“She kissed me again with her murderous lips.” Thus runs a typical sentence from the torrid 1870 novella Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom the word “masochism” was later coined). It’s the lurid story of a man named Severin and his desire to be enslaved by a beautiful woman, Wanda von Dunajew; the couple become embroiled in explicit (for the time) episodes of what is now known as BDSM. The story became notorious and was frequently banned.
Fast-forward to New York in the mid-1960s, where Lou Reed and John Cale were putting together a band, which would become The Velvet Underground. They recorded demo tapes in a basement in Ludlow Street; among the songs was “Venus in Furs”, written by Reed and inspired by what he called Masoch’s “trashy novel”. Sung by Cale with abundant echo and a jangly folky guitar, it sounds almost like a medieval madrigal.
At that time, The Velvet Underground were still a work in progress with folky leanings and music that often reflected Reed’s fondness for Hank Williams. But viola-player Cale had worked with avant-garde composers such as La Monte Young and had been involved in the experimental Fluxus movement. He was drawn to drone music. Drummer Maureen Tucker was recruited, having apparently trained by hitting telephone directories while playing along to Bo Diddley records. Her style was elemental and primitive. Reed came up with his own unique guitar tuning, which he called “ostrich”, in which each string is tuned to the same note.
The version of “Venus in Furs”that ended up on the band’s groundbreaking debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), utterly different from the earlier demo, reflects this new approach: it is a chilling, thrilling, sexually charged piece of drone-rock, Cale’s viola crackling like a whip, Tucker’s bass drum pounding, tambourine shaking, Sterling Morrison’s bass weaving a repeated pattern, Reed’s lyrics transporting the story to a modern urban milieu with “shiny shiny boots of leather” and “streetlight fancies” (it’s Reed singing this time).
The album sold badly; later, Brian Eno quipped that everyone who bought a copy went on to form a band. This wasn’t quite true, but many bands in the following decade’s punk years owed a massive debt to The Velvet Underground: the leather jackets, the musical minimalism, the drugs and sex, while the bondage of “Venus in Furs” became a key part of the punk look. Their association with Andy Warhol added to their arty allure. Punk and new wave bands channelled the power and the otherness of acts such as Iggy and the Stooges and The Velvet Underground.
Among those bands were Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose bass player, Steven Bailey, renamed himself Steven Severin after the character in “Venus in Furs”. They are the band who most faithfully covered the song in live versions, capturing its compelling drone, often without drums. Cale himself, who co-produced the band’s 1995 album The Rapture, toured on the same bill as a Banshees offshoot, The Creatures, in 1998, on which they would join forces for “Venus in Furs” with Cale on viola. Cale himself has continued to play it many times, with a typically saturnine readingopening his 2007 live album Circus Live.
It formed an occasional part of Lou Reed’s stage repertoire, perhaps most memorably on his live Animal Serenade album (2004); deploying his by now customary casual conversational delivery, Reed seems to be taking the song less seriously than his band, notably cellist Jane Scarpantoni, who plays an electrifying solo that echoes Cale’s scrapings on the original. And The Velvet Undergroundfeatured it on their 1993 reunion album, Live MCMXCIII, with Reed again showing a Dylanesque disdain for his original phrasing; Cale’s viola saves it.
Other notable versions have come from Beck, featuring an impressive drone created by a sitar, and a guitar played with a violin bow, though Beck’s vocals lack the required stentorian grandeur and the beat plods without being insistent. DeVotchKa’s 2006 version doubles up on the beat, which rather loses the point of the thing, though there’s impressive violin action.
A memorable solo performance, captured on video at McCabe’s guitar shop in Santa Monica in 2016, came from Paz Lenchantin, bassist and violinist with The Pixies since 2014: she samples herself on bass and violin, setting up loops and layers of sound, singing over the top while whipping her violin bow.
Reed’s dark dirge has become a signifier of edginess, like Masoch’s story a gateway into a world of forbidden pain and pleasure. Films and TV adverts have used this quality to add a dark lustre, most memorably in a TV advert in the UK for Dunlop tyres: directed by Tony Kaye, the wild one-minute film caused a stir with its bizarre imagery (including a grand piano falling from a bridge), leading to the tagline: “Tested for the unexpected”.
What are your memories of ‘Venus in Furs’? Did you form a band after buying ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: UMC — Polydor; Domino; Warner
Picture credit: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images