Lou Reed has promised "a night of deep noise" based around Metal Machine Music, the notorious hour of howling feedback that nearly killed his career stone dead on its release in 1975. Whatever that means, the assembled audience is certainly diverse, testament to the weird allure of Metal Machine Music, either as an act of impressively monumental petulance or a compelling and even oddly pretty work of art in its own right.
A certain kind of rock star is also in evidence – Nick Cave and sundry Bad Seeds, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields – but so is a woman who appears to have brought her daughter. The kid looks about eight, which even the most ardent MMM fan might think is pushing it a bit. Maybe it's a birthday treat in the process of going disastrously wrong: "No, Mummy couldn't get tickets for Hannah Montana, but don't despair."
The gig begins before the trio appear: a row of amplifiers makes a vast, ominous grumble. On arrival, Reed initially just stands frowning at them, apparently surprised to find them there, as if he expected to come on stage and plug his guitar into a barbecue. Then he starts playing, his guitar sounding not so much distorted as corroded, while Sarth Calhoun pounds away at a computer. Some people leave fairly rapidly, which does make you wonder what they were expecting.
At one juncture, Reed motions to his assistant to turn off the wall of amplifiers, and what follows is comparatively lovely: long, arcing notes that float free of the tumult, then dissolve again. At another, Ulrich Krieger plays something identifiable as a sax solo. You could argue that it's a special kind of person indeed who listens to Metal Machine Music and thinks, "You know, what's really missing here is a saxophone solo," but then Lou Reed is the man who, on his 2003 dates, offered evidence that what he thought All Tomorrow's Parties was really lacking was a funky syncopated beat and an east Asian man doing tai chi stage left.
It reaches a climax when Reed whacks a gong at the back of the stage: incredibly, it's the loudest and most startling sound all night. Some people boo, more rise in a standing ovation, which doesn't last quite as long as Reed laps it up for. Still, he's waited 35 years for the public to applaud Metal Machine Music: under the circumstances, you might be inclined to milk it too.
