Public Servant Lifestyle

The legendary John Cale returns with a brand new 5-track EP, a great prelude to his forthcoming album.

John Cale 5 Tracks by John Cale.

"John Cale’s footprints are stamped all over the last three and a half decades of musical history. Through his from his celebrated work with The Velvet Underground, the music he has made as a solo artist, a mind-boggling array of collaborations or simply as producer (Nico, The Stooges, Nick Drake, Patti Smith, Happy Mondays). In the past 40-plus years he has amassed a deserved reputation as a pioneering, deeply influential presence.

5 Tracks

Moreover, his horizons continue to extend, and with the release of his new EP - John Cale 5 Tracks - the prelude to a new album released this autumn; Cale proves that he is still nudging his music into invigoratingly fresh territory.

The music the EP contains began in London, where Cale started work on a set of sample-based arrangements, before returning to the project in New York. "Working with the samples really freed me up," he enthuses. "It was a method I first used when I was doing film music. If I have a band in a room, trying things out is a lot more difficult. The immediacy of what I was doing cut me loose."

Its five tracks - Verses, Waiting For Blonde, Chums Of Dumpty, E Is Missing and Wilderness Approaching - were inspired by wildly different factors, and take in an array of moods, but they’re united by two factors: the quintessentially Cale-esque feeling that musical boundaries are being artfully blurred and extended, and an expansive, cinematic aura, as if the music is intended to conjure up a widescreen perspective on the modern human condition.

South Wales

Cale was born in 1942, in Garnant, South Wales. His father was a coal-miner, his mother a teacher. As a child, he displayed enviable musical talent on both the piano and viola - and between 1961 and 1963, he was a student at Goldsmiths College London, where he began to immerse himself in both avant-garde and electronic music. After a meeting with the American composer Aaron Copland in 1963, he won a scholarship to the Boston University Orchestra’s Tanglewood summer school - and by the autumn of that year, he was resident in New York.

It was there that he collaborated with the cutting-edge composers John Cage and LaMonte Young - but Cale soon began to sense a kind of entrapment. "With avant-garde music," he explains, "there’s generally a small coterie of people, and you try as hard as you can to expand it. But it seemed to me that LaMonte was trying to make it smaller and smaller. We were involved in long-duration experiments: we’d play for an hour and a half, sustaining a drone. Most people didn’t want that kind of sensory deprivation." "And there was something really nagging away at me," he continues.

"I’d tried to put a band together when I was a kid in Wales, but I failed: it ended up being a jazz band. But before I could do anything like that again, I needed to be with someone who was a songwriter; someone with the ability to write words. I had no idea how to do it. I was a pretty serious classical musician, so if I was going to make music with words, they had to be pretty serious as well. And to find somebody who happened to have all that, and a bent for improvisation...it was a bolt out of the blue." Cale met Lou Reed in 1964, and the pair began work on the project that would soon become known as The Velvet Underground.

Manhattan

Their base of operations was Ludlow Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but in 1966 they moved Uptown, when Andy Warhol grafted the band’s visionary music on to the heady, frantically experimental scene taking root at the legendary Factory: Warhol’s hangout-cum-artspace, which acted as a honeypot for New York’s scenesters. "What we had been doing on Ludlow Street was suddenly being done on 54th Street in the presence of Jackie Kennedy," says Cale. "Andy’s milieu was growing. The people who hung around the Factory were movers and shakers in the art world. It was a very different universe. But everything we’d been doing fitted perfectly with what was going on. Plus, we had 1000 per cent more attention."

With Warhol’s assistance, the Velvets - Cale, Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Mo Tucker - worked on one of the most revered albums ever put to tape: The Velvet Underground & Nico, much of which was made in collaboration with the German emigre who was an integral part of Warhol’s circle. In time, however, the band and Warhol went their separate ways - thanks, it seems, to both Warhol’s wish that they should extend their activities elsewhere, and Lou Reed’s desire to remove him from the picture.

Andy Warhol

"Andy brought the point up first," says Cale. "He said, ‘Look, you’re doing well. If you want, you can continue making music the way you do now. I can book you into all the art galleries in the world. But you have other responsibilities. There are other audiences out there who don’t want to go to art galleries.’ "But before he could finish the point, Lou fired him." In the wake of that rupture, The Velvets hit the road, and eventually recorded White Light/White Heat. It remains an amazingly extreme, confrontational album; the fact that it was released in 1968 rather beggars belief.

Nico

"It’s music by people who really can’t get along," Cale explains. "We’d been on the road a long time. The Velvet Underground & Nico was the result of a year’s hard labour - and it was recollected in tranquillity, as it were. Then we went on the road, and we became a rock band, with a vengeance. It was the music of personal confrontation, more than anything else. It’s all brutality." Thanks to a mixture of management manoeuvring and Reed’s wish to assert his leadership, Cale exited the Velvets in 1969. "We didn’t understand the concept of taking time out," he considers.

"We were ‘on’ the whole time…on something the whole time, put it that way. You drive, you drive, you drive - and you never kick back. We were four individuals who each had their own idea of what relaxation was." Even at the time, Cale had little doubt that - though The Velvets made very little commercial headway during the time they were together - acclaim would arrive belatedly. "I kind of knew that the music we made couldn’t be ignored. There were too many elements of classicism in what we were doing for people to dismiss it as just somebody making a noise. It was too constructed. I thought it was inevitable that someone would realise the unique nature of what we’d been doing."

Solo Career

Cale’s solo career began with 1970’s admirably sophisticated Vintage Violence. It was followed a year later by Church Of Anthrax, a collaboration with the esteemed avant-garde composer Terry Riley. In 1973 came The Academy In Peril, a sumptuous, near-symphonic work that featured the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In the wake of that project, Cale signed a contract with Warner Brothers as artist, producer and A&R man, and relocated to LA. "I really felt like I had a European background in LA," he says. "There was a comfortable distance between me and everything around me." The result of this heightening of his European identity was Paris 1919 - a poised, elegant, haunting masterpiece that managed to fuse a classical sensibility with some of the most commercial music that Cale has ever recorded.

In the meantime, he had worked as a producer and musician on some of the most pivotal records in the rock canon.

A few examples, from this period and beyond, illustrate the point:

- Nico: The Marble Index (1969), Desertshore (1971), June 1 1974 (1974, with Cale, Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno), The End (1974)

"It was all so melodic. With every album, the songs got prettier and prettier. I had no idea what she was going to bring in, but it was really uncanny. We were recording at Elektra studios, in a dark room. We got a guy called David Anderly down from Elektra to hear what was going on. He wanted to know where the money went. We played him the album in the dark. By the end, he was breathless."

Iggy Pop

- The Stooges: The Stooges (1969)

"That was really funny. It felt very, very solid - like a wall. I’d seen them live, and there was this problem: ‘How do you capture that?’ When you saw Iggy standing on his head or jumping in the crowd - how do you get that frivolity on the record? You don’t. You just turn the tape machine on, count it off - and bang. It was done in five days."

- Nick Drake: Bryter Later (1970)

Cale played piano and viola on two tracks) "He was very quiet guy. It was very difficult to figure out what was going on in his mind. He made music with a real sensuality - very different from English folk music."

- Patti Smith: Horses (1975)

"Lurking inside her was a preacher - like those Welsh ministers who declaim. When she got going, her whole body was consumed by this fervour."

- Happy Mondays: Squirrel And G-Man (1987)

"I just saw 24 Hour Party People. I loved that movie. My daughter had just been born, and I was very, very sober in a fragile kind of way. I had no idea what these guys were into when I got there. I got lambasted for being so clean and healthy. Shaun was hilarious, Bez was too - but the keyboard player was very worrisome. At one point, we stopped the take, and he said, ‘Make it go all woozy for me again.’ Totally out of it, like he was in a coma." In 1974, Cale left California, signed to Island and relocated to London. Thus began the phase of his career that took in the albums Fear (1974), Slow Dazzle (1975), and Helen Of Troy (1975).

The Velvet Underground

"Slow Dazzle was the most commercial of all of them," he explains. "Helen Of Troy was a distortion: the result of doing the same thing as I’d done with the 'Velvets, and going on the road with a band forever and ever, and writing songs on the road. I used to write songs onstage, and yell out chord changes to the band. It would drive them mad. But by then, I was in a really bad place. My personal life was a real shambles. I was having difficulty doing anything with a calm prospect. I was really frazzled, most of the time."

During the 1980s, Cale released the legendarily bleak Music For A New Society ("That was over the edge. We improvised songs in the studio. It was a crazy notion of how to make a record"), and stepped away from rock music into both classical and conceptual territory.

Songs For Drella

Among his work from this period was the 1988 work The Falklands Suite, which drew on four Dylan Thomas poems, and formed part of 1989’s Words For The Dying album. In 1990, in the wake of Andy Warhol’s death, Cale reignited his partnership with Lou Reed on the stunning, elegiac album Songs For Drella - and in 1993, The Velvet Underground reformed for a six-week European tour. Three years later came Cale’s first pop-based album in over a decade: the acclaimed Walking On Locusts, which featured both Mo Tucker and Talking Heads’ David Byrne.

In the meantime, Cale’s native Wales had tumbled into a musical purple patch, reflected in the roll-call of a 2000 documentary entitled Beautiful Mistake, for which Cale collaborated with the likes of Super Furry Animals, Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield and Cerys Matthews.

Super Furry Animals

"Did I find it compelling?" Cale considers. "Absolutely. Especially the Welsh-speaking bands. Super Furry Animals were good, well-behaved young kids from Wales. It was, ‘There’s another side to this story: there are some people who do well in their lives, and are happy, and make very good rock’n’roll music.’ James Dean Bradfield is a restless soul, uncomfortable in his skin. You can hear that when he sings. It was all a real education."

The music the EP contains began in London, where Cale started work on a set of sample-based arrangements, before returning to the project in New York. "Working with the samples really freed me up," he enthuses. "It was a method I first used when I was doing film music. If I have a band in a room, trying things out is a lot more difficult. The immediacy of what I was doing cut me loose."

Its five tracks were inspired by wildly different factors, and take in an array of moods, but they’re united by two factors: the quintessentially Cale-esque feeling that musical boundaries are being artfully blurred and extended, and an expansive, cinematic aura, as if the music is intended to conjure up a widescreen perspective on the modern human condition.

This is particularly true of Waiting For Blonde, at least partly informed by the events of September 11 2001. Its refrain is based on the incantation of a subway train conductor who attempted to rally the spirits of commuters: "Remember you are New Yorkers/This is your last chance." As with much of the EP, its music both evokes Manhattan’s surreal bustle, and conveys the fractured sense of a newly-uncertain world.

Fascist

Elsewhere, E Is Missing shines its light on the 20th Century Poet Ezra Pound, whose reputation was rather besmirched by Fascist sympathies. "Ezra is missing from the lexicon," says Cale. "Everyone wants to avoid him like the plague - but he was an amazing poet." The record closes with a deeply mournful piece called Wilderness Approaching, taken from a forthcoming movie entitled Paris, which finds Cale’s talent for creating uncomfortably affecting music working its customary wonders.

All of it, needless to say, proves that John Cale remains in amazing creative health - and as close to the cutting edge as ever. His footprints may be stamped all over the past - but unlike so many of his peers, his paths also extend into the future...

John Cale 5 Tracks is out now, on EMI records.

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