![]() Though there are no drums on Songs for Drella, the music is often spiky and percussive – not least on I Believe, in which Reed startlingly declares that Solanas should have received the death penalty for shooting Warhol. Neither of them look like rock stars, and they’re both concentrating hard, facing one another while delivering the vocals (singing isn’t quite the right word in Reed’s case) and hammering on the piano or guitar. Filmed when both men were 47, Cale looks aristocratic in a black suit and fabulous wedge haircut, while Reed serves disgruntled librarian in a black sweater and octagonal spectacles. Lachman’s 16mm camera is so close to the two protagonists that you seem to be reading their thoughts – both about Warhol and about each other. The result is unlike any other concert film. “I thought about it, came back the next day and said to them ‘Look, would you let me shoot two of your rehearsals on the stage with no one in the audience and I’ll shoot the performance but the cameras will be off the stage?’ And he agreed.” Are you all right with that?’ So I said: ‘Well, I don’t know how I’m going to shoot the concert without any cameras.’ “Lou was very emphatic and said: ‘I don’t want to see any cameras on the stage and I don’t want cameras to be between me and the audience. Lachman had a meeting with Cale and Reed to discern whether he met with their approval. Photograph: Marion Curtis/StarPix/AppleTV+/REX/Shutterstock ‘I don’t know how I’m going to shoot the concert without any cameras’ … Ed Lachman. It was gorgeous and it got a lot of notice, and that’s why Channel 4 came to me and offered me to do this concert.” Yes, the TV station about to be sold off by Nadine Dorries co-produced Songs for Drella, along with Sire Records in the US. “We met and he gave me home movies of his family when he was growing up, so I had the idea of projecting the images of his childhood over the white pancake face of Annie singing the Cole Porter song Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye. Jarman had been diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986, and was to become seriously ill making his 1990 film The Garden. “I was going to make a video with Derek Jarman and Annie Lennox, but Derek was too sick by then.” Zooming from a colour correction studio in New York, he is squashed into a corner of the frame so all I can see is one lively eye and his fedora. “There was an Aids benefit compilation called Red Hot + Blue,” he remembers. It was, however, a music video that got him the Songs for Drella gig. Now 76, Lachman photographed Far from Heaven and Carol for Todd Haynes, earning Oscar nominations for both films, and has worked with Sofia Coppola, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Enter the great cinematographer Ed Lachman. Presumably with an eye on the combustible nature of the partnership, as well as on its great cultural significance, someone decided that this performance should be filmed for posterity. They finally performed its 14 songs in full at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, at the end of 1989. Cale and Reed decided to make Songs for Drella after meeting at his memorial service – the first time they’d spoken in years. Warhol died suddenly in 1987 after routine gall bladder surgery, aged 58. The cover of the Velvet Underground’s first album. Yet without any sentimentality, Songs for Drella reveals the warm currents of respect and friendship that lay deep beneath the frosty surface. Even the title Songs for Drella is ambivalent: Drella was a nickname used behind Warhol’s back, and which he didn’t like, a conflation of Dracula (the blood-sucking night creature) and Cinderella (the servant who goes to the ball). Given that Reed fired Warhol, then slung Cale out of the band a year later (not face to face, either – he got guitarist Sterling Morrison to do it) relations between the three men were less than cordial. They were the creative engine of the Velvet Underground, the rock band the artist managed and produced and whose first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, ignored on release, became a bible for glam rockers, drag queens, junkies and punks, and is arguably the most influential LP ever made. Reed and Cale, of course, had a particular insight into Warhol. Andy Warhol (centre) between John Cale and Lou Reed with members of the Velvet Underground and Factory star Paul Morrisey (far right).
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