The band that made Lou Reed bond with Bono: “One of the great people”
Lou Reed is not the kind of man you would want to organise a surprise birthday party for. If anecdotal evidence and the plethora of videos of him terrorising confused journalists are anything to go by, the former Velvet Underground songwriter and king of the underground was particularly difficult to please.
Even within the realm of music, where Reed was most at home, he was rarely known to gush over any emerging artists or contemporaries. When New York started using the inspiration of his Velvet Underground era output to form the foundations of the punk movement, for instance, Reed wasn’t overly impressed. By and large, he tended to stick within the confines of 1950s R&B and doo-wop when it came to his own listening habits.
There were, however, a few notable exceptions to this rule – you would have to assume, for instance, that Reed fostered some appreciation with 1980s metal heroes Metallica, given that his final studio release before his death in 2013 was Lulu, the much-maligned collaboration album recorded with Metallica.
You could argue that those late-period collaborations came around as a result of Reed mellowing somewhat in his old age, but way back in the 1980s, when he was still the sunglasses-clad confrontational cult hero that we all know and love, he still found something to appreciate about young up-and-comers like Dublin’s Cactus World News.
Aside from a few notable hits in the UK, Cactus World News never made a huge impact on the musical mainstream, but Reed was never one to pay attention to commercial appeal anyway. As he recalled during a 1986 appearance on 120 Minutes, “Cactus World News are a group from Ireland that I first heard about when I was out on the Amnesty International tour, I went on just a little while ago.”
That six-date tour of benefit concerts featured a pretty star-studded – and rather disjointed – line-up, including the likes of Sting, Bryan Adams, Joan Baez and, of course, Lou Reed. Although it was far from being Reed’s most extensive time out on the road, that tour clearly had an impact on the songwriter at the time. “I made some really good friends on that tour,” he revealed. “Peter Gabriel was one, and U2 – a group that I really, really, really truly admire.”
In fact, it was U2 who introduced Reed to fellow Dublin rockers Cactus World News, since Bono had produced the band’s debut single ‘The Bridge’. “Bono, the lead singer, who is one of the truly great people, along with all of them,” Reed continued, “He told me about Cactus World News and he said it’s a really legitimate band, they’re really great, and I’d probably really like it, and I like U2 so I really like Cactus World News too.”
On the face of it, U2 might seem an unexpected band for Lou Reed to take such an interest in. After all, Bono and the gang were raised on the inspiration of the punk rock revolution, but always angled their work much more towards mainstream appeal, whereas Reed was always at his best when he was working in the shadows of the underground.
Nevertheless, it appears as though the Irish group were one of the very few new bands in the neon-hued age of the 1980s that got through to Reed, and Cactus World News followed not too far behind.
