A little while ago I wrote about The Velvet Underground and how, until recently, I’d struggled with them over the years (you can read that here). The two things that had kept me interested were John Cale and Nico, thanks in large part to their work on the latter’s second LP, an album for which their creative union bore the richest fruit. According to a recent Record Collector review, when completed, the album prompted John Cale – who had recently been fired from the band – to present a copy to Lou Reed and pronounce, “This is what we could’ve done!”  

Listening to The Marble Index brings to mind the scene in Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film ‘Orpheus’, in which the protagonist steps through the mirror and takes his first few unsteady and disorienting steps into the afterlife. As pretentious as that might sound, it’s an album that doesn’t encourage humdrum imagery; it isn’t a normal record, and it isn’t easy listening. It is not just Otherworldly but Netherworldly, and we take a trip through that Netherworld with Nico as our guide and John Cale the ferryman. There is no other album like it, the only other that comes anywhere near close is the follow-up, the more straightforward, but still dazzling ‘Desertshore’, although, if forced to pin down another, the Third Ear Band’s ‘Alchemy’ does inhabit a similar sonic universe in terms of its dense, exotic, medieval-sounding musical canvas and sense of portent.