Transmitting Andy Warhol review – white light and black angels in an immersive explosion

Tate Liverpool
The first major Andy Warhol exhibition in the north of England recreates the world of the Factory and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – and Warhol is revealed in all his compassion and searing insight

When I look at Andy Warhol paintings, I tend to play Velvet Underground songs in my head. The Velvets were the “pop group” Warhol managed and produced in the 1960s, their overwhelmingly harsh yet beguilingly poetic sound a fusion of Brooklynite Lou Reed’s rock’n’roll animality and Welshman John Cale’s classical-music theory. I can’t look at the hard, black, silk-screened skeletons of Warhol’s luridly coloured pictures without imaging Cale’s scraping electric viola, Reed drily declaring that he’s “made a big decision”.

In Tate Liverpool’s utterly delightful Andy Warhol exhibition, you don’t have to imagine those inimitable cascades of feedback, for the Velvet Underground are playing live. OK, not exactly live. Cale and mallet-using drummer Maureen Tucker are now the original band’s only survivors. Yet a superbly devised installation recreates the club Warhol created to showcase their violent sound, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with whip-wielding dancers, a multicoloured lightshow and Warhol’s films projected in overlapping chaos.

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