![]() ![]() “A cockteaser,” says Rolling Stone, urging him to “forget this artsy-fartsy kind of homo stuff.” “The Lou Reed chic album,” snorts the NME’s Nick Kent, as if it is a bad thing. Unease runs through Transformer’s critical reception too, far chillier than the public’s reaction. His white pancake make-up, black lipstick, eyeliner and nail polish will see him dubbed “the phantom of rock” – apt for a man lost inside a mask, who isn’t quite there. Behind those vacant, zombie-like eyes could be anything loneliness, boredom, helplessness. Beneath the high voltage lettering Reed is part Sally Bowles, part Boris Karloff, part Pierrot, part sad panda. The front features Reed photographed by Mick Rock on 14 July 72, onstage at the Scala in Kings Cross, in full glitter rock regalia (or as Rock puts it “the degenerate side of glam”). It’s an immaculate construction, taken by Roxy album lensman, Karl Stoecker, right down to the tumescent bulge in road manger Ernie Thormahlen’s jeans (a banana stuffed in a sock). Warning signs flicker across Transformer’s cover, which Reed tells Disc & Music Echo is "divine", perhaps a nod to dialogue from 72’s Cabaret (“divine decadence, darlings!”) On the back, a priapic stud, straight from the pages of a gay porn mag, stares at model Gala Mitchell, her drag-like glamour framed in what looks like a mirror, as if the butch caricature was looking at another potential self. ![]() 'Perfect Day' could be the tender moment missing from Caroline and Jim’s saga on next record, Berlin. By the end of 73, Reed’s marriage will be over, as will his dalliance with glam and the hit parade. It’s magically poignant, an idyllic snapshot frozen in time, its edges darkened by impermanence and a New Testament proverb. 'Perfect Day' captures an early date with Bettye Kronstad (the pair married in January 73), when Reed, in post-Velvets exile at his Freeport childhood home, would take the Long Island train into the city. Reed says he’s eager to learn from the thunderbolt-fast Bowie, who co-produced Transformer with Mick Ronson, tarting up Reed’s tunes with hard-rock swagger, classically tinged prettiness and tuba-powered campery.īut while Transformer taps into the glam rock zeitgeist, contemporary ads make it clear who got there first: “In the midst of all the make believe madness, mock depravity and pseudo sexual anarchists – Lou Reed is the real thing… the original.” Transformer elegantly stitches together fragments for a world that is quickly catching up Velvet off-cuts, songs that sound like an abortive Warhol musical, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ taking its title from a 1956 Nelson Algren novel. Ever since meeting at NYC’s Ginger Man restaurant in September 71, the RCA label mates have been moving closer towards each other, Bowie wooing Reed with a dozen roses spray-painted gold, the pair caught by Mick Rock’s lens kissing at London’s Dorchester Hotel. ![]() Velvets superfan Bowie has co-piloted his ascent. It’ll chart even higher in Holland and Australia. The 45 is a transatlantic top 20 hit, the album climbs to a US number 29 and a UK number 13. The double-punch of last year’s November arrivals, ’Walk On The Wild Side’ and Transformer, have elevated Reed finally from the doldrums of cult star status. It’s 1973 and Lou Reed is rising from the underground, like the vapour emerging from the subway on Loaded’s cover.
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