The Velvet Underground may appear sui generis – and there really had been nothing within rock that had managed to connect such disparate aspects of music (pop, drone, noise, minimalism, avant-garde classical, Beat poetry, modernism) – but their involvement with the broader milieu of Andy Warhol’s Factory, along with John Cale’s involvement with Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Theatre Of Eternal Music, helps to place what they achieved in broader context. By the time of their first, self-titled album, released in 1966 and roughly contemporaneous with Warhol’s one-hour Velvet Underground & Nico film, Warhol had spent three years behind the camera, exploring the possibilities of single-shot cinema, improvised dialogue and interaction. He created a kind of quietly ecstatic “cinema of looking” where the main figures – artist Robert Indiana eating a mushroom; actor DeVeren Bookwalter getting a blow job; poet John Giorno sleeping – through the single-minded focus of Warhol’s vision, almost turn into art objects themselves. Velvet Underground & Nico has Warhol documenting one of the group’s lengthy improvisations around one chord, and it’s both a welcome, extended glimpse into the group’s world, and another beautiful example of Warhol’s cinéma vérité of sorts. Nico might be the focal point at the start of the film, but by the end, Warhol has somehow managed to capture the essence of each member of the group, and their interactions, through the lens.