Lou Reed, the genius who transformed rock

Rock Critic Lou Reed was a rock and roll genius. He was also unarguably, an artist, an overused word in pop culture. Reed's seminal New York outfit The Velvet Underground shaped the future of music every bit as profoundly as more commercially celebrated figureheads like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

His association with Andy Warhol in the Sixties came about because the two men grasped that popular commercial forms of creativity had an intrinsic value because they connected to people in the contemporary moment, realigning the very parameters of modern art.

At his most accessible, Reed created recordings of such depth, beauty, brilliance and dark energy that they will live on for as long as songs are sung. At his least accessible, he created music that pushed the frontiers of rock out in multiple different directions that are still being explored today. Not that Reed would agree with that assessment.

"I've never thought of myself as something in pop music," he told me when I interviewed him in 1989. As a young man growing up in relatively affluent circumstances in New York in the Fifties and Sixties, he had a difficult relationship with his family and suffered incarceration in mental institutions and electroconvulsive therapy — supposedly to cure him of bisexual tendencies.

He poured all his energies into rock and roll, concocting a literary street style that was distinctively contemporary. With The Velvet Underground in 1966, Reed struck out against the prevailing mood of flower power by creating urban tableaux mired in the dark appeal of hard drugs, sadomasochism, prostitution and gender-bending, matching the complexity of his lyrics with a bold, dark sonic palette.

The Velvets only released four albums before breaking up in 1971; radio ignored them and not many people bought them, but with their Warhol-endorsed chic, poisonous attitude, atonal vocals, shuddering rhythms and thrashy distorting guitars, they became godfathers of art rock, punk, indie and Goth.

Cited as inspiration by David Bowie, Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, the Velvet template can be detected in every band who have favoured noise, attitude, experimentalism (and, perhaps, the vampiric appeal of wearing sunglasses at night) over ordinary commercial criteria.

It is probably fair to say that no other band ever achieved so little success in their time and yet exerted such a vast influence on those who followed. Reed's solo career was enormously varied and wildly erratic, from the glam rock meets music-hall triumph of 1972's Transformer (produced by David Bowie) to the heavy-metal operatics of Lulu (made with Metallica in 2011). He divided critics but declared himself unmoved. "Who cares?" he snapped, when I mentioned the confused critical response during an encounter in Paris in 2011. "I could give two sh**s. I never wrote for them then, I don't write for them now, I have no interest in what they have to say about anything. I write for me."

Reed was a notoriously difficult interviewee with a reputation for being insulting and evasive. But the last time I met him, I got a surprising sense of the vulnerability underpinning his surliness, as this now rather frail, bespectacled old man reached out to ask me to champion his unloved latest album.

"I was trying to escape the simplistic form, and find a different kind of melodic form, but still rock… All this stuff is about emotion, I mean, why else do it?" Gripping my arm tightly, he started to recite Macbeth's famous monologue in a low drawling voice. "Out, out brief candle, life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."