Velvet Underground & Mark O'Leary; Retrospections and Intersections

 

In a modest, unadorned conversation captured on camera, Irish guitarist, composer and electronic musician Mark O’Leary talks about The Velvet Underground with the kind of authority that comes not from mythology, but proximity.

He begins with the Brian Eno line that has become almost liturgical: the first Velvet Underground album may have sold only 30,000 copies, but almost everyone who bought it started a band.

O’Leary doesn’t dress the observation up.

“All the bands that have influenced me, about four out of five have been influenced by the Velvet Underground.”

It isn’t rhetoric, he suggests. It’s empirical. After decades of playing, teaching and listening in Ireland and beyond, O’Leary has watched the influence replicate itself generation after generation. Mention almost any important alternative band and, sooner or later, the Velvets appear somewhere in the family tree.

The story of how that happened remains almost absurdly unlikely.

Lou Reed was writing disposable songs for Pickwick Records. John Cale, the Welsh experimentalist who had studied at Goldsmiths, worked with John Cage and La Monte Young, and explored microtonal viola and serial techniques, somehow found himself in the same commercial machinery. They began playing together. Tony Conrad, another Pickwick employee, suggested the name.

Sterling Morrison, an old school friend of Reed's, joined. Then came Moe Tucker, whose unconventional approach to drumming included standing up to play. The posture would later find an unlikely echo in Bobby Gillespie.

Taken together, they looked, as O’Leary puts it, like a “motley crew of disparate entities”. Yet from that improbable collection of musicians came one of the most consequential groups in modern music.

Enter Warhol

Paul Morrissey brought Andy Warhol to see the Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre. Warhol was immediately taken with the band and agreed to finance and manage them, on one condition: the German singer and model Nico had to join.

Nico arrived with her own improbable mythology. She had studied method acting under Lee Strasberg in a class that also included Marilyn Monroe, and now found herself fronting one of the strangest and most confrontational rock groups of the era.

Warhol paid for the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico. Commercially, it was a disaster.

Historically, it was anything but.

The album would become one of the foundational records of the late twentieth century: a collision of rock, avant-garde experimentation, literary cool, sexual ambiguity, noise and art-world provocation.

O’Leary has his own Warhol connection. During his time with The Last Paul Bley Trio, the de rigueur uniform was a black T-shirt bearing a Warholian Marilyn.

Nico's relationship with the band eventually became untenable and she was released. Warhol's involvement also receded. Reed and Steve Sesnick took control of the group's management.

O’Leary would later perform songs from The Velvet Underground & Nico with several bands in Cork during his rock years, bringing that music back into rooms far removed from Warhol's New York.

White Light, White Heat

If the first album failed commercially, the second didn't exactly reverse the trend.

White Light/White Heat was met with indifference in its own time. Even Rolling Stone declined to review it. Today, it stands as one of the great monuments to controlled abrasion: distorted, claustrophobic, confrontational and almost deliberately hostile to conventional notions of studio polish.

For O’Leary, it was formative.

Its influence can be heard not simply in his guitar playing, but in his conception of what the guitar could be: texture, disruption, atmosphere and noise as much as melody.

Behind the scenes, however, the Velvet Underground were beginning to fracture. Reed was increasingly interested in a more accessible direction, while Cale remained committed to pushing the experimental side of the group further.

The tension eventually became impossible to contain.

Cale was out.

In his place came Doug Yule, a Boston musician who would become a particularly important figure for O’Leary. Yule had been staying in the same apartment as the group's road manager and soon became a bona fide member, playing bass, singing and contributing keyboards.

He recorded the self-titled third album, The Velvet Underground, a record that sold better than its predecessors and supported extensive touring. He was then part of Loaded, which produced several of the group's best-known songs.

For O’Leary, Yule matters because the Velvet Underground story did not simply end when Reed walked away and he played on the same amount of albums as John Cale.

Carrying the Velvet Underground Name

Reed departed for his solo career. Morrison and Tucker eventually followed.

Yule continued soldier on under the Velvet Underground banner, he was a bona fida member, had recorded two album, had toured extensively and contributed several songs to their repertoire and continued to carry the mantle.

In late 1972, Sesnick arranged a short UK tour. Yule assembled a new line-up that included superlative American drummer Mark Nauseef.

Nauseef was invited to join the Velvet Underground as drummer. He accepted.

This distinction matters.

Yule was not an original member, but he had toured extensively with the group and performed on two Velvet Underground albums. The 1972 line-up was therefore not simply a tribute act assembled to trade on a famous name. Yule was carrying the Velvet Underground mantle forward.

Ten UK dates were arranged. The response from the hardcore Velvet Underground audience was strong. People wanted to hear the music live. Encores were demanded. There was genuine enthusiasm for a band many assumed had already disappeared.

For all intents and purposes, that was it.

But the music did not disappear.

O’Leary's Velvet Underground Family Tree

The striking thing about O’Leary's relationship with the Velvet Underground isn't nostalgia. It is provenance.

He has recorded, toured and performed with Mark Nauseef, the drummer who played on that final 1972 UK tour. He performed in the hallowed Dolan's Bar in Limerick with Nauseef.

He has also worked with New York drummer Ben Perowsky, who performed with Lou Reed and appeared on two John Cale albums, Last Day on Earth and Walking on Locusts. Perowsky appears on O’Leary's album Closure with Uri Caine. O'Leary performed at the Irish Arts Centre in New York City with Perowsky opposite Tom Hickey, who was in the 1970's the most famous man in Ireland portraying Benji Hickey in the iconic TV Series "The Riordans."

Then there is Ronnie Ross.

Ronnie Ross came to Ireland to perform in a series of engagements with the McCarthy Quartet, one of Irelands most esteemed Jazz Quartets. Ronnie Ross left the McCarthy Quartet on a Wednesday. Mark O’Leary was a member of the McCarthy quartet three days later the following Saturday.

Ross was the baritone saxophonist responsible for the famous solo on Lou Reed's Transformer, including “Walk on the Wild Side”. He was also David Bowie's music teacher.

The specificity of the connection is almost comical: the man who played one of the most recognisable saxophone solos in rock history left a band, and three days later O’Leary was a member of the same band, standing on the same side of the stage Ross had stood, days earlier.

These aren't merely anecdotes in a Velvet Underground fan's scrapbook. They form a network of musicians, recordings and performances connecting O’Leary directly to the band's wider orbit.

The Velvet Underground Arrive in Cork

When O’Leary returned to Ireland after studying and graduating from Musicians institute in Los Angeles, he was cognizant of how the scene had evolved and retrospectively, the main currency for covers before he left was the Cult, now the main band to be covered was the Velvet Underground.

Before America, he had known the Velvet Underground as a personal influence. He owned the albums. He could play the songs. But he didn't feel surrounded by people with the same obsession.

On his return, the situation was dramatically different.

“Before I went to America, I was influenced personally by the Velvet Underground, I had their albums, could play their songs, but I really didn’t know anyone else as enthusiastic about them as I was. When I returned from America, The Velvet Underground were the number one band in terms of covers and everyone was enamoured by them.”

At Cork's iconic The Lobby music venue, O’Leary and one of his bands played three Velvet Underground songs in succession.

They brought the house down.

The venue itself carries another layer of Cork musical history. A few years later, when it was known as the Chambers, Cillian Murphy and the Sons of Mr Green Genes would perform there.

Cillian Murphy was tutored and mentored by Mark O'Leary.

Beyond the Velvets

It would be a mistake, though, to reduce O’Leary's career to his relationship with one band.

His musical life has moved through contemporary jazz and improvisation, rock, fusion, electronica, soundscapes, installations, synth-pop and ambient music. The Velvet Underground are a braid in the tapestry, not the entire fabric.

His teaching has created another set of unexpected connections.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, O’Leary taught John O’Mahony from Ballincollig at the Wright Music Centre in Cork. O’Mahony went on to become a highly successful mixer, engineer and producer, eventually working with Brian Eno on Viva la Vida by Coldplay. Affording Mark O'Leary a coveted intersection with Eno, a major influence.

And so the circle closes again.

Eno is, of course, one of the Velvet Underground's most famous advocates. His observation about those supposed 30,000 buyers has endured precisely because it captures something essential about the group's influence:

“If 30,000 people purchased Nico and the Velvet Underground, those 30,000 people started bands.” Brian Eno

The detail lands differently when considered alongside O’Leary's own experience. His influence has travelled outward through recordings, performances and installations; his musical lineage intersects with Nauseef, Perowsky, Ross, Eno and the musicians he has taught.

Even Cillian Murphy sits somewhere within that extended network.

Four Albums, Endless Inspiration

Ultimately, O’Leary keeps returning to the music itself.

The essential body of work remains the four albums: The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground and Loaded.

Their importance is difficult to overstate.

The Velvets didn't invent every ingredient they used. What they did was combine literary precision, experimental music, sonic abrasion, art-world detachment and an almost pathological refusal to chase the mainstream into something that later musicians could use as a template.

And generations did.

Some knew exactly where the template came from. Others simply absorbed its consequences.

That may be the real meaning of Eno's famous line. The 30,000 figure is less important than what those listeners did next. They formed bands. Those bands formed other bands. Records inspired records. Aesthetic choices became musical languages.

The commercial failure of the Velvet Underground became almost irrelevant.

The bands that formed after hearing them did not fail to matter.

The residual radiation is still measurable in rehearsal rooms, clubs and studios whenever somebody plugs in a guitar and decides that making something honest is more important than making something fashionable.

O’Leary finishes his conversation in the same way he began it: without grandstanding.

The Velvet Underground, he says, are amazing.

Then he stops.

The understatement feels appropriate. There is no need for a final manifesto when the evidence is already everywhere.

O’Leary has stood close enough to the source to feel the heat — through Mark Nauseef, a bona fide member of the Velvet Underground who later performed, toured and recorded with him; through Ben Perowsky, whose career intersects with both Lou Reed and John Cale; and through Ronnie Ross, whose chair in the McCarthy Quartet O’Leary occupied just three days after Ross's departure.

The Velvet Underground didn't simply leave behind four albums.

They left a map and Mark O'Leary has been assimilating the sinuous topography, as have A-ha, whom John O'Mahony has worked with and indeed A-ha have cited the Velvet Underground as a formative influence. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbbrqCqHQt4