The Velvet Forum

I'm not sure if the "After Hours" tapes themselves ever reached the UK, but between '89 and '93 various other VU tapes could be picked-up from pop-up stalls in markets from Walthamstow to Wapping; I stopped collecting them in '93 when cassettes started to decline and the stalls disappeared.

I'm not sure if the tapes have ever been documented (honestly I haven't kept up with the VU books of recent years), or whether there's even a need.

Nevertheless I've put together some notes about two of them, selected at random and posted them here https://c.mail.com/@652099718028993115/ ... ty7Mqy3qgw (you'll have to download the file).

Do you folk have an appetite for more? Remember, they came from a time before the web when information about the VU was hard to find and lies were as welcome as truth (ok, maybe not, but sometimes it was hard to tell the difference).

Sounds interesting, do they have tapes from the 1993 reunion ? A lot listed here in the tapes section are totally unavailable.

I visited Edinburgh record fairs from 1980 onwards and picked up a fair number of live lou Reed / vu cassettes. But to be be honest I got more by trading. I used to run a wanted ad in Goldmine every few months and made a lot of trading contacts that way.
The "live and alive" section of Enrique's Web page started out as a list of my live tapes.

Good idea for a thread! Before CDR trading and the internet cassettes helped us hear some great VU music (not always in great quality though!) i started saving some pics from Ebay recently of any 80/90s examples...

dial4 wrote: ↑

12 Aug 2019 12:20

Sounds interesting, do they have tapes from the 1993 reunion ? A lot listed here in the tapes section are totally unavailable.

Well, I don't know who "they" are; I didn't really know the sources and the market stalls came and went years afo, so any tapes that did exist are presumably no longer available. But I did pick up tapes from The Forum, Wembley and Glastonbury.

lurid wrote: ↑

12 Aug 2019 22:11

I visited Edinburgh record fairs from 1980 onwards ...

Great, I'm not the only one who remembers these things. But what is Goldmine and what is Enrique's Web page? Forgive my ignorance.

bleach wrote: ↑

16 Aug 2019 16:48

Good idea for a thread! Before CDR trading and the internet cassettes helped us hear some great VU music (not always in great quality though!) i started saving some pics from Ebay recently of any 80/90s examples...

Thanks, I agree completely about the quality. The numbered tapes in the second picture look like the Afterhours tapes themselves (minus 26, Sweet Sister Ray) - and these were on eBay? Well done, that's an incredible find. Did they sell?

lurid wrote: ↑

12 Aug 2019 22:11

I visited Edinburgh record fairs from 1980 onwards ...

Great, I'm not the only one who remembers these things. But what is Goldmine and what is Enrique's Web page? Forgive my ignorance.

Goldmine was/is(?) the US equivalent of the UK "Record Collector" magazine, although it leant more towards classified ads than articles. It came out fortnightly and was crammed full of lists of records for sale. When I stayed in the USA I spent hours looking through it for obscure Lou/VU material. It was prohibitively expensive to have delivered to the UK but I eventually found a record shop in Glasgow which imported it and I paid them to send it on to me for the cost of the UK postage. I got good responses over the years to my "Lou/VU wanted" classified ads.

Enrique's web page is the Rock'n'roll Animal website which, while he maintained it, was THE best place to get info about Lou Reed live material (and lots of other Lou-related material).

Thanks, I agree completely about the quality. The numbered tapes in the second picture look like the Afterhours tapes themselves (minus 26, Sweet Sister Ray) - and these were on eBay? Well done, that's an incredible find. Did they sell?

I bought a few Afterhours tapes direct from the VUAS in the 1980s but I sold them all on ebay a few years back.

Found these 2 cassettes in the loft! Only remains of the late 80s/early 90s cassette buying i did. I used to go to Camden Market, London in the late 80s/early 90s and there were alot of stalls with thousands of brightly coloured cassettes.

After i saw the VU at the Forum i went a month later and was sure that there would be recordings available, generally it was very hit and miss quality but they would play them if you wanted to try before buying. I occasionally went and there would be no stalls of cassettes I later found out later that there had been raids by police/BPI.

At festivals they turned around a live cassette with printed sleeve within an hour! I saw Lou at Glastonbury 1992 and bought a cassette that very evening it was surprisingly very good quality audio-wise. I later transferred this in the mid 90s to CDR and i think some of the CDs later widely traded of that gig originally came from my C90!

Before CDRs/iPhones/internet they were nice souvenirs of a good gig..Now everything is available at anytime (often free) i kinda miss the searches and stumbling on great finds and new music.

Thanks lurid, that's good info that I didn't know; thanks bleach, lovely memories of Camden Market where the tribes of England mixed and mingled before it went commercial and before half of it burnt down.

Anyway, the documentation project continues slowly and has turned up an interview with Lou in Boston (probably early 1969 but definitely not 3.3.68 as listed on the tape sleeve) so I've put a mass-market brand cassette through a cheap digital converter and the results can be seen on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/y1xAEQYtqkQ

The image doesn't change so sit back and listen to Lou talk about What Goes On and The Murder Mystery; you'll be surprised by how well he knew his audience. I really don't know if this interview is a long-lost gem or a well-known nugget, so your comments are welcome.

Yeah thats the wbcn 3/3/69 interview with lou and doug.