lyrics project

Reap
Artist: Lou Reed
Song: Perfect Day
Album: Transformer
Model: Jade Lyon
Location: Cherhill, Wiltshire

I was 21, I was in love, I was also struggling to get the girl to understand I was in love with her. Of course, it would have helped if I could only get the courage to speak to her! I was renting a house with some mates. We thought we were the coolest dudes in the whole of Somerset. We weren’t. We were a bunch of guys having the time of our lives.

I spent many a happy hour lying in my rented room, free, full of hopes and dreams and quite a bit of angst. Lou Reed’s Transformer album helped me wile away the quiet hours during those days. It was considered an ‘old’ classic album even then but it seemed to somehow maintain its cool. The album was a weird mixture and quite an accomplished listen. It has raw energy, a quirky style and even in those early days, a front cover that was a style of photography I would one day want to emulate. Cool, hip and a bit of punk thrown in years before its time. Reed was still considered cool by me because he threw out tradition and prejudice and didn’t seem to care what others thought of him. He sang about transvestites, gays, drugs, love and death without judgement or surprise. It was just around him, his lifestyle, so he wrote about it as he saw and lived it. No judgement because to him it was ‘normal’. I liked that. I also liked the weird collection of instruments he had on the album. Tubas, strings and pianos combined with odd rhythms to make quite an eclectic record.

Perfect Day got truly ruined and messed up for ever on the ’97 release for the BBC to justify their licence fee and then re-released for the Children in Need charity. It was ruined because it’d always been a raw forlorn love song with a massively powerful and simple message in the last refrain. However, the beautifully recorded BBC version made it all about charity, massive rock stars and the commercialism that surrounds that, which it was never about. Quite the opposite really. Reed must have thought it ok as he appeared in it along with Bono and the usual suspects. I felt the BBC had stolen something from me and I still refuse to listen to that ‘new’ overplayed version even now.

Reap
Artist: Lou Reed
Song: Perfect Day
Album: Transformer
Model: Jade Lyon
Location: Cherhill, Wiltshire

I was 21, I was in love, I was also struggling to get the girl to understand I was in love with her. Of course, it would have helped if I could only get the courage to speak to her! I was renting a house with some mates. We thought we were the coolest dudes in the whole of Somerset. We weren’t. We were a bunch of guys having the time of our lives.

I spent many a happy hour lying in my rented room, free, full of hopes and dreams and quite a bit of angst. Lou Reed’s Transformer album helped me wile away the quiet hours during those days. It was considered an ‘old’ classic album even then but it seemed to somehow maintain its cool. The album was a weird mixture and quite an accomplished listen. It has raw energy, a quirky style and even in those early days, a front cover that was a style of photography I would one day want to emulate. Cool, hip and a bit of punk thrown in years before its time. Reed was still considered cool by me because he threw out tradition and prejudice and didn’t seem to care what others thought of him. He sang about transvestites, gays, drugs, love and death without judgement or surprise. It was just around him, his lifestyle, so he wrote about it as he saw and lived it. No judgement because to him it was ‘normal’. I liked that. I also liked the weird collection of instruments he had on the album. Tubas, strings and pianos combined with odd rhythms to make quite an eclectic record.

Perfect Day got truly ruined and messed up for ever on the ’97 release for the BBC to justify their licence fee and then re-released for the Children in Need charity. It was ruined because it’d always been a raw forlorn love song with a massively powerful and simple message in the last refrain. However, the beautifully recorded BBC version made it all about charity, massive rock stars and the commercialism that surrounds that, which it was never about. Quite the opposite really. Reed must have thought it ok as he appeared in it along with Bono and the usual suspects. I felt the BBC had stolen something from me and I still refuse to listen to that ‘new’ overplayed version even now.