Reviews

Occasions where touts attempt to sell off tickets for the price of a small African country’s GDP, where Manchester's rock glitterati stagger down the aisles after the lights have gone out, where all bar one of the bars is shut, thereby ensuring that the only way you're going to get any liquid refreshment is by drafting Challenge Anneka in to help you.

Lou Reed (pic: Karen McBride)

Lou Reed's Berlin is renowned for being a bastion of rock mardiness, the kind of beautifully bleak musical darkness that most bands nowadays can only ever dream of.

So when he decides to bring his circus to town, it's going to be quite a night, a feeling exemplified when the curtain rises and we are treated to the sight of a drummer in a clear plastic box, Reed strutting on stage (looking surprisingly mean and taut for a sixty year old) and a full children's choir.

Berlin was designed to be a song cycle which graphically depicts the drug and violence-fuelled decline and fall of an American couple - Caroline and Jim, in case you wondered - who had moved to the still divided city. When first released in 1973, it produced some of the most hostile reviews of Reed's entire career.

However, in the austere grandeur of the Apollo, magnified by the hush of an awestruck crowd, the overall effect is breathtaking and more than a little moving. By the end of it all, it would take a very hard heart indeed not to have a slightly damp eye, particularly when the haunting sounds of crying children are piped around the venue.

Lou Reed (pic: Karen McBride)

Reed exerted a collected control over proceedings, remaining silent throughout the entire set, only breaking the mean and moody act to ask the audience rather touchingly at the end if the whole proceeding was ok. He obviously didn’t notice that everyone was on their feet, clapping their hands raw.

And, just to ensure the audience got their fifty quid's worth, Reed even manages to assemble his merry band of troubadours back on stage at the end for an encore, which, because of the decision to perform classics such as Satellite of Love and Sweet Jane in a manner which only barely trod on the right side of jazz funk, didn't work quite as well.

But never mind. As curtain-raisers go, this was a staggering event for a staggering city, and if the rest of the fest is as mind-blowing, then we’re in for a treat.