Lou Reed and John Cale met in the early Sixties and you can hear the germs of the Velvet Underground’s song on their early songwriting collaboration Why Don’t You Smile, released by The All Night Workers.

In 1964 Reed had just left Syracuse University with an English degree and was employed as a jobbing songwriter and session musician.

Pickwick’s low-rent take on the Brill Building was housed in a record manufacturing plant on Long Island, churning out dime-a-dozen pastiches of current hits.

“There were four of us locked into a room and they would say: ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs…'” Reed later recalled.

Their efforts included novelty dance-craze songs (The Ostrich: “You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it”), novelty Motown songs (Soul City) novelty girl group songs (Love Can Make You Cry), novelty surf songs (Teardrop In The Sand) and novelty girl-group-surf-song-tragedy-ballads (Johnny Won’t Surf No More).

These cheap knock-off singles were then sold in drug stores and supermarkets and would have been forgotten for ever were it not for the subsequent fame of Reed.

He had met Cale at a party where he tried (unsuccessfully) to seduce the long-haired Welsh music student, and when they wrote this song one drunken night they had already collaborated on The Ostrich under the made-up band name The Primitives.

Crucially for music history, Cale had noticed that Reed’s unusual guitar technique – tuning every string to the same note – echoed the minimalist techniques of his own music tutor, avant-garde composer La Monte Young, with whom he performed in the experimental Theatre of Eternal Music.

Before long the duo began working on the demos that would eventually become that first legendary Velvets album, and you can hear their embryonic sound in the drone-like “Ostrich guitar” on this song, co-written with two other in-house songwriters, Terry Phillips and Jerry Vance.

It came out, as the only release on a Pickwick subsidiary called Round Records, by The All Night Workers, made up of two Syracuse-area friends of Lou’s called Otis Smith and Mike Esposito, and Lloyd Baskin, whose soulful vocals give it a Righteous Brothers feel.

It was released in early 1965 – also the band’s only release – as the B-side of Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket, which is not written by Reed or Cale and sounds nothing like this: it’s a brilliant Northern Soul tune.

Why Don’t You Smile was covered a year later by Downliners Sect and again, 25 years later, by Spiritualised. Its original version by The All Night Workers appears on a new compilation of all Reed’s early songwriting efforts called Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed At Pickwick Records 1964-65.