If I'm forced to pick my favourite ever record, it would be Venus In Furs. A record that just seemed to appear fully formed and totally without precedent. Strip it down to its component parts and it isn't recognisably rock music. I mean, what is it exactly? I still don't know. And it's got drones and a viola for god's sake. Listen to the demo on the Peel Slowly And See box-set and it sounds a bit like Scarborough Fair, but once it's traversed the VU filter it sounds like nothing you've ever heard.

In the mid-60s, Reed was a hack songwriter for Pickwick Records; Cale was a classical musician studying in New York. They met when the record company put a band together for Reed's tongue-in-cheek dance record The Ostrich. Cale was playing with La Monte Young's drone-heavy avant-garde classical outfit, The Dream Syndicate. To Cale's delight and amazement, Reed had detuned all his guitar strings to the same note. A band was born.

Reed's using Ostrich tuning in Venus in Furs; I spent ages as a teenager trying and failing to play the guitar parts. Now I know why. Cale's playing viola and it sounds like nothing on earth, going from an unsettling screech (some people swear there's a whip on the record, although there isn't) to discordance to yearning, relentless sustained notes. It's hard not to use the words relentless and unsettling when talking about this record. Maureen Tucker's primitive, unorthodox drumming's like something from a horror film but, as always, she's holding the band down.

Reed can be a lazy vocalist, but his singing is really focussed here. Did I mention it's a song about a sadomasochistic love affair? Taste the whip in love not given lightly. Taste the whip, now plead for me. Still sends a shiver down my spine. Grumpy old sod he may be, but Reed's a hell of a lyricist when he puts his mind to it.

So I give you Venus In Furs by The Velvet Underground. A record I still haven't tired of in 25 years and hope I never will.

Difficult to put the Velvet Underground in that category, sticking to the rules of conventionality. I listened intently to that track, fascinated by the beautiful but deadly video clip of nuclear destruction. It was like being back in my teens watching the OGWT again. Only thing missing was Bob Harris coming on at the end to say..."nice".

"Venus in Furs", for those who don't know, is based on the novel of the same title by Leopold von Sacher Masoch (who course, gave his name to that well-known niche sexual preference, leopoldism).

The character Severin, mentioned several times in the song, is presumably also where Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist Steve Bailey turned to when he was looking for a somewhat darker surname than the one he was born with.

A great record indeed (and very well introduced, too, Brookster). As with "Kashmir" or "Wuthering Heights", everyone says it's been "hugely influential" but the truth is that it's so out-there that its influence is limited to moods and approaches far more than actual tunes or arrangements.

A true one-off, well worth dusting off.

I'll have my records back now thank you very much.

I cannot fathom how one could even attempt to form a frame of reference for it in 1966/7. It doesn't so much invite criticism as obliterate it.
Have we all tried the mono mix?

I heard it for the first time on a John Peel-type show on Radio Merseyside in 1979. The huge slabs of rhythm guitar and metronomic drumming blew me away. Sister Ray was almost as thrilling when I heard that for the first time.

Enjoyed your post Brookster, although I have to say Venus in Furs always sounds a little ponderous to me.

Still one of my favourite tracks of all time. Japan's version was a bit good too.

Remember when Venus in Furs was used to sell tyres? I had a friend who was a Velvets devotee,and when I mentioned having seen the ad on TV he thought I must have imagined it. Such was his disbelief that I actually started to doubt myself.Maybe it was a productof my drunken imagination. I was therefore relieved when it shown again,but abit disappointed too.

..a feeling as soon as I pressed "post" that I'd got the tyre brand wrong. I think I assumed it was Pirelli because I loved one their ads from a few years previously. Remember the one where it's "the end of days"? the Earth has stopped spinning, chaos reigns,and all is lost.But somewhere deep in a cavern a Lamborghini noses up against a stone obelisk ,a blip of the throttle, and the tractive efffort of the Lambo combined with the grip of the tyres re-starts the planet spinning on it's axis.And all to the strains of "Nessun Dorma". Of course this was before Pavarotti's party piece became so ubiquitous that I wouldn't care if I never heard it again.