![]() Frustrated by the album’s year-long delay and unsuccessful release, Lou Reed’s relationship with Andy Warhol worsened and the singer then spectacularly fired Warhol. A Japanese re-issue LP in the early 1980s was the only re-issue version to include the banana sticker for many years.ĭespite the controversial cover, The Velvet Underground & Nico didn’t fly off the shelves and the manner in which it sensationally flopped led to tensions growing between the band - a problem from which they would never quite recover. Most reissued vinyl editions of the album do not feature the peel-off sticker and original copies of the album with the peel-sticker feature are now rare collector’s items which are sold for a ridiculous amount of money. “The banana actually made it into an erotic art show,” Lou Reed once noted about the cover art. The copies that were already printed were sold with a large black sticker covering Emerson’s image, a result which was not the ending that the actor had envisaged and left him significantly out of pocket. The label had other ideas, however, and rather than pay Emerson they instead recalled copies of the album and decided that they wouldn’t print any more copies of The Velvet Underground & Nico until the image of Emerson had been removed from the photo on subsequent pressings. Warhol’s artistic director, Ronnie Cutrone, would later explain the delay: “Someone had to sit there with piles of albums, peel off the yellow banana skin stickers and place them over the pink fruit by hand,” he painstakingly admitted. The plans were earmarked as an investment by the record company who happily obliged to pay for the extra costs, believing that the tie to the iconic artist would boost sales of the album tenfold. ![]() However, the connection to Warhol was viewed by their label as a major key to their success. A special machine was then needed to manufacture the covers, a decision which led to the album release being considerably delayed. Early copies of the album even invited the owner to ‘peel slowly and see’ and, when peeling back the banana skin, revealed a flesh-coloured banana underneath which didn’t leave much to the imagination. Warhol created a deliberately provocative design for the self-titled debut record by The Velvet Underground & Nico and the banana would become symbiotic with the group even some 50 years later. All great albums have iconic cover art yet few in the world of music are as eye-catching as Andy Warhol’s famous banana, one which has perhaps become even more celebrated than the record itself. However, when it was released in 1967, it remarkably had little to no cultural effect on the world despite ushering in a breadth new sounds. ![]() ![]() The Velvet Underground & Nico is undeniably one of the great seminal albums of all time. ![]()
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