#MEMBERS OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND ARCHIVE#
The doc benefits greatly from the testimony of surviving members Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker, and Welsh experimentalist John Cale, alongside extensive footage shot at the Factory and archive gems. The Velvet Underground has always been a slippery band to pin down, between the music, the drugs and the arguments, but Haynes navigates individual members, the band, the Factory and Andy Warhol in a mostly chronological and wholly comprehensible manner. Set for worldwide distribution through Apple TV+, this music doc sits at the top end of the genre – an aural and visual must for buffs and Velvet heads and those attracted to last year’s David Byrne concert American Utopia or the upcoming Summer Of Soul. Haynes deals with the band with admiration, but not uncritical reverence Any questions which remain chime tantalisingly with the work of his defiantly-impenetrable protagonists. Haynes, whose 1988 Velvet Goldmine skirted around some of these characters in a fictional way, does the art and the time, the people and the places, immersive justice. Hypnotic, seductive, and, just simply, very cool: the good news is that The Velvet Underground is everything you might have expected and dreamed of a documentary made by Todd Haynes about the influential (yet ultimately penniless) 1960s New York avant grade rock group.