Velvet Underground to Sue Andy Warhol Foundation
It is one of the most iconic album covers of all time, and can still be seen today on music t-shirts around the world – but now the Banana album cover seen on the 1967 classic ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ has found itself at the centre of a legal wrangle.
The Velvet Underground, or more properly founders Lou Reed and John Cale, have filed a lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation after it sold the pop artist’s Banana design to IT giant Apple. The image is being used on various iPhone and iPad products, and this has enraged the artwork’s original benefactors, who argue that the Banana is not only symbolic of The Velvet Underground itself – and is widely seen as one and the same thing by the band’s fans – but by selling the image to a computer company, the Andy Warhol Foundation is tarnishing The Velvet Underground’s name and linking them to a product they would never commercially endorse.
The legal challenge could well founder, however, because the famous artwork used on the album cover was never copyrighted by Andy Warhol himself. Instead, the artist licensed the image from an advert, much as he did his equally famous Campbells soup cans.
The Velvet Underground & Nico is widely agreed to be one of the most important and influential rock albums of all time, although when it was released in 1967 it was actually a commercial flop – with its dark and moody tone contrasting starkly with the bright psychedelia characterised by the hugely successful Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by The Beatles. Whereas the latter album spent 15 weeks at number one in the US Billboard album charts after its release on June 1, 1967. Conversely, The Velvet Underground & Nico crept into the Billboard chart in May 13, 1967 at #199 and had dropped out again in less than a month, having reached only #177 during that time. Its controversial content didn’t help it commercially, with major record store chains refusing to stock it and radio stations refusing to play it.
The real story comes decades later afterwards, with the album being rediscovered and praised to the rafters by critics and the public alike, as well as its great influence on later bands. Rolling Stone magazine, in its 2003 list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, gave it 13th place and declared it “the most prophetic rock album ever made.”
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