Lou Reed’s favourite song by The Rolling Stones

Although the two bands aren’t commonly mentioned in the same sentence, The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground emerged from the 1960s as kindred spirits. Both presented a bad-boy image to counter the concurrent technicolour hippie wave. Lou Reed wanted to “paint it black” like the Stones, but his more experimental work with John Cale proved less of an immediate hit in the global charts.

Famously, Reed wasn’t one to publicly venerate his peers and even contradicted himself occasionally, betraying a desire to misdirect the press, whom he despised more than any other artists. For example, in his 1987 interview with PBS, Reed spent a few minutes slating some of his ’60s rivals and was asked for his opinion on The Beatles. “No, no, I never liked the Beatles,” he said. “I thought they were rubbish.”

However, Reed’s opinion of the Liverpool lads seemed to change throughout his life with the ebb and flow of his capricious and conflicted mindset. Perhaps Reed was fed up with the eclipsing durability of The Beatles’ legacy by the 1980s, but in the 1970s, he was quoted as saying: “They just make the songs up, bing, bing, bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever – just amazingly talented. I don’t think people realise just how sad it is that the Beatles broke up.”

During a 2015 conversation with Uncut, Reed’s former bandmate John Cale shed more light on the matter, revealing that, while he and Reed preferred the Stones, they enjoyed Lennon’s darker material. “There was always this competition between the Stones and the Beatles,” Cale said. “Even though The Beatles could be brilliant, the Velvets would always side with the Stones because they were darker, rougher.”

“Then ‘She Said She Said’ turned up, and I could see The Beatles were changing,” Cale added. “Lou [Reed] and I looked at each other and realised something was happening, which we zeroed in on. The way [John] Lennon did it seemed so natural. It was obviously not just something he made up his mind to do; it was always part of who he was.”

The Rolling Stones used a similar Andy Warhol-created design on their 1971 album, Sticky Fingers, to the famous banana one the Velvets used on their 1967 debut. In the 2016 book The Rolling Stones All The Songs, Mick Jagger revealed that the 1968 Beggars Banquet cut ‘Stray Cat Blues’ was inspired by The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’. Although left unmentioned, an even more apparent comparison could be made between the Stones’ ‘Parachute Woman’ and the Velvets’ ‘Run Run Run’.

Beyond this, the two bands didn’t seem to mention one another much. However, when Reed sat down with the Helsinki Music Club in the mid-2000s to list his 100 favourite songs of all time, he listed The Rolling Stones’ 1981 hit single ‘Start Me Up’ in 76th place. While he included classic songs by The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and more, Reed omitted mention of The Beatles, suggesting a final allegiance in the 1960s’ biggest rock rivalry.