The Emigration Playlist - 64 years of songs: #16 Venus in Furs - Velvet Underground (1967)

'You were into the Velvets aged 5?! Impressive', I hear you say.

And much as I'd love to claim that I was enjoying Lou Reed singing about Heroin and Waiting for the Man on the school bus to my Singapore kindergarten (though, to be honest, perhaps that's not a great mental image), it obviously wasn't so.

I can say that I was probably first hearing Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues and A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum and A Day in the Life by The Beatles from Sgt. Peppers around then (and for many years after) because they all came out in 1967 and were magnificent songs and my teenage brother was probably playing them on his suitcase-shaped portable record player when he flew out from boarding school in the UK.

Probably. But to be honest I can't remember. 

So - full disclosure - I didn't really come across this song until 1993, at which point I recognised it as a work of genius. Like one other song, from 1984 (I can tell you  - it's How Soon Is Now by The Smiths because, insanely, it's going to pipped at the post by something else that year), I first met Venus in Furs on a tv commercial.  

In 1993 I was 9 years into my time at fancy London advertising agencies. By 1995, I'd finally had enough of a career where the money was great, the people were fun, the booze was expensive but the morality was completely missing, and by '93 I was already deep into a strategy of trying to find a way to hate it less. My plan was to move into a role where I was tasked with thinking about 'consumers' (a term I came to hate) and what they really felt about hoovering or feeding their cat or eating cake or some other bulshit, then writing creative briefs to get art directors and copywriters to produce ads that actually had something to with that. (The alternative, which often happened, was allowing them to go off on some flight of fantasy with the the client's money to produce an ad that either disappeared without trace, or had the creative department bulk-ordering tuxedos (there were barely any women there then) from Moss Bros for a jaunt to Cannes or the D&AD Awards so they could drink themselves stupid on Bolinger and pick up a gong ("It's a gold dahling!") for a film their drinking buddies loved but which sold precisely fuck all of their client's products. All very Patsy, all very Ab Fab). 

Funnily enough one of the best ways of making an ad effective was to harness two things. A message that actually meant something to people and spoke to their actual needs, and a creative and memorable way of saying it. I had to help creative teams find that - what they called an Account Planner. Creative people were notoriously, er, 'touchy', and often played up to the temperament that the prima donnas in the industry cultivated, even if they themselves had done little of note in their own careers whilst working on Dairylea, Lenor or Toilet Duck or somesuch. So you had to 'coax' them. I was good at the job, and one day I'll tell you about my One Moment In The Sun when a brief I wrote, and a team I worked with, produced a campaign that changed a vodka brand's fortunes round across the entire globe and won every creative award going...

But that is genuinely another story.

Back to Venus in Furs. In 1993 I was working in the London office of a dreary, American mega-agency, having been recruited out of a hot shot creative place (where the vodka campaign was produced). I got given some dull, but huge, accounts. One of them was the account that finally drove me out of the industry - Kellogg's - a company so full of arseholes, scapegoating and political warfare - that it ground me into small pieces (in fact I once got into a lot of trouble by telling them in a meeting that they should cut their £30 million spend - the commision on which my agency relied - by 50% and just think a bit harder about what the hell they were doing).

To relieve the pain, I use to run sessions for junior and mid ranking clients in which we could talk about great ads. Just you know, informal sessions, with beers 'n' that. I imagined that I might influence them, just a bit, maybe and get them to open their eyes a tad (I was of course wrong). 

That's where I remember Dunlop's 'Tested for the Unexpected' commercial from. I was running a session for some of the agency's most thick-headed-I-mean-conservative blue-chip clients to try and shake them up a bit. P&G might have been there along with Kellogg's. Maybe some other dullards too. I had come across the Dunlop commercial and my jaw fell open. I wanted to provoke them and make theirs do the same too.

The thing about the Dunlop commercial is that it has a message that relates very clearly to what you need a tyre to do. Your tyres need to expect the unexpected - ice, oil, water, crap on the road, snow, people, the sudden brake lights of a truck, whatever. You have to rely on them to stop your car in time. But frankly, who cares about actual tyre brands? Apart from petrolheads, most people didn't, and don't buy on brand, but price. The challenge in that kind of market (more or less a commodity) has always been to try and find something that people will actually remember - associating it with your brand - so that when they walk into the garage they are drawn to your tyres as the ones they can remember seeing on the telly (think of toilet roll and Andrex puppies if you like). You can try and tell a story about stopping distances, or tread pattern, or get some C list driving celeb to endorse your tyre maybe, but usually that stuff is dull as shit and forgettable (though Continental did do some interesting things driving cars around the flat, unprotected roof of a skyscraper once, slamming the brakes on inches from the edge). 

Dunlop's agency, the legendary Abbott Mead Vickers, knew this, and they hired maverick (and frankly bananas) director Tony Kaye to make a film that pushed the idea of the unexpected to the absolute extreme for Dunlop. The film below is the result - something full of bizarre, extreme, weird events, through which an expensive BMW 8 series navigates. The ad doesn't make any sense, because it's not supposed to - just like that guy who unexpectedly stepped out into the road in front of you didn't, or the invisible diesel spill on the inside lane didn't, or the black ice on that bend didn't. 

I think it's a stunning song, and it remains my favourite tv commercial ever, even if it probably did cost the same as the annual GDP of Sri Lanka to make. 

And finally - I got there - the music. Venus in Furs. Debauched. Hypnotic. The theme tune of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lou Reed sounds pretty out of it. A song with no real start, it just comes in, like you opened the door on a basement club and you're stumbling down into some dark playroom where the punters are hanging from the walls and everyone is high. Where you don't know what you'll see next, and you don't care, and Lou doesn't care because he's out of it and so are you. The song feels dangerous, like the road in the commercial and what's on it. There's a drone, a slow marching rhythm and John Cales' scratching electric viola sound at the end of each phrase, whip-like, dominatrix like, matched with the crack of a tambourine. It drips with threat. For me it's The Velvet Underground's best song - and that's saying something as they made some other fantastic records too.

I showed the ad, with its wonderful music, to my set of clients. Clients whose idea of creative radicalism was the 'bite and smile' shot in a Frosties ad, or the pseudo-science-bit in a L'Oreal commercial. They thought it was awful. Told me that they'd probably get sacked on the spot if they ever let the agency present a script like that to the Marketing Director. I suspect I just sat back down, opened a Michelob, and let them get on with telling me how great their recent Head & Shoulders film was. 

The song in full is here. You get to see Nico too. 

*****

Readying myself for a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html