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It is one of the more unusual details of my autobiography that Lou Reed once saved my life. It was just over twenty years ago, and I was in New Zealand at the time. I had previously harboured little desire to spend any time in the antipodes. However, friends of mine in New Zealand contacted me, offering the chance to help out for a year at the Buddhist Centre they ran in Wellington. In return for being resident Buddhist from the northern hemisphere, I would be fed, accommodated, and given pocket money. My heart didn't exactly leap at the prospect. However, I was free and available, and there was the feeling that, should I turn down the offer, I might spend the rest of my life wondering whether I had missed out on the chance of a lifetime.
From the moment I set foot on New Zealand soil, I felt like a stranger in a strange world. I was never able to completely pin it down, but this just wasn't the place for me. Gazing out over the ocean, I could easily imagine jumping in a little boat and dropping off the edge of the world.. My friends in New Zealand were wonderful with me, unfailingly kind and generous, but nothing could turn things around. I felt truly displaced.
One Saturday afternoon, in an effort to improve my lot, I climbed the hill at the back of our house. On reaching the top I sat down, put on the headphones, and listened to Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. In response to one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written, I felt precisely...... nothing.
It was only a matter of days later when I received a phone call from my girlfriend in London. We had been together for about eight years in a relationship that was close and sometimes intense. We were, in my mind, a unit; end of story. This time, though, she was weird, her voice strained. She had been seeing a mutual acquaintance, she said. Walks in the park, visits to the cinema. She didn't know where it was heading. A few disturbed hours later, the phone rang again. She hadn't been able to tell me first time round, but they had been doing more than watching James Bond movies together. Quite a bit more. And that was that.
It was the pinprick that finally burst the balloon. I fell into a dark and seemingly bottomless pit, from which there seemed no escape. Every remaining antipodean minute was spent wandering around the vast, black space I had descended into. I had not imagined a human being could feel like this. I experienced many new things: non-specific hatred and rage; total self-disgust and worthlessness. I felt what it would be to kill another person, and to kill myself. I temporarily turned into an unsuccessful sexual predator, too sensitive and timid to properly act out the role of sexual hunter.
Where to turn in a moment of such unanticipated darkness, when ones own existence and sanity hang in the balance? My friends did all they could, offering support and advice. They were not, however, able to meet me fully in this new uncharted territory. More critically, Buddhism, as I had known and practiced it at any rate, had nothing to say. The intensive meditation retreats, the highly-charged study groups, the much-vaunted friendships: nothing prepared me for this moment. In my time of greatest need, the tradition I had followed faithfully and with heart for the previous fifteen years let me down. Badly. Generalised chunterings about impermanence and unsatisfactoriness didn't cut the mustard; neither did more tantric stuff about cremation grounds. What I needed was someone or something very precise and concrete, which could shed light into this very specific darkness that I was living with.
The only voice that spoke to me in my moment of greatest need was that of Lou Reed. Swapping Mozart for 'Berlin', 'Street Hassle' and 'Rock and Roll Animal', I walked the rain-and-windswept streets of Wellington with my headphones at full volume, absorbed in songs of degradation, despair, rage, torment and utter confusion. Songs of the edge, sung from the edge. Here was a voice that knew where I was at that moment in time. A voice that had been there - and, by the way, survived to tell the tale.
'Genius' is a word to be used sparingly. But I would claim that, scattered amongst the diverse offerings of the 1970s and 1980s Lou Reed, there are distinct nuggets of dark genius. I am not thinking of the poppy, singalong tunes of 'Transformer', probably Reed's best-known album. No, I mean the combination of sexual ecstasy and death from an overdose of the lyrical 'Street Hassle'; vulnerability and the possibility of redemption in 'Coney Island Baby'; the crazy yet highly crafted energy of the live 'Rock'n Roll Animal'; melody and beauty emerging from electronic chaos in suicide on 'The Bells' ('It was really not so cute/to jump without a parachute'). But for degradation, torment, and self-abnegation, nothing comes close to the series of songs put down on 'Berlin'. 'Harrowing' is a word that crops up in reviews, and it is apt. Think of tramping the rain-beaten streets of Wellington, and I think of 'Berlin'.
On returning to the UK, I set about my own dark regeneration with the help of an electric guitar and an impressive array of effects pedals. Still, the Buddhist tradition failed to offer any assistance, and the gulf between what it had to give and who I was started to widen. Several years on, I came across another person aside from Lou Reed who had been into the darkness that had become my domain. This was Carl Jung. His description of the 'night sea journey' held me in its thrall. My own life seemed to recapitulate his writings about personal shadow and unconscious and collective shadow/unconsciousness. I undertook shamanic lowerworld journeying, and drew deep nourishment from archetypal psychologist James Hillman, someone else familiar with the Underworld.
My stay in New Zealand coincided with another high point in Lou Reed's creative life, a remarkable trilogy. First up was 'Songs for Drella', a collaboration with John Cale in memory of their mentor Andy Warhol; 'New York', a unique portrait of the city at the time; and 'Magic and Loss', written on the death of two of Lou's friends from cancer. All three albums charted new territory in the landscape of rock, and all are touched by that daimonic genius. A few years ago, thirty years after its original release (to critical condemnation, by the way), 'Berlin' finally went on the road. I caught the show with a friend of mine when it hit Edinburgh: a night to remember. For the rest, I have not followed Lou closely over the past two decades. By all accounts, he's not somebody I'd hurry to invite for dinner. But for his giving musical and poetic voice to the underbelly of the human condition, and for helping me out in my own dark night of the soul, I shall always be grateful.
