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For years, Lou Reed's third solo album – the follow-up to his Bowie-produced Transformer – split critics down the middle. You either loathed its bleakly suicidal scenarios or you wallowed in them. Nick Kent set the tone for the latter camp with his New Musical Express review on 6 October, 1973. Now Reed himself has revived the album in a stage production filmed by Julian (Diving Bell and Butterfly) Schnabel. -- Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

JUST WHEN you think your ex-idol has slumped into a pitiful display of gross terminal self-parody, Lou Reed comes back and hits you with something like Berlin. It's a creation which leaves you so aesthetically bamboozled that you just have to step down and allow him a brand new artistic credibility for pulling off such a coup in the first place.

Lou Reed, the phantom of rock, transforming himself into the official narrative poet of Third World disintegration? The Lawrence Durrell of the concept album? Tell us more. Why, certainly.

Berlin is a grandiose, heavily orchestrated tale of nihilism, depression, detachment suicide – how's that for starters? It builds itself around the relationship of Jim and Caroline, two members of a speed-freak exile colony set-up in Berlin. (It's set in Berlin because, of course, it's oh-so-decadent out there, and anyway it gives Lou the chance to re-shape that old bizarre-cocktail-lounge ditty of the same name that awkwardly graced his first solo effort as the album's opening cut.)

From there on, "Lady Day" is full of pomp and possesses anonymously paced-out quality bolstered up by the chorus. "Men Of Good Fortune" is particularly effective – slow and brash, allowing Reed to mouth Jim's own defiantly nihilistic philosophy of life. "Men of good fortune often cause empires to fall/While men of poor beginning often can't do anything at all/The rich son waits for his father to die/The poor just drink and cry/And me? I just don't care at all."

"Caroline Says I" is dangerously camp – "Caroline says that I'm just a boy/She wants a man, not just a toy." The orchestration is particularly clumsy here, too, all but obscuring a particularly ferocious jam between Messrs. [Aynsley] Dunbar, [Jack] Bruce and [Steve] Hunter, who all play immaculately throughout. "How Do You Think It Feels?" features another exceptional Reed vocal performance even though the arrangement is far too busy. The side finishes with "Oh Jim," which featured Reed strumming rhythm and singing almost like Buddy Holly – "Oh Jim howd'ya treat me this way – hey hey hey." It sounds not unlike the Velvets' classic "Some Kinda Love" in feel.

Side 2 features the triumvirate of tracks starting with "Caroline Says II," the refrain of which – "It's so cold in Alaska" – is based on an old Velvets' song, called, I think, "Alaska," which was recorded but never released on an album. "The Kids" is a long tortuous piece mapping the final stages of disintegration in the relationship between Jim and Caroline – "And I am the waterboy – the game's not over yet...I'm just the tired man/No words to say." The real piece-de-resistance, though, is "The Bed" – a harrowingly beautiful track of suicide that will literally leave the listener numb.

Bob Ezrin's production here, as throughout most of the record, is quite exceptional. In every sense, Berlin is as much his achievement as it is Reed's.

Finally there is "Sad Song," where schmaltz – "A Picture-book. She looks like Mary Queen of Scots" – mingles with vicious detachment – "I've got to stop wasting my time/Someone else would have broken both her arms." The track ends with Reed droning "Sad Song" counter-pointing a choir with strings.

I've yet to reach any truly concrete grand conclusions about this album, partly because it's perhaps too early, and secondly because its epic intentions conflict with what I've always looked for in a rock album.

But that's just my problem anyway, because Berlin is no way a rock 'n' roll work and Ezrin's cinematic approach to the production make it so that the record's immediate effect is more akin to watching, say, Last Tango In Paris, than checking out something like a new Rolling Stones album.

Right now I can only make gestures towards that conclusion – I'm certain, for example, that "The Bed" is absolutely the finest thing Reed's accomplished since his days with the Velvets and may even transcend those heady heights.

At the moment I find Berlin intriguing enough to come back to, if at times more than a little harrowing to sit through. Leonard Cohen once stated that his Songs From A Room would become more popular as more people started cracking up. Well sorry, Len, but Lou Reed and Berlin are going to capture that prized market right out of your clutches without even a flick of the proverbial limp-wrist.

But then what else can you expect from a man who was writing songs about mainlining smack during the Summer of Love?

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