"I just think as [Lou]'s growing older he's becoming the writer that he was probably always going to become. A short story writer. He writes in the narrative form very clearly. For me there's still a lot of symbolism or instinctive or emotive lyric writing - I don't know where it comes from - that explains the way I feel or the atmosphere I'm in. There's a couple of lines in "Crack City" on this album - They'll bury you in velvet/And place you underground - which had intent. The drug dirge - and this is not a slight on Lou because Lou is clean - the sound that one associates with that particular lifestyle is very much personified by the early Velvets. I had hoped that I gave that away in those two lines."

David Bowie, Q, June 1989