smarting a little bit from that. Really, Berlin shouldn't have worked, it was constructed from waifs and strays, but it has that great production with all the brass on it. 'Sad Song' is so beautiful. It's probably the most beautiful song you'll hear in your life."