Sandman would not have happened without Lou Reed – and I named my daughter after Warhol's Holly Woodlawn, from Walk on the Wild Side. I am sad today
A real rock'n'roll star … Lou Reed, circa 1970. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
'There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs – the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock'n'roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock'n'roll too." That was what Lou Reed told me in 1991.
I'm a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Reed on the list, and nobody ever asks what he's doing there, which is good because I don't know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.
His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope and of those tiny, perfect days and nights we want to last for ever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitch-hike into the limelight and out again.
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I'm a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Reed on the list, and nobody ever asks what he's doing there, which is good because I don't know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.
His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope and of those tiny, perfect days and nights we want to last for ever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitch-hike into the limelight and out again.
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