Headphones #102: Boys who are casual like Lou Reed

“We approached such a great legacy, someone like Lou Reed, little by little,” says Christian Fuchs, a founding member of the band “Die Buben im Pelz” along with David Pfister. And it wasn’t new territory for him and his colleagues either, as translations of songs from Lou Reed to Nick Cave to Johnny Cash can be found in the musicians’ musical vita. “Verwandler”, the current album on the tenth anniversary of Lou Reed’s death, was familiar territory and yet a little different. What was also different this time was that it was a commissioned work.

After their debut album eight years ago, Die Buben im Pelz had said goodbye to cover versions and made two albums with their own songs when the record label Konkord asked whether Fuchs, Pfister & Co wanted to devote themselves to the subject of Lou Reed again. “We were skeptical at the beginning, but then it was tempting to dare to do it again,” says Fuchs in an interview with OÖN. As a journalist, he is used to working with deadlines and orders. “This limitation was the challenge, so to speak, but it quickly became clear to us that this time we weren’t going to cover an entire album or just the Velvet Underground, but we wanted to get closer to Lou Reed.”

Reed has always been about transformation, which is why the album is called “Verwandler”. “It was about this transformation, of fighting for freedom outside of social norms,” says Fuchs, explaining what fascinates him about the giant of rock music. The exciting thing relates to the work, rather than the person as the author. But: “You could define coolness by Lou Reed, as well as rock ‘n’ roll, which has to do with this casualness.” What Fuchs means by that: Lou Reed told dramatic stories, including about his own heroin addiction, in an incredibly laconic and cool way can. He told the story and didn’t shout.

For Christian Fuchs, it is this aspect of transformation that has always fascinated him in pop culture, as he says. This also applies to him. “I don’t belong to a minority, I didn’t grow up on the fringes of society, I grew up very middle-class, but still, as an outsider in the country, so to speak. Pop culture has also given me a different life. I have myself At some point, I said goodbye to my middle-class middle school persona as a teenager and invented myself several times. That’s undramatic compared to Lou Reed. For me, who grew up in the country, pop culture was the wide world. This aspect is central to Lou Reed, which is about very radical things.”

The masterpiece “The Wüdn”

The boys in furs on “Verwandler” have succeeded in a magnificent way in transferring these stories in their casualness from New York in the 1960s and 1970s to Vienna. “I’m rooting for you” is a moving declaration of love. “Everything dissolves” asks the question what would happen if one were to start over. And “Die Wüdn” is proof that you can ignore a no-go, namely Reed’s only mainstream hit “Walk on the Wild Side,” if you tell the story in such a way that you almost forget the original. Succeeded!

To approach Lou Reed and his lyrics needed the stimulus. “I like to write songs in a slogan-like and deliberately striking way. Normally I don’t tell stories in my songs like Lou Reed does, but in this context I’ve already done that, transferring these little New York anecdotes from the subculture to Vienna. These characters with I found it exciting to create relatively few sentences and words.”

With “Verwandler” the band managed to transform Lou Reed’s songs into another language, to another place and bring the feeling into the listener’s world. “This transmission is extremely important,” says Fuchs. “What we don’t try to do is pose with the hardness that Lou Reed has. To imitate that would be ridiculous. But we try to adapt it to the Viennese.”

The Boys in Furs “Transformers” (Concord)

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