The Velvet Underground have been one of the most consistently advanced musical organizations of our time, paid the price and endured on the strength of their commitment. The mass audience which they’ve deserved for so long may finally be coming around to them after exhausting all that “safer”, flashier music which eventually proved so stereotyped. Not that there is anything intrinsically difficult about the Velvets’ music, then or now, but a combination of bad press, guilt-by-association and public defensiveness have dogged them, absurdly, ever since they agreed to donate their manifold talents to dramatize the milieu of a Pop artist/filmaker who had reached the stage where he needed a rock’n’roll band to deliver both his vision and his image to every still-safe living room in Middle America.

So the Velvets hit the pop music scene with a grinding fanfare, and brought countless quivers to the flesh of harried parents gaping at their children huddled in quietly intense circles around speakers ozzing the ultimate nightnare — a resinous hymn building into a roar of agonized hostility as inescapable as one honed fingernail shrieking across a blackboard: “Heroin/Be the death of me ... And thank your god that I’m not aware!”