You're so vicious

Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio perform at the Opera Theatre in Sydney Opera House for the Vivid Live festival. Photo / Supplied

The Lou Reed show has started without him.

The stage of the Sydney Opera House theatre is crowded with electric guitars leaning against amps, humming in unison. A giant gong, kettle drum and a couple of high-tech workstations sit as yet unmolested. Reed, it seems, is droning it in.

The crowd attending the opening weekend of the city's Vivid festival -in its second outing and this year curated by Reed and wife Laurie Anderson - file in, many taking up the offer of earplugs which ushers are lolly-scrambling into the audience.

Outside, the merchandise stand is doing a steady trade in re-issued copies of Reed's Metal Machine Music, the 1975 no-song, all-noise, career-suicide note of a double album which is the inspiration behind tonight's show.

Also up for grabs and likely to get more sales are T-shirts of its cover showing Reed in his peroxide punk era, looking sunglassed and defiant.

Supposedly, the original album was his way of annoying his record label masters after he was pressured to hurry up and follow up the success of his previous - and most conventional - album Sally Can't Dance.

But two days before, at their Vivid press conference with Anderson, Reed said that wasn't the case. "I just really like guitars and feedback."

And he has for quite some time. In the Velvet Underground, his influential 1960s band which was the New York anathema to the hippie Californian psychedelia, Reed showed his affection for sonic extremes on songs like the deathless noise-drenched Sister Ray.

John Cale, his classically trained Velvets sparring partner had been part of the experimental music by American minimalist composer La Monte Young, an influence Reed cited on the liner notes to MMM crediting: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont [sic] Young's Dream Music."

These days, with the Metal Machine Music Trio of himself, electronic musician Sarth Calhoun and saxophonist-percussionist Ulrich Krieger, he's rattled the rafters of festival halls around the world. It's all part of where 68-year-old Reed's career is at - finding new possibilities in past glories, as he did in a series of live concerts orchestrating his 1973 Berlin album, which brought him to Sydney a few years back.

But local fans expecting another night of Reed, New York poet of the streets, are in for a shock ... .

The two curators have brought less confrontational fare to the iconic building, the famous sails of which each night are being lit up with projections designed by multimedia artist Anderson.

The festival's music programme opens with singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones. On the same stage which Reed and co will terrify two nights later, she delivers a set which acts as a sort of memoir to her life as the quintessential Californian jazbo hippie chick. Along the way, there are anecdotes mentioning old boyfriend Tom Waits and encounters with the late Lowell George of Little Feat and some thoughts of always being in the singer-songwriter shadow of the "queen" Joni Mitchell.

And while her speaking voice shows it has clocked a few miles in her 55 years, her singing remains the same airy, girlish instrument that still skips its way across the top of her biggest hit Chuck E's in Love which she delivers three songs into her largely chronological set.

It's a big photo album of a performance. And sometimes those old snapshots get a little blurry when Jones can't quite remember that next line or chord. Sometimes she gives her rhythm section a bit of a hard time - telling them brusquely she'd be doing this next one by herself and taking over the drumkit, an instrument she clearly can't play, for an encore which strains the seams of this seat-of-the-pants performance too far.

But as it swings from goofy asides (like her cover of Bowie's Rebel Rebel ) to heartfelt moments like Wild Girl, a song which she started writing long before her daughter Charlotte was born but which motherhood helped complete, Jones' eccentric charms prove a winning combo.

From there it's a quick dash down into the basement of the Opera House's studio for Boris, the Japanese metal band you suspect are more Reed's idea to include on the bill than Anderson's.

The three-guys, one-gal group sport double-necked guitars, vast stacks of amps and, behind their kit, a giant gong you suspect might actually be the drummer's own family heirloom.

With all that, they produce something as thrilling as it is terrifying, a sound that is less hard-riffing metal than a slow-surging high-volume sludgy tsunami.

Neatly tempered by the switch from the end-is-nigh tracks sung by frontman Takeshi to the dreamy songs sung by the band's female guitarist Wata, it thankfully comes with plenty of light and shade. But at its loudest, it's enough to scare the Wagner right out of venerable venue.

Two nights later and the venue's two-tone warning bell to take our seats for Reed's performance will prove the last recognisably musical notes of the evening.

The unmanned drone that greets us inside creates its own expectation of something dangerous about to happen. But exactly what, even Reed doesn't know.

"It's completely improvised from scratch," he tells the press conference earlier. "We try very hard not to have fall- back positions - it's very free-form right from the beginning, including instrumentation. It's very loud."

It is. Even before anyone's turned up.

Eventually, Reed pads on, looking frail. He and his cohorts pause at the amps to make adjustments. Krieger - a man who actually transcribed the original album note by buzzing discordant note and a star of the noise-music world in his own right - gets busy on the gong.

Then it's all on - 90 minutes of abstract sonic madness which throbs, screeches and then folds in on itself, again and again.

Krieger spends much of the first hour swinging his saxophone about, coaxing feedback from the miked instrument without actually blowing into it.

At stage left, the equally long-haired and studious Calhoun busies himself with various laptops and percussion pads, adding doomy rhythms underneath the white noise. While at stage centre, Reed takes his place seated among racks of guitars and effects racks where he spends his time intently adjusting knobs, running his fingers across a "continuum keyboard", like an extended laptop mousepad, or signalling to his side-of-stage technicians that guitar amp number seven obviously isn't quite migraine-inducing enough.

It's not much to look at. In fact, the slack-jawed Reed unfortunately resembles Stephen Hawking wrestling with the controls of the Starship Enterprise for much of the evening. And after half an hour, a slow of trickle of people start to leave. Others find the feedback assault is just the lullaby they need and doze off.

But the majority stay and every 10 minutes or so you become aware of another dynamic shift. Some are obvious, as when Reed finally picks up a guitar and adds some almost conventional notes to the sonic haze.

And when Krieger finally decides to find his mouthpiece, his overblown notes give the thunderstorm some long-awaited lightning strikes.

Eventually, after 90 unfathomable and cacophonous - and, for this forgiving long-time Reed fan, utterly thrilling - minutes, it's over. Reed presses his fingers to his lips to shush his cohorts, thanks us for coming and ambles away, looking far more dangerous than when he first crept on stage.

Russell Baillie attended Vivid with assistance from Tourism New South Wales and Air New Zealand