Regurgitator are easily one of Australia’s favourite bands, and have been for years. Although the music scene has shifted significantly since their late ’90s heyday, their ability to incorporate elements of so many styles, from hip-hop (Fat Cop) to the rock (Kong Foo Sing) to the synth-laced Polyester Girl, has maintained their position as one of the country’s favourites, and they’ve been busy touring and recording new material, with a lot more on the cards for 2017. Even when it comes to covering one of the most critically-acclaimed rock albums of all time, The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, they not only do the record justice, but do so with a perfect amount of their own sound in and around staying true to the original sound. What started as a once off for the Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria last year turned into a festival run of tribute shows, including special performances at both Sydney Festival and Hobart’s Mona Foma this month.
We had a chat with Regurgitator’s Ben Ely about the album, how it all came about, and the future of Regurgitator.
How was 2016 for Regurgitator?
It was really good for us. We just finished a tour, and we have been writing songs for a new record. But we haven’t actually had a chance to go in and record them. We have just been writing and preparing stuff. Hopefully, we might do two different records. That’s the plan.
And until those are ready, you’re performing the Velvet Underground & Nico cover shows?
Yeah we are. These show came about because our manager, Paul, for years has booked live music for the National Gallery of Victoria and the GOMA Art Gallery in Brisbane. He’s been booking them for about nine years, and we have never actually played a gallery. We’d been teasing him the last couple of years saying, ‘come on when are you going to give us a gig?’ Then, he was booking music for the NGV and the Andy Warhol and Weiwei joint show and he just said to me in conversation, ‘If you guys were to do a gig at NGV for this show, what would you do?’ My missus is a contemporary dancer and I have composed a lot of music for contemporary dance. She just toured China with a friend of hers, Mindy Meng Wang, who is a guzheng player. She’s really lovely and very talented and the music she makes is really beautiful. So I was thinking of Mindy and the Chinese element as well as the Andy Warhol element and thought it would be really nice to cover the first Velvet Underground album, but with a Chinese kind of instrumental slant on it. And that’s where the idea came up. Then [Paul] presented the idea to the NGV and they really liked the idea, so we did the show. It was a lot of work, but the show sold out, it was really fun, and we thought it would be really nice to do it again.
Did you and the others ever mess around or cover the tracks before this project came along?
We have all been very big fans of that record and the band. Oh, it’s funny, I am standing in a record shop and I am looking at the record right now on vinyl. That’s quite hilarious! We’ve always been big fans of it and we’ve gone through phases where we’ve listened to their music for inspiration for our own songs. Songs like Strange Human Being, or Art, actually Superstraight off Eduardo and Rodriguez has a very Velvet Underground-inspired vibe to it.
I think they’re one of those bands that, when you’re in high school, you hear and it stands out as being a very, very different record to a lot of the music that’s around. Even in the eighties when we were teenagers I remember the place I was sitting in my friend’s living room listening to that record for the very first time. He was like, ‘have you heard this?’, showed me the album cover, put it on and it really struck me as being an extremely different record. There really are so many great songs on it as well. All of us feel quite inspired by that, I guess as alternative leaning artists we find that record very inspiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2t4tEOqido
What in particular about the sound influenced Regurgitator?
We love the fact that the record has really nice pop sensibility but it does sound quite abrasive and different to top 40 pop music, and at the time it wasn’t really considered very popular. I mean, no one bought the record, but a lot of people love the record. So I think it is an interesting way of presenting pop music and it’s kind of very distorted and dissonant type of way. Which is probably what we find attractive. We have always loved the idea of making pretty pop music but with nasty lyrics content and lots of swear words, you know to make pop music in a different way.
When you’re doing these Velvet Underground sets, do you try and put your own spin on the tracks?
Some of them we have. Towards the end of the album, the songs get a little bit more kind of distorted and art school, some of those songs we took liberties with. But the songs at the beginning of the album we tried a little harder to keep them closer to the originals.
Which songs on there did you just love learning or playing?
All of them pretty much. I really enjoyed singing Sunday Morning, but Venus and Furs was probably my favourite, just with the dark S&M subject matter. It’s just the kind of simple beauty of the drums and the bass line and lyrical content being quite dark, but the music is quite pretty, I really enjoyed that. I was enjoyable playing someone else’s music that you really appreciate. It’s quite an honour and a pleasure really.
It’s funny you said Venus in Furs, it’s my editor’s favourite track. [Ed. note: yup – read my feature on the album for more 😉 ]
It’s such a great song. We just tried to relax and play it really slow. It’s got this beautiful trancey kind of nature about it. It was fun. That was probably my favourite part of the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLQzaLr1enE
You mentioned before you have a guzheng player, Mindy Meng Wang. What kind of sound does that instrument add?
Oh definitely, it’s a classic instrument which is almost like a violin. It’s quite quiet so we did have to allow ourselves to be quieter. Dynamically we had to go up and down, and if Mindy was going to do a big solo we would break down the sound so you could hear her play quite clearly over it. I think it does add this more of an eerie element to it. It’s such a beautiful instrument that has such a classic Asian sound. She plays really well, she’s world renowned. She’s played on a Gorillaz album and Damon Albarn’s stuff and she’s pretty awesome. She definitely brings a different beautiful element to it for sure.
Are you likely to start mixing in some Velvet Underground into your regular live sets?
*Laughs* I don’t know. That’s what the funny thing is, it’s so different to our kind of music. It’s almost like being an actor playing a role of someone else. When we do Regurgitator it feels like us and when we do Velvet Underground we enjoy the playacting type moment. Which I really love, it’s cool.
So, you’ve been focusing on a lot of music outside Regurgitator.
Yeah, I’ve been working on other things like composing for film, contemporary dance shows, circus, and I’ve just done a hip-hop show. I’ve been busy doing other kinds of music as well. I have little breaks, but then I will kind of experiment with art or something. It’s always good to do something, I get a bit bored otherwise.
Given that you do a bit of art as well and the Velvet Underground were so connected to Andy Warhol, do you take inspiration from him in art as well?
I do love his art work. I really love it, and that whole New York scene is pretty inspiring also. I love artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring and those other New York visual artists. I like making art, because when I make art I get a chance to listen to a lot of music.
I remember as a kid being obsessed with your music videos. Particularly Polyester Girl – I would always tape RAGE in hope of catching it. When I was younger, I thought the song was about Pamela Anderson. I’ve always wanted to know if it was about any one person?
Really? That’s bizarre. I think that’s the thing about music and art in general is that it is open for everyone’s individual interpretation whatever that may be and I think it is always cool to hear a different perspective on a song or a play or anything. It’s up to every individual’s interpretation and I think it’s nice just to hear different versions of how people take it – it’s cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BxVBziFvtU
After the Velvet Underground shows, will we see Regurgitator doing Regurgitator shows?
Yeah, we will try and put out another record and do some shows. We are even hoping to put out a kids punk rock record too. Like a naughty kids record. We have already written that, we just have to record it. We have a bit of work ahead of us.
You can catch Regurgitator performing Velvet Underground & Nico at Sydn`ey Festival on January 17 and at MOFO on January 22.
Image: Examiner
The Velvet Underground. No band inspires wonder in the way they did. Their opus, The Velvet Underground & Nico, is probably one of the most influential albums in the late 20th Century. If Brian Eno is to be believed, while only 30,000 people bought the album, and “Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
So when I heard that John Cale played the entirety of that album, live, along with other songs from White Light/White Heat, I was crushed I didn’t hear about it sooner. Of course, it was at Philharmonie de Paris, so I wouldn’t have been able to go anyway, but it’s the thought that counts right? Cale was joined on stage by some very special guests throughout the concert: Pete Doherty and Carl Barât from The Libertines, Mark Lanegan, Lou Doillon, Etienne Daho, and Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly.
Another notable guest was Animal Collective, whom Cale appeared with on Hocus Pocus off their album Painting With. Cale and Collective also appeared in conversation together on The Thread.
You can watch the performances of I’ll Be Your Mirror, White Light/White Heat, and Femme Fatale below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejaGPh6FcZE]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_UBcddi5rY]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMQ9VFjTAA]
Read our Flashback Friday feature on The Velvet Underground & Nico
Image: The Velvet Underground
They say that while The Velvet Underground‘s 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 30 000 copies, every single person who bought it went out and started a band.
Okay, so I didn’t start a band. But I did become a ‘music person’. I met other ‘music people’ – they were in bands, they knew about bands. Soon, I did too.
I learnt a lot from The Velvet Underground.
I was around 14 years old when I first heard The Velvet Underground and Nico. I don’t know who told me about the album, I don’t know how I found out who these guys were. I do remember going out to buy the CD, though. It was $10 from Dirt Cheap CDs on Bondi Beach. It had that iconic Andy Warhol banana on the cover (and all the history that came with their relationship with that famed art community). Well over a decade later, it still, and always will be, one of my all time favourite albums. This week marks the anniversary of Lou Reed’s passing in 2013, so it felt like the opportune moment to reflect on one of the most beautiful, strange and intriguing albums of the 1960s.
Without doubt, I was too young to fully understand this album when I first heard it. It made no secret of its central themes: sex and drugs. Of course, tracks like Heroin and Femme Fatale made their intentions clear from the very top, but it wasn’t until I was a little older that everything else unfolded before me.
Because of that, absorbing all I could from this record took a long time. Call it a sustained release. It was almost as if every year that I grew older, the album peeled back another layer, letting me in, letting me learn.
The first layer was the most obvious – the music. Gentle at times, jarring at others, I learnt so much about music, about melodies, about lyricism. This was some of the first 1960s music I’d ever heard outside of early Beatles-type stuff, and boy was I in for a treat.
The time I first heard it, I was exploring all sorts of music, deciding what I loved and hated. Back then, I found that I was mostly digging heavier stuff – Silverchair, Nirvana, Deftones, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails. I even distinctly remember only liking the heavier tracks on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. So you can imagine that I was fairly unprepared for the gentle, juvenile celesta that floated into my ears, as I heard Sunday Morning for the very first time.
A pacifying, easily digestible lullaby, I was immediately intrigued by the calmness of this song. It’s hard to describe, even now, years later. This was probably the first song that I ever related to on a level beyond angsty growing pains, for which I’d found solace firmly within grunge. I’m not even sure what, specifically, I related to about this track. It wasn’t until my later teen years that I came to fully understand the concept of a ‘Sunday morning’ – and to discover that this song is the precise sonic embodiment of exactly that.
Venus in Furs was – and this is still on a purely musical level – perhaps the strangest, most unnerving song I’d ever heard. That hypnotic, droning guitar, that jangly tambourine, that hollowed beat. Lou Reed’s deadpan delivery – singing about shiny leather, boots and blood. I was drawn to this song with a strange intensity, I used to play it on repeat – without understanding the meaning behind any of the lyrics. It wasn’t for at least two years that I came to understand what the song was about – an homage to the themes and characters in the explicit BDSM-centred novella of the same name, published in 1870. That alone is testament to the influence of The Velvet Underground. I had absolutely no understanding of what the hell Lou Reed was singing about. But it managed to draw me in, and draw me deep.
The obscure references and metaphors were pure poetry – I didn’t get it, but found it beautiful and intriguing nonetheless. I was learning about nihilism before I knew what nihilism was. I was learning about sex and seduction, about what it’s like to be a heroin addict, well before I had any contextual means to process that stuff.
I love that I loved this album without fully understanding a single thing about it.
As I grew older, and I gradually began to grow aware of the actual topics, words and themes, it didn’t feel revelatory in the sense of, ‘finally, it all makes sense’. It didn’t feel like the pieces hadn’t already been put together – it was more that now, I simply knew even more, I had peeled away another layer.
The Velvet Underground and Nico was already speaking to me; it just took me a while to learn the language.
Next, I took to researching the band. I learnt everything I could about Lou Reed, about Nico, about Andy Warhol and that New York art scene. This album single-handedly educated me about a world I never knew existed. So far removed from any kind of subculture I had, or will ever know, the bohemian lifestyle, free love, drugs, experimental art and everything else that came along with it. It was exciting and new, and soon it led to me also learning about modern art, about beat poetry, and so much more. This album planted the seed, and I’ve been sowing ever since.
I learnt a lot about drug culture and drug use from this album, too. Waiting For The Man is hilarious, a casual, cheerful tale of a forlorn junkie, desperately waiting to meet his dealer – his lifeline.
Heroin is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard in my life. It breaks my heart. Opening on a simple strum and a slow rhythm that eventually speeds up to emulate a thumping heartbeat, this is the rawest, most exposed Lou Reed that we hear on the album. “I don’t know just where I’m going,” he begins. “But I’m gonna try for the kingdom if I can, ‘cause it makes me feel like I’m a man. When I put a spike into my vein, and I’ll tell ya, things aren’t quite the same when I’m rushing on my run, and I feel just like Jesus’ son.”
“Heroin, it’s my wife, it’s my life,” he sings towards the end. “When the smack begins to flow, I really don’t care any more.”
The lack of metaphor, the straight up literal words and descriptions were stark and honest enough that this song stuck with me. Talking again about the music, the thoroughly onomatopoeic layers – the frantic guitars and increasingly pounding rhythm, astounded me.
It gave me a desperate desire to try heroin too, by the way. I never did it though.
The Velvet Underground and Nico was so much more than a diverse, lyrically dense, groundbreaking album within modern music. It was the beginning of so much for me. I learnt about music itself, I learnt about culture, I learnt about the 1960s. And while the album orbited around themes of sex and drugs, they were the least important, almost irrelevant aspects to me. It was so far from all that I gained, all I was exposed to. What I really took from this album was the way I was able to absorb so much information – so many types of information, from one record with a big yellow banana on the front cover.
It’s as if this album grew up with me, and I, with it.
Thank you for the music, thank you for the lessons. Lou Reed, you are missed.
PBS’ Blank on Blank video series is a serious goldmine. Previously lost interviews with famous names (BB King, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix have all been past featured subjects) are dug up, animated and uploaded to the website. Today, an open, honest interview with the late Lou Reed was added to the catalogue.
If anyone was going to tell music exec and author of Off The Record (a collection of interviews with over 200 musicians) Joe Smith how they really felt, it was going to be Reed. Throughout the interview, Reed discusses his vision for The Velvet Underground, the misinterpretations of their songs, his desire to write the Great American Novel and his concerns about going deaf. However, it’s the discussion of his contemporaries, more than anything else, that has been making a buzz in the short time since the video was uploaded.
Choice quotes include:
I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up … the level that we were on… They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “arty”, it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.
And:
I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you said, “who did you like?” I liked nobody.
The Blank on Blank clip runs for 5.16 minutes, but you can listen to the entire, unedited interview here.