This week Helen’s taken ‘Angel’ as her theme for Song Lyric Sunday. Hmmm – schmaltz alert.

There are certainly hundreds, and probably thousands, of songs about angels. Indeed, there are quite a few simply titled ‘Angel’. All the ones that I can think of are, to varying degrees, saccharine-coated.

Except this, by the Velvet Underground. I suspect that it could divide opinion.

The myriad choices of his fate
Set themselves out upon a plate
For him to choose
What had he to lose
Not a ghost bloodied country
All covered with sleep
Where the black angel did weep
Not an old city street in the east
Gone to choose
And wandering’s brother
Walked on through the night
With his hair in his face
On a long splintered cut from the knife of G.T.
The rally man’s patter ran on through the dawn
Until we said so long
To his skull-shrill yell
Shining brightly red-rimmed and
Red-lined with the time
Infused with the choice of the mind
On ice skates scraping chunks
From the bells
Cut mouth bleeding razor’s
Forgetting the pain
Antiseptic remains cool goodbye
So you fly
To the cozy brown snow of the east
Gone to choose, choose again
Sacrificials remains make it hard to forget
Where you come from
The stools of your eyes
Serve to realize fame, choose again
And roverman’s refrain of the sacrilege recluse
For the loss of a horse
Went the bowels and a tail of a rat
Come again, choose to go
And if Epiphany’s terror reduced you to shame
Have your head bobbed and weaved
Choose a side to be on
If the stone glances off
Split didactics in two
Leave the colors of the mouse trails
Don’t scream, try between
If you choose, if you choose, try to lose
For the loss of remain come and start
Start the game I che che che che I
Che che ka tak koh
Choose to choose
Choose to choose, choose to go

Written by John Cale and Lou Reed

Song Lyric Sunday 29 April 2018