Mark E Smith’s favourite Lou Reed album
The Fall‘s Mark E Smith wasn’t known as someone who gave out praise lightly. Scores of former bandmates, journalists, and fellow musicians have all been on the receiving end of Smith’s potty-mouthed putdowns over the years, while the trailblazing bandleader was also famous for sacking dozens of Fall members across the post-punk band’s 40-year lifespan.
“The thing with me: I can’t stick musicians,” he once said. “I’ve thought about this. I can’t stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that’s my strength I can hear what they can’t. Being in The Fall isn’t like being in another group. It isn’t a holiday. A lot of musicians are really hard to deal with. They aren’t as smart as me.”
But that doesn’t mean Smith didn’t give out praise where praise was due. He also liked to highlight the work of the musicians he loved and respected, which included fellow punk luminaries the Sex Pistols, ‘The Man in Black’ Johnny Cash, Mothers of Invention, The Seeds and Peter Hammill. They were some of the musicians he highlighted as part of a 1981 feature titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer’. Alongside his favourite musicians, Smith also highlighted his favourite books, films, art and comedians. Included on that list was an album by punk visionary Lou Reed – but in true Mark E Smith fashion, it’s probably not what you were expecting.
Live: Take No Prisoners is a 1978 album by Lou Reed, recorded during a May 1978 performance at The Bottom Line in New York. Confrontational, non-conformist, aggressive, avant-garde, expectation-defying… in many ways, this at-times-bizarre live album is the perfect encapsulation of both Lou Reed the musician and Lou Reed the man. Famous for featuring extended, unplanned rants about everything from rock critics to oral sex, Live: Take No Prisoners is 98 minutes of pure, unadulterated chaos.
On the rare occasions that Lou Reed makes it through a song uninterrupted, such as on ‘Coney Island Baby’ or ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, the results are breathtaking. However, when he lets his penchant for improvisation take over, as he does on the rest of the album, the outcomes are equally captivating. ‘Sweet Jane’ is transformed into a sprawling ten-minute journey, ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ stretches to nearly 14 minutes, and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ becomes a 17-minute, jazz-infused epic, complete with monologues and a quick nod to Bruce Springsteen in the audience.
Reflecting on the performance, Reed later quipped: “Everybody said I never talk. I was in my hometown of New York, so I talked… I even thought of titling it ‘Lou Reed Talks, And Talks, And Talks’.”
Live: Take No Prisoners was far from Reed’s first dalliance, confounding the expectations the music industry placed upon him. His first band, The Velvet Underground, broke just about every taboo in rock music, while his 1973 album Metal Machine Music—which consisted of more than 60 minutes of feedback—remains one of the most divisive records of all time. Reed would follow Live: Take No Prisoners with The Bells, an album that continued to eschew traditional rock music structures in favour of loose, jazz-like compositions.
Smith’s reverence for Reed and The Velvet Underground went way beyond this live release. He wrote a eulogy for The Wire to mark Reed’s death in 2013, vividly recalling the time “I’d listen to ‘Sister Ray’ on full blast, 14 years back” and showing that even he got a little starstruck sometimes: “On the ‘Gorillaz’ tour, Lou Reed must’ve been the only person I didn’t talk to. I bowed, and he nodded.”
It’s easy to see why Smith had such a reverence for Reed’s boundary-pushing releases and confrontational attitude. Both Reed and Smith continued to make music on their own terms, and nobody else’s, right up until their untimely deaths in 2013 and 2018, respectively.
