Upon its release in 1973 dismayed critics labelled Lou Reed’s follow-up to Transformer the most depressing album of all time. While Berlin might not quite deserve that dubious honour, it remains one of the darkest records of that, or indeed any other, decade. Reed poured his bitterness about the disintegration of his own marriage into the album’s narrative of two doomed lovers, Caroline and Jim, and throughout the album’s nightmarish cabaret  - songs about domestic violence, drug abuse and suicide take a walk on the grim side, even by Reed’s standards - his detached misanthropy can feel genuinely chilling. Yet Reed’s MO as a writer was always to inhabit the places others feared to go, and while Berlin frequently makes for uncomfortable listening (The Kids and The Bed might be mainstream rock music’s bleakest double header), it’s an undeniably powerful one, with producer Bob Ezrin bringing a cinematic bombast to the record’s sorry tale.