The punk star who became Lou Reed’s drug dealer
As soon as Lou Reed released ‘Heroin’ with The Velvet Underground in 1967, he became synonymous with the strange world of narcotics that was coming to the fore, a status cemented by his lifestyle and penchant for extensively analysing the darker side of life in his work. A highlight of the New York band’s transgressive, boundary-pushing debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the song was one of the first of its kind in that it explicitly discussed the use and effects of the drug.
Elsewhere, with other efforts such as ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, which told the realistic tale of trying to score heroin, and ‘Run Run Run’, which artistically paired drug terms with religious imagery, Reed made it clear that he knew more about drugs than most of his generation.
After all, he did. Reed began experimenting with narcotics at the age of 16, and during his time at Syracuse University, he tried intravenous drug use for the first time. This hard-living lifestyle, as the Beatnik era gave way to the counterculture movement that defined his generation, provided him with countless real-life stories to weave into his work with The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist. His 1972 glam rock classic Transformer is heavily tinged with references to drug use, while later tracks like ‘How Do You Think It Feels’ from 1973’s Berlin—a concept album exploring the lives of two speed-addled lovers—also delve deeply into the theme of addiction.
Although Reed’s addictions would have severe implications on his physical health and personal life, and he would start to wean himself off them in 1979, there was an extended period where he partook in an array of substances with seemingly no real care for the consequences.
This even led Peter Perrett, the frontman of the cult London punk band The Only Ones – a man whose life has also been seriously affected by addiction – to being his unlikely dealer one night in London in the early 1970s, a time when Reed’s lifestyle was hitting new depths.
“I was a big Velvet Underground fan, but the original incarnation never toured England,” Perrett told The New Cue in 2024.
He continued: “In 1972, Lou had a band called The Tots, and we went to every gig south of Cambridge. Eventually they started talking to us after the shows. They had a holiday let on the corner of Beaufort Street and the King’s Road in Chelsea, and they invited us back there. We’d just go there after every gig and hang out. A part of the attraction was that I had an ample supply of hash, which they didn’t get in New York. They’d never seen such large lumps of it. That was an icebreaker.”
While Perrett sorted Reed out with a simple bit of hash and not something as hardcore as heroin, this was a moment The Only Ones frontman has never forgotten. It was fitting as well, as not only was his music compared to Reed’s by the press when the band burst onto the scene, but he openly counts Reed as one of his greatest influences despite always maintaining that he tried his hardest to be individual on the sonic front.
