The music world remembers Lou Reed

The punk poet's death has been met with an outpouring of grief from fellow musicians.

Influential rock singer-songwriter and punk poet Lou Reed sadly passed away yesterday (Sunday 27th October 2013) at the age of 71. He underwent a liver transplant in May this year, and today his literary agent confirmed to the Associated Press that his death was liver-related.

Fellow Velvet Underground member John Cale led the tributes on Facebook with the message: "The world has lost a fine songwriter and poet…I've lost my 'school-yard buddy'". Meanwhile, Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers also wrote, "Lou Reed, R.I.P. I did the Jools Holland show with him last year and we yucked it up. I didn't know he was ill."

Morrissey wrote a blog post for the True To You zine, saying: "We are all timebound, but today, with the loss of liberating Lou, life is a pigsty." Iggy Pop tweeted that Reed's passing was "devastating news", while Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth told of her "shock" on Twitter. Meanwhile the official David Bowie Facebook page shared the below photo of the two together with the message, "David Bowie said of his old friend: 'He was a master.'"

You can read a tour diary Reed wrote for the New Yorker in 1996, on 'The Aches and Pains of Touring', here; in it, he details the dullness of touring with a bad back and missing luggage, as well as meeting up with Bowie and Iggy Pop on his travels and taking a characteristic swipe at music journalists with the following anecdote – "An interviewer asks me why I don't smile much. I wonder if he'd ask Mile Davis that question. I tell him to check my inner glow."