If I hadn’t done it, I’d have gone crazy. Talking to Nick Kent in 1974 Reed argued, “I had to do 'Berlin'. We went so far into it that it was kinda hard to get out.”

The theme of the album also took its toll on producer Bob Ezrin who recalled about the sessions in 1976, “We killed ourselves psychologically on that album. But we had to have a roadie there with her from then on.” Their faltering relationship effectively came to an end after the recording had finished when he kicked her out saying he wanted to “make a fresh start”. He told Allan Jones once: “She tried to commit suicide in the bathtub at the hotel. Reed’s “old lady” Bettye, his first wife, also tried to kill herself during the recording of the album. On the album the main female character Caroline ends up taking her own life. The song cycle told the disturbing tale of a doomed romance between an expatriate American prostitute and a German drug addict and colouring the album an even further darker shade of black was the effect on Reed of the suicide of Andrea Whips (aka Andrea Feldman), who had starred in Andy Warhol’s film Heat and was part of the Factory crowd.

Despite the name, 'Berlin' was actually recorded in the less dramatic setting of Willesden in North West London. It was, effectively, a land-locked capitalist city surrounded by a socialist state.įormer Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed once said of the place, “Berlin is a divided city and a lot of potentially violent things go on there It reminds me of Von Stroheim and Dietrich.”īut even before Reed knew much about the German city he’d used the backdrop of Berlin for one of his most bleak and harrowing albums. A grey, sombre atmosphere seeped into everything as well as an uneasy, unsettling almost paranoid sense encroached on everything.Īs a counterpoint to this austerity West Berlin also had its decadent, self-indulgent side where people could indulge their vices – often with detrimental effects – of all descriptions. It was still devastated from being bombed and ransacked during World War II and then as the Cold War set in it had been divided up between the West, controlled by the Allies, and the East, which was in the hands of the Soviet Union.

Berlin in the early 70s wasn’t the place it is today.

David bowie and iggy pop