The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut album by the Velvet Underground and German singer Nico. Released in March 1967, it was recorded in 1966 while the band was featured on Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, which gained attention for its experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism, and sexual deviancy. Aside from The Velvet Underground, there were screenings of Warhol’s films and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol’s Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga

The banana itself is, of course, the handiwork of Andy Warhol. He crafted the image and slapped it on the cover of his pet band’s first record. Warhol served as the manager and patron saint of the now-iconic art-rock band. Surprisingly, The Velvet Underground sold only 30,000 albums in its first five years – which can be a failure, especially considering Warhol’s support

Warhol created a deliberately provocative design, and the banana became symbiotic with the group even some 57 years later. Early copies of the album even invited the owner to ‘peel slowly and see’ and, when peeling back the banana skin, revealed a flesh-coloured banana underneath, which didn’t leave much to the imagination. A special machine was then needed to manufacture the covers, a decision which led to the album release being considerably delayed. However, the connection to Warhol was viewed by their label as a major key to their success. The plans were earmarked as an investment by the record company that happily agreed to pay the extra costs, believing that the tie to the iconic artist would boost sales of the album tenfold. Warhol’s artistic director, Ronnie Cutrone, would later explain the delay: “Someone had to sit there with piles of albums, peel off the yellow banana skin stickers and place them over the pink fruit by hand,” he admitted

That first pressing is the holy grail among record collectors. Nowadays, a reasonably good copy is worth at least £1,000.

What was Warhol’s inspiration? As always, real life. Recently, D Generation and Danzig member Howie Pyro finally revealed the true origin of the famous Warhol-created banana. Pyro reveals in an op-ed that he accidentally stumbled upon the original banana in a junk shop “in the mid-80s” in the Lower East Side of New York City, only realising recently what it meant in punk and NYC history

“There was one on Broadway that I had never seen before right down the street from Forbidden Planet and the greatest place ever, the mighty Strand Book Store. I went in, and there was a lot of great stuff for me. I found some old records, a huge stash of outrageous and disgusting tabloid newspapers from the sixties, which I kept buying there for a couple of months afterwards, and some cool old knick-knacks. I knocked into something on a crowded table full of junk and heard a big CLANG on the cement floor. I bent down to pick it up. It was one of those cheap triangular tin ashtrays that advertised car tyres or something mundane. I picked it up (it was face down), and when I turned it over, I was surprised to see… THE BANANA!”

Despite its success as an artistic project, the album cover landed the band in a spot of legal trouble upon its first issue because of a cover photo featured on the back. The picture in question was taken at a performance of Warhol’s event Exploding Plastic Inevitable and contained an image of actor Eric Emerson projected upside-down on the wall behind the band. This came at a tough time for Emerson, and rather than be honoured to feature as art on the cover of such an outstanding record, he instead sued the band. He’d recently been arrested for drug possession, was desperate for money, and saw this as an opportunity to cash in – but this would be something he’d come to regret

The label had other ideas, however, and rather than pay Emerson, they instead recalled copies of the album and decided that they wouldn’t print any more copies of the album until the image of Emerson had been removed from the photo on subsequent pressings. The copies that were already printed were sold with a large black sticker covering Emerson’s image, a result which was not the ending that the actor had hoped for and which left him significantly out of pocket!