CALL OF THE WILD SIDE

Listen to any of Lou Reed's albums and you'll hear his life laid out in music. Just don't ask him to talk about it, writes Nick Johnstone

IT'S a humid Sunday night in New York City. I'm standing with 250 sweaty fans in a packed-to-capacity jazz club called the Knitting Factory, just round the corner from Robert De Niro's restaurant, The Tribeca Grill.

It's early April and Lou Reed is about to take to the stage for a third and final warm-up show prior to touring with his new album, Ecstasy, a trip which brings him to Edinburgh later this month. Reed, it seems, has a thing about Edinburgh. Modern Dance, a song on Ecstasy, contains the line: "Maybe I'll move to Edinburgh, wear a kilt in Edinburgh".

When he finally appears on the Knitting Factory stage, there is no kilt. Instead, he wears black leather trousers, a black T-shirt and the same serious spectacles he's been wearing for years now. He leads his note-perfect quartet into a speaker-shredding version of Paranoia, Key Of E, the stripped down rock'n'roll nugget that kicks off Ecstasy. For the next two hours, he performs most of the songs - all of which sound rougher and tougher live- on the album, interspersed with offbeat oldies such as The Blue Mask, Doin' The Things That We Want To, Romeo Had Juliette and - how about this for an encore? - Sweet Jane, from his days as leader of The Velvet Underground.

A few weeks earlier, on a grey, cold, late Tuesday afternoon, I find myself sitting opposite the man himself at a table in a plush hotel suite overlooking Hyde Park. Reed, 58, looks tanned and healthy, even though his heavily lined face shows all the tell-tale signs of a life nearly destroyed by drug addiction and alcoholism. But that is behind him now, and he has been alcohol and drug-free for almost two decades.

Reed has flown in from New York the night before and is heavily jet-lagged, so I brace myself for the worst. However, my fears are ill-founded. He turns out to be amusing, talkative and affable.

He still has a hint of that famous New York attitude, however, as I discover when the questioning strays towards his private life. He fixes me with a cold, relentless stare and throws out a look that says he isn't interested in discussing whether Ecstasy is partially about his painful divorce from Sylvia Morales, his second wife and the woman credited with getting him off booze and drugs in the 1970s and turning his career around. "I'm not going to tell you that," he snaps when I ask if the embittered acoustic ballad Baton Rouge is a dig at Morales.

Neither is Reed keen on discussing whether the songs on Ecstasy which aren't about the divorce - a half-dozen or so angry dissections of a complicated relationship - are about his ongoing love affair with performance artist/musician Laurie Anderson. If other non- Sylvia, non-Laurie questions stray too close to home, Reed wrong- foots me by stating that his songs are about fictitious characters rather his own life. This, though clearly a lie, pretty much ends certain lines of inquiry. For instance, when he is asked why he rarely, if ever, passes moral judgment on the subject matter in his songs - and with alcoholism, transvestism, drug abuse, bisexuality, homosexuality, wife-beating, suicide, rehab and recovery to choose from, there's plenty to judge - he simply replies: "Who am I to take a stance upon things that have happened to the characters? I mean, it speaks for itself. The listener can figure things out. They don't need me to stand on a soapbox and go, 'Raaaah'."

What Reed will talk about is his craft. With nearly 40 years of songwriting behind him, he sounds as enthusiastic now as when he picked up his first guitar and launched himself into a music career which probably peaked with the extraordinary Velvet Underground.

But for all his expertise, his songwriting process is still at the mercy of the muse. "Sometimes I've got a guitar lick, sometimes I've got the lyrics first, sometimes one chord or the other. There's no set rule," he says, lighting up a cigarette. "I take it whenever I can get it, however I can get it. That's not the thing I pay attention to. If I can come up with a title, then I'm home free. If I have a title then I stuff that back here [he points at his head] and it'll take care of itself."

So does every album start life as a title? "Oh yeah," he says. "I don't know if you do this but if there's something I can't figure out, before I go to sleep, I'll be thinking about that. Now, assuming I can still sleep because I'm thinking about that, when I wake up it will be figured out. The albums tend to start out a little like that."

Reed has channelled his life through his music. He examined his bisexual desires on Transformer (1973), worked through the failure of his first marriage on the rock opera Berlin (1973), documented his fascination with amphetamines on Sally Can't Dance (1974) and Metal Machine Music (1975), addressed his estranged relationship with his family on The Bells (1979), dealt with life without alcohol and drugs on The Blue Mask (1982), Legendary Hearts (1983) and Live In Italy (1984), railed against an out-of-control home town on New York (1989) and mourned the death of two close friends to cancer on Magic And Loss (1992). Now, on Ecstasy, he is picking through the rubble of his failed marriage to Morales while digesting Anderson's disinterest in his desire to remarry.

Lying at the heart of Ecstasy is Like A Possum, certainly one of the most ambitious pieces of guitar music anyone has come up with in years. Forget Sonic Youth and every other band Reed and The Velvet Underground ever influenced - this is the real thing.

"Possum started with my friend P Cornish," gushes Reed. "He lives out-side London and he's a true genius. He's a sound designer. He makes things. I've got a bunch of toys from him. Just before going into the studio this box arrived. His note said, 'This is a present only to be used when you go into the studio.' And that's the sound we have on Possum. So I took it out, plugged it in and started playing it immediately. It was like 'Oh my God'."

The song evolved into a three-section epic which Reed then sat down and tried to write lyrics for. When the band came to record it, they did it in one take. "The vocal then had to be adjusted to it, which is why it sounds improvised," he says. 'It's gorgeous. It's amazing. It's really amazing loud. You may not believe this but we sat listening to it about five times in a row. And we just couldn't believe it. We put it on the big speakers and just blasted it."

When he's not blasting music, Reed has been known to act. In recent years he has turned in cameo roles in Wayne Wang's Smoke, the Wayne Wang/Paul Auster companion piece Blue In The Face and Paul Auster's debut as writer-director, Lulu On The Bridge.

"Paul Auster thinks of me as his lucky mascot or something since Blue In The Face so he wanted me to play this cameo role when he directed Lulu On The Bridge", drawls Reed. "Blue In The Face was all improvised. I'm pretty funny. It was just me and Paul and the sound guy because Wayne Wang was sick that day. Paul would just ask me these set-up questions and I would just rip and then Paul just edited the footage down to the funniest answers.

"My cameo in Lulu On The Bridge - he wrote that and he really wanted me to stick to that. So I did, which was also funny. You know, I originally wanted to act but I wasn't good enough. But, oh yeah, it's fun playing another character. I mean, I do that in songs all the time. It's fun doing that. Speaking a different way, wearing different clothes. I love doing that."

When it comes to Ecstasy's acutely personal subject matter, it seems improbable that Reed is doing any acting. It is perhaps for this reason that he gets so annoyed when lazy ears make rash comparisons between the rough and ready, laidback guitar sound of Ecstasy and the similarly rugged feel of the New York album.

The songs on Ecstasy are about his interior emotional life; the songs on New York about his exterior urban environment. "This is not New York by any stretch of the imagination, although people keep saying it reminds them of it," he says. "It doesn't remind me of it, not even a dot.

"As far as the guitar sounds - well, yeah. But in everything to do with Ecstasy the bar got raised a whole lot. There's still two guitars, bass, drums and some cellos and some horns but recorded a whole lot better. The sounds are better and more controlled in a certain way and I can play them better. I know what I'm doing more than I did on New York. Everything really came together on this one. The focus is really good. There's a lot of words on this one.

"I like to think that I very slowly get better. Little incremental things get better and you add up these increments and, pound for pound, this album weighs in pretty good."

Lou Reed is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on May 17Lou Reed was born in Long Island, New York, in 1942. Thrown out of Syracuse University, he met a young Welshman called John Cale and formed The Warlocks. In 1964, the band became The Velvet Underground, now viewed as one of the most influential rock groups ever. In the 1970s, plagued by drug addiction, Reed began a solo career. The drugs are now gone, but the music continues.

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