Music

John Cale's name is inevitably associated with the legendary New York band that produced ‘Femme Fatale’. Yet it was in Wales that the artist was born in 1942.

After studying music at Goldsmith College in London, he flew to New York at the age of just 20. Always keen to experiment, he took part in the activities of the Theatre of Eternal Music, an avant-garde collective that put him in the right place, during the birth of Velvet Underground under the impetus of Lou Reed and, very quickly, with the blessing of Andy Warhol. With the exception of a brief reformation in 1995, the adventure lasted only a handful of years, marked by a few legendary albums: mainly ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ (1967) and ‘White Light/White Heat’ (1968).

When he left in ‘68, he spent a few years as a producer. He found himself at the helm of Iggy Pop's first Stooges album, another landmark in rock history. He also worked on Nico's three solo albums.

When he finally released ‘Paris 1919’ (1972), his interest in France and Voltaire's language was evident, as was his desire to bring together two supposedly antagonistic musical worlds by calling on Lowell George Lowell of Little Feat and Wilton Felder of the Crusaders. John Cale, at the risk of sometimes making a mistake, loves balancing acts.  

A mixture of poetic intellectualism, nonchalance and second-degree humour, John Cale enjoys remaining as elusive as he's unclassifiable. Who else but him could launch into an improbable declaration of love such as ‘Honni soit (la première leçon de français)’ in 1981. Other references to the City of Light can be found on ‘Paris s'éveille’ (1991), probably making him the only artist to use the word Paris twice in his discography. His ‘Artifical Intelligence’ (1985) even has a premonitory side during current times when Chat GPT and DeepSeek are battling it out on the field.

oday, John Cale is celebrating his 83rd birthday in the best possible way... on stage. He usually remains seated behind his keyboard and has to put on his glasses to read the lyrics on his iPad, but we can easily forgive him for that as he always plays ‘I'm Waiting For The Man’, the one and only allusion to Velvet Underground, at the end of his concerts...

Some forthcoming concerts:

10 March: Rockhal - Esch-sur-Alzette (Grand Duchy)
17 March: Tivoli - Utrecht (Netherlands)
21 March: Royal Festival Hall - Artifical Intelligence (1985) (England)
31 March: Vicar Street - Dublin (Ireland)

(MH with AK - Photo: © Etienne Tordoir)
Photo: John Cale on stage at the Werchter Festival (Belgium) on 3 July 1983