So,
goodbye Lou Reed. According to Brian Eno, not many people bought the Velvet Underground & Nico album first time around, but everyone who did went out and started a band. Sorry Brian, I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule. But I've been a Lou fan ever since, and apart from seeing him live in the 1970s, I was lucky enough to catch the Velvets reunion tour in 1993. Though my original copy of the first album is long gone, I also own more Velvets box sets (vinyl and CD) than I have space for.
Lou was notoriously tough on journalists, who commonly asked him stupid questions and got things wrong (not that he was above feeding them contradictory stories for the hell of it), so he would not have been too surprised to see the
BBC report that he was survived by his second wife - in fact Laurie Anderson was his third, not counting the mysterious
Rachel.
There are millions of musicians, but only a handful change the direction of music: Lou was one. And even Susan Boyle recorded one of his songs...