TAYLOR MEAD

The day I met Taylor Mead, the Andy Warhol star, underground poet and actor who has died aged 88, it was a blazing bright New York afternoon. I am fairly sure it was a Sunday, and our appointment was at a bar in downtown Manhattan. I was there with Mark Webber, guitarist in Pulp and underground cinema enthusiast, to research a feature – it was he who set up our meetings with some of Warhol's most legendary associates. We sat in a cafe chatting with Gerard Malanga, and I kept hearing Venus in Furs (the Velvet Underground song to which Malanga once danced with a whip at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable).

But Taylor Mead ... he turned out a wonderfully romantic figure, a true bohemian. At that time, he was in his late 70s and, on a day before any murderous planes had ever poisoned that blue Manhattan sky, he embodied all I find fascinating about the city and its avant garde. Nicely drunk when we got there, he exuded an innocent belief in life, love and the city's generosity to its wild children.

Jonathan Jones
 The Guardian
 May 10 2013