I stood and read it in the shop, typos and all. Went back for it a couple of days later, but it was gone.

I’ve been looking for it ever since.

II

IN 1986, BACK when I was still a journalist, I was in the press offices of RCA, with a friend who was blagging me a copy of Mistrial. [To blag: means “to scrounge, obtain, mook.”]

“Neil wants to interview Lou Reed,” said my friend.

“Lou Reed? Jesus. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog,” said his press officer. “He’s hell on interviewers. Walks out on you if you say the wrong thing. He’ll probably just tell you to fuck off. Or not answer you. Or something.”

Then they went on to talk about how a few years before a young hack had begun an interview with Meatloaf by asking him if the problem was glandular and never really got much further than that.

III

IT STARTED OUT as an idle comment, over a lunch with an editor. I gave up journalism for fiction three years before, and mentioned that, while nothing could tempt me back, I’d always wished that I’d interviewed Lou Reed . . .

“Lou Reed?” said the editor in question, her ears pricking up. “Well, he’ll be in Europe next month. But we were already thinking of maybe asking Martin Amis to talk to him.”

But I’d volunteered and Martin Amis hadn’t, and somewhere wheels were set in motion, or at least a couple of phone calls were made.

A month later the book arrived.

Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. Ninety song lyrics, two poems, and two interviews—one with Václav Havel, playwright, author and president of Czechoslovakia, and the other with Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Some songs had small italic notes at the bottom of the page. Occasionally they clarified; often they infuriated.

“Kicks,” a song about how murder alleviates ennui better than sex “cause it’s the final thing to do” carried the annotation “Some of my friends were criminals,” while the note for “Home of the Brave” read, “My college roommate and friend, Lincoln, tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. He lived but lost an arm and a leg. He then tried to become a stand-up comedian. Years later he was found starved to death in his locked apartment.”

IV

I WAS IN my local Woolworths, in the nearest dull little English town to me (which doesn’t have a real record store, just a Woolworths, which is still a real improvement over a few years back, when simply possessing a compact disc in Uckfield could have got you burned as a warlock), looking for Magic and Loss, although I didn’t seriously expect them to have it. I went through the Rs but there was just a copy of Sally Can’t Dance with a crack running down the battered plastic of the cover.

I asked the shop assistant about it, who pointed me to the charts wall. Lou Reed’s in the UK top ten?