“Without them, Roxy Music wouldn’t have happened. Without Lou Reed there is no Richard Hell, no Sex Pistols; without John Cale, no Nick Cave; without Nico – well, where do you start?” writes Loaded author Dylan Jones. “The Velvet Underground were to the East Coast what the Grateful Dead were to the West, New York’s brutalist realist streetwise riposte to San Francisco’s hippy-dippy love-ins.”

Loaded is Jones’ oral history of avant-garde outsiders The Velvet Underground, who went out on a limb creating dark, nihilistic songs unflinchingly depicting drug use, S&M and life within the underbelly of NYC. Festooned with gold-dust quotes from VU members Lou Reed, John Cale and Moe Tucker, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Jimmy Page, Bono, Bobby Gillespie, Chris Difford, Mick Jagger, and Courtney Love add their two pence to boot. Books in this oral-history format don’t always capture the whole picture, yet Loaded is forensically detailed, gossipy, analytic and opinionated – as well as being the most accessible VU-related book written yet.

Its final chapter, The Aftermath, beautifully reinforces the group’s legacy, with film director Francis Whately commenting, “You can’t imagine what rock’n’roll would have become without the Velvet Underground”. From the Warhol years via Reed’s Transformer to Cale’s recent beauty Mercy, there is much to devour and savour within the pages of Loaded.