Lou Reed to curate Vivid Sydney 2010

The curator of the 2010 Vivid Sydney Festival of Music, Light and Ideas has been announced. It's Lou Reed, enigmatic rock renaissance man, former leader of the Velvet Underground, reformed drug deity and culture curmudgeon extraordinaire.

Reed, who turned 68 yesterday, will curate the Vivid Live section of the expanded 27 May-21 Jun festival with the help of his wife and longtime muse, performance artist Laurie Anderson, 62. It is the first time the couple have curated a festival together.

Vivid Sydney 2010 will include:

Vivid Live at the Sydney Opera House: Curated by Reed and Anderson, this music festival with a difference will also include the illumination of the iconic sails.

Macquarie Visions: Macquarie Street will be transformed with large-scale immersive light displays illuminating the city's parliamentary powerbase and Sydney's most ceremonial street.

Fire Water: More than 40,000 people came to Campbell's Cove to experience Fire Water last year. This year the event is based on the voyage of the Sydney Cove, sent to Australia from Calcutta in 1797 by merchant Robert Campbell.

Creative Sydney: Nine thousand people experienced Creative Sydney in 2009 and this year the event will take place in an exciting new venue at Circular Quay.

X Media Lab: The internationally acclaimed creative industries think tank will hold a Vivid Sydney Lab on global media cultures.

Song Summit Sydney: A three-day conference that will bring together local and international songwriters and music industry experts and offer a nightly programme of live music performances at Song Summit LIVE.

Reed is another brave and avant-garde choice by Events NSW, who last year launched Vivid Sydney as an annual arts and culture carnival designed to transform the Harbour City into a living canvas of music and light under the stewardship of Reed's equally controversial contemporary, oddball sound boffin Brian Eno.

The centrepiece of Eno's Vivid was the audio-visual installation ‘77 Million Paintings' whose projections onto the sails of the Opera House were beamed to 200 countries and seen by over 600 million people around the world. Lou Reed's major work is expected to revolve around Metal Machine Music, the 1975 album Eno famously described as "music as immersion, a sonic experience in which you float".

Metal Machine Music is one of rock'n'roll's great legends and testament to Reed's genius/pretentiousness. Essentially a double album of abrasive, electronically generated, narcotic-fuelled audio feedback, the white-noise opus was a response to the glam rock success Reed had found with 1972's Transformer album produced by David Bowie and featuring the hits, ‘Walk on the Wild Side' and ‘Perfect Day'. Reed proclaimed it "the perfect soundtrack to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

Despite three decades of critical mauling for Metal Machine Music - Reed himself has said that "anybody who gets to side four is dumber than I am" and that "no one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive" - he has recently resurrected the work with a new group the Metal Machine Trio. The gigs so far have been a typically eclectic mash of ambient soundscapes, free rock, contemporary noise and improvisation.

Reed's most recent Sydney sojourn was in 2007 where his Berlin song cycle was performed to widespread acclaim at the State Theatre for that year's Sydney Festival alongside Sharon Jones, Antony Hegarty and the Australian Youth Choir.

Reed's first Sydney gigs were at the Hordern Pavilion in August 1974 on the ‘Sally Can't Dance' tour at the height of his "junkie faggot" phase. He was supported on this seminal juggernaut by a recently formed AC/DC, then fronted by singer Dave Evans, who was sacked days later after Angus and Malcolm Young met Bon Scott on the Adelaide leg of the tour.

Reed and Anderson married in 2008 after hooking up in the early 90s. They are well matched as a couple and have collaborated on various projects, but Vivid Sydney marks their first joint outing as festival curators.

After finding success outside art circles with ‘O Superman' in 1981, Anderson has invented several devices used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that employs recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long, batonlike MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds.

White light Reed and White Heat Anderson? Sounds like the Vivid soundtrack that a smash-bang-wallop city like Sydney deserves this winter. Angus Fontaine

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

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