SCHOOLED AT HARVARD, SUCCOURED BY THE TWO-CHORD BEATITUDES OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, GALAXIE 50O WERE THE NΕΟ- PSYCHEDELIC JEWEL OF LATE-'80S AMERICAN INDIE ROCK. BUT IF THEIR PERFECTION WAS TOO VOLATILE TO SURVIVE ENNUI AND LABEL MELTDOWN, THEIR CATALOGUE - NOW AUGMENTED BY UNRELEASED TREASURES - SHINES ON. "NOTHING LASTS FOREVER," BAND AND ASSOCIATES TELL ROY WILKINSON. "BUT NOTHING IS EVER TRULY LOST."

BAND PORTRAIT BY SERGIO HUIDOR.

JUNE 1993. EX-GALAXIE 500 SINGER/GUITARIST Dean Wareham is on tour with the re-formed Velvet Underground, fronting his group Luna at Edinburgh Playhouse. “We sat jet-lagged in our dressing room,” recalls Wareham today, “hearing them play Venus In Furs through this little monitor speaker. It sounded amazing. For all the bands that are told they ‘sound like The Velvet Underground,’ nobody else actually sounds like that.”

His old band had always been compared with the Velvets – and spectral traces of Reed and co do chime through Galaxie 500’s three storied studio albums, released from 1988 to 1990. But Galaxie 500 vocals don’t sound like Lou Reed. Their bass and drums don’t sound like The Velvet Underground. However, Galaxie 500 could conjure similarly transportive melody from a couple of chords, and Wareham remains a Velvets fan, immersed in the studio albums and live bootlegs. “It was exciting on that tour,” he says in his distinctive Australo-American tones. “[Lou] was very friendly. He’d stop their soundcheck and say, ‘Oh, Luna needs a soundcheck now.’ He liked to talk about equipment. It was sort of his new drug – guitar tone.”

Galaxie 500 played beatific independent-label rock music. As Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore wrote when he covered their song Another Day in 2020, “They… will always remain one of the best, most remarkable bands from a time when being amped up and scuzzy was the prescription. Galaxie 500, in some otherworldly way, brought us back to Earth so we could recalibrate and soar anew.”

Double vision: Galaxie 500 (from left) Damon Krukowski, Dean Wareham and Naomi Yang go into orbit, 1990.

Sergio Huidor

Galaxie 500 were an archetypal cult band, beloved of connoisseurs. In 2020, to mark the reissue of the posthumous Galaxie 500 live album Copenhagen, artists including Mercury Rev, Mark Lanegan and The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt released video cover versions. But, while the band occupies a finite cosmos, the band members’ family histories have fascinating reach. From Wellington, New Zealand to Manhattan. Wartime China and Poland. Post-war jazz in Harlem. As a child, drummer Damon Krukowski first spoke his own name not to either of his parents, but to Herbie Hancock.

THE THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS OF GALAXIE 500 – Wareham, Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang – met at school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The Dalton School has liberal, idealistic roots, with a strong arts bias. Alumni include Montgomery Clift, Claire Danes and Sean Lennon. Krukowski and Yang were already at the school when Wareham arrived aged 14 in 1977, from his birthplace in New Zealand, via Australia.