Entire forests have been leveled trying to unravel Warhol’s riddle – Blake Gopnik’s 2020 biography is 976 pages long. However, in just 55 minutes, the album and 1990 film by Lou Reed and John Cale Songs for Drella reach the heart of a man hiding behind his wig, shades and empty expression. Their song cycle begins with Smalltown, a cute portrait of Warhol’s childhood in Pittsburgh, “Bad skin, bad eyes, gay and faddy” (or is it “fatty”?), Through its overproductive golden age in 1960s, until later years struggling with the pain of the wounds he suffered when he was shot by Valerie Solanas, author of the Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto, alienation from colleagues and friends, and a growing lack of ideas. All the issues that biographers later addressed as great revelations – Warhol’s Catholicism, his strangeness, his relationship with his mother – are here, explored with rigorous precision and economy. Andy Warhol (center) between John Kale and Lou Reed with members of the Velvet Underground and Factory star Paul Morrisey (far right). Photo: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Reed and Kale, of course, had a special image for Warhol. It was the creative engine of Velvet Underground, the rock band that the artist directed and produced and whose first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which was ignored in circulation, became a bible for glam rockers, drag queens, junkies and punks, and is arguably the most influential LP ever made. Since Reed fired Warhol and then removed Kale from the band a year later (not even face-to-face – he put guitarist Sterling Morrison to do so) the relationship between the three men was not at all cordial. Even the title Songs for Drella is ambiguous: Drella was a nickname used behind Warhol’s back, which he did not like, a mixture of Dracula (the blood-sucking creature of the night) and Cinderella (the servant going to the ball). However, without any emotion, Songs for Drella reveals the warm currents of respect and friendship that lie deep beneath the icy surface. The cover of Velvet Underground’s first album. designed by Andy Warhol. Photo: Records / Alamy Warhol died suddenly in 1987 at the age of 58 after routine gallbladder surgery. Kale and Reed decided to make songs for Drella after they met at his memorial – the first time they had spoken in years. They finally performed all 14 of his songs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in late 1989. Obviously, given the flammable nature of the collaboration and its great cultural significance, one decided that this show should be shot for the next ones. Join the great filmmaker Ed Lachman. Now 76, Lachmann photographed Far from Heaven and Carol for Todd Haynes, earning Oscar nominations for both films, and has worked with Sophia Coppola, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. It was, however, a music video that gave him the Songs for Drella concert. “There was a collection of benefits for Aids called Red Hot + Blue,” he recalls, zooming in from a color-correction studio in New York, crammed into a corner of the frame, so all I can see is a vivid eye and a fender. of. “I was going to make a video with Derek Jarman and Annie Lennox, but Derek was very sick by then.” Jarman was diagnosed with HIV in 1986 and was due to become seriously ill in the 1990 film The Garden. “We met and he gave me movies of his family when he was growing up, so I came up with the idea of ​​projecting his childhood images over Annie’s white face singing Cole Porter Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye. “It was great and it got a lot of attention, so Channel 4 came to me and suggested I do this show.” Yes, the TV station to be sold by Nadine Dorries co-producer of Songs for Drella, along with Sire Records in the US. “I do not know how to shoot the concert without cameras”… Ed Lachman. Photo: Marion Curtis / StarPix / AppleTV + / REX / Shutterstock Lachman had a meeting with Kale and Reed to see if he met their approval. “Lou was very emphatic and said, ‘I do not want to see cameras on stage and I do not want cameras to be between me and the audience.’ are you okay with that? ‘ So I said, “Well, I do not know how to shoot a concert without cameras.” “I thought about it, I came back the next day and I said ‘Look, will you let me shoot two of your rehearsals on stage without anyone in the audience and I’ll shoot the show but the cameras will be off stage?’ And he agreed. “ The result is unlike any other concert film. Lachman’s 16mm camera is so close to the two protagonists that you seem to be reading their thoughts – both about Warhol and the other. Shot when both men were 47, Kale looks classy in a black suit and a lovely wedge haircut, while Reed serves a disgruntled librarian in a black sweater and octagonal glasses. Neither of them looks like a rock star, and they both gather hard, facing each other while shouting vocals (song is not the right word in Reed’s case) and hammer on piano or guitar. Although there are no drums in Songs for Drella, the music is often sharp and percussive – especially in I Believe, in which Reed states in surprise that Solanas should have received the death penalty for Warhol’s shooting. Indeed, it took three years, which tells you something about the low level of respect that held the lives of homosexuals, even celebrities. As with Velvet Underground, the tender moments are fermented with other intense sweetness – for example Style It Takes, in which Warhol urges a wonderful young man to play in one of his screen test films and which has self-referential lines: ” This is a rock band called Velvet Underground / I show movies with them, do you like their sound? ” At such times, the camera remains on Reed and Kale’s faces. “Sven Vilhem Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s senior director of photography, said that the face is the landscape for the camera,” notes Lachman. “If there were ever people who could be landscapes, it would be theirs.” The Velvet Underground in Rotterdam in 1993… John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison. Photo: Rob Verhorst / Redferns Towards the end of Songs for Drella there is a sense of self-awareness, for example in A Dream, where Cale recites verses from Warhol diaries such as: “You know I hate Lou, I really hate him. He won’t even hire us for his videos, and I was so proud of him… »At this point you look even more closely at Reed and Kale. There is so much to wonder about as you look at their unexplored expressions. Can we discern the sorrow for their wickedness, both towards Warhol and among themselves, pride in the fiery mutual creativity of their youth, sorrow that it is too late to do things differently? “It was not just a tribute, a tribute, a eulogy, but it was a kind of confession,” says Lachman. To that end, Kale and Reed were filmed almost in the dark, sometimes with Warhol’s artwork or the front page of the New York Post mocking “Pop Goes Pop Art” after filming, projecting over them. “Cameramen like to separate people from the dark,” Lachmnan adds, “but I wanted to get out of the dark.” Lachmann first met Reed years ago – he was recruited to make a video clip for Reed’s baroque gloomy 1973 album, Berlin. “She came to the camera when I was staring at her, kicked the tripod leg and said, ‘Do it like Andy.’ “I was terrified, I was trying to hold on to the camera that was about to fall to the floor.” By the time of Songs for Drella, Reed had calmed down. “I asked him if he remembered that, and he said, ‘I do not remember much since,’” he smiled and went back to the microphone. John Cale and Lou Reed in 1988 were working on what became Songs for Drella. Photo: New York Times Co./Getty Images So what was the atmosphere like between Kale and Reed? Did they have fun? “What you see is what you have,” says Lachman. “They showed up and did the job. I did not hang out with them after or before, I had my hands full. “They did not go to the corner for beer.” Indeed, Reed and Kale fell out in the aftermath of Songs for Drella – “Lou must always be in control,” Lachmann notes – before they build and decide to remodel the Velvet Underground. The band toured Europe in 1993 (probably including a Glastonbury show) before Kale and Reed became estranged again. That was until the band entered the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, which turned out to be their last appearance. Reed died in 2013, at the age of 71. Kale is now 80. Rejected approaches to talking about this movie. Songs for Drella aired on Channel 4 in 1990, a show I recorded on VHS, which seemed to my teenage self as a broadcast from a planet of cryogenic coolness. He has been living deep in my bones ever since, so it is shocking to hear that he was actually “lost” from that first broadcast. In the US, it was released on a laser disc and then disappeared. Lachmann tried to find the film while working on Todd Haynes’s documentary about the Velvet Underground and eventually located it during the pandemic, passing through boxes of material he had requested from the New York Film Lab. “There, 100 feet from my bed, were the real genuine negatives, but without sound,” he says. Warner Brothers provided …