John Cale - Symphonies in Viola

Born in Wales in 1942, John Cale trained from the start as a classical musician, learning to play keyboards and viola from childhood (an instrument he would call "the saddest of all instruments," and one that would become a cornerstone of the Velvet Underground's sonic revolution). As a musicology student in college, he developed an artistic sensibility akin to avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen, LaMonte Young and John Cage; this soon brought him into direct contact with these very figures, to the point that in the early '60s he left Wales for New York, after being invited by Cage himself to perform in pieces composed by Erik Satie. He soon became part of LaMonte Young's musical project known as "The Theatre of Eternal Music," alongside his friend Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise (drummer originally from the Warlocks, the embryonic nucleus of what would become the Velvet Underground); this experience revolved around extremely long instrumental sessions built on the drone technique (borrowed from Indian music), which consisted of sustaining the same note for the entire duration of the performance: for the occasion, Cale even made technical modifications to his viola. One of these sessions was released in 2000 as Inside The Dream Syndicate Vol 1: Day Of Niagara (1965).

But the encounter that would shape John Cale's career more than any other was the one with a young Lou Reed, at the time a penniless songwriter churning out tunes for ghost bands on the Pickwick label. With Reed, Cale discovered rock'n'roll and found his ideal artistic partner: thus was born the partnership that would give rise to the Velvet Underground. Cale helped shape and color Reed's songs; in turn, Reed opened up new musical horizons for Cale, who, after his experience with LaMonte Young, seemed to have painted himself into an artistic dead end. Thanks to John Cale, classical music, experimentation and the avant-garde burst into rock. The use of a classical instrument like the viola (employed both as melodic counterpoint and as a source of savage noise), the drone technique, a predilection for long, orgiastic instrumental jams, an unconventional, "rock-profane" approach to conventional instruments like bass and keyboards: these are all elements that define the Velvet Underground's first two unreachable, revolutionary albums, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) and White Light/White Heat (1968), on which Cale's contribution is essential. Certainly, Cale's departure from the band contributed to the mistaken popular identification of Lou Reed as the sole face of the Velvet Underground, regardless of his own fundamental contribution. As is well known, rock would never be the same after the Velvet Underground.

In his post-Velvet career, Cale has traveled down countless paths: session musician, arranger, experimenter, soundtrack composer, producer; unfortunately, not enough has ever been said about his work as a songwriter, which began in 1970 with the album Vintage Violence. Pushed out of the Velvet Underground in October 1968 at Reed's own insistence (egged on by the flattery of new manager Steve Sesnick, the very same man who two years later would cause Reed's own departure), after having produced Nico's "The Marble Index" (for whom he would remain a frequent collaborator and true deus ex machina for years, right up to 1985's "Camera Obscura") and the debut album by Iggy Pop's Stooges ("The Stooges"), John Cale made his recording debut for Columbia Records. Vintage Violence is probably the last album anyone would have expected from the Velvet Underground's mad viola-ravisher, and it immediately revealed Cale's untapped potential as a writer of songs and melodies, beyond his already-established skills as instrumentalist and arranger. The record is the compendium of Cale's pop sensibility (before the classicism of Paris 1919 and the acidity of Fear): an oblique pop, at times easygoing, tinged with country, though not without a certain heaviness in some of the arrangements (a genuine limitation of Cale's artistic output, one that would become even more apparent on later albums); the songs already contain, in embryonic form, the main hallmarks of his songwriting: a pronounced melodic sense ("Gideon's Bible"), acoustic intimacy ("Amsterdam"), claustrophobic nightmares ("Ghost story").

After appearing as a session musician on Nick Drake's "Bryter Layter", Cale didn't forget his first calling, the avant-garde, and released Church Of Anthrax (1971), the fruit of his collaboration with electronic musician Terry Riley; the record is mostly instrumental (with the exception of the melancholy ballad "The Soul Of Patrick Lee", a gem entrusted to the voice of Alan Miller), steeped in psychedelia, with piano digressions and obsessive rhythms converging in a hypnotic sound, at times bordering on free jazz. At the start of 1972 Cale took part in a truly rare event: on January 29th he performed on the stage of the Bataclan Club in Paris in an acoustic concert alongside his former bandmates Lou Reed and Nico. The evening was memorable, thanks to a set drawing on both Velvet Underground classics and new solo material from all three artists; an official release of the bootleg documenting that concert is reportedly forthcoming.

That same year Cale released The Academy In Peril on Reprise, another strongly experimental and avant-garde album made up of instrumental pieces, with strong echoes of the artist's classical background.

The following year, 1973, saw the release of what most consider the Welsh artist's first masterpiece, Paris 1919, released by Warner (who had hired Cale as a staff producer). The album is the result of a perfect fusion between the artist's classical and rock sensibilities, here in enviable balance; the songs move through a succession of different registers, yet still seem to belong to a fairly cohesive vision. It ranges from the almost Beatles-esque pop of "A Child's Christmas In Wales" (steeped in the same nostalgic themes that would later define the other masterpiece "Music For A New Society") to the chamber-music mini-suite of the title track, from the rarefied folk atmospheres of "Hanky Panky Nohow" and "Andalucia" to the country hard-rock of "Macbeth" (perhaps the album's only weak moment), from the orchestral emphasis of the dramatic "Endless Plain Of Fortune" to the dreamlike atmospheres of "Antarctica Starts Here", the record's true masterpiece, led by electric piano and Cale's whispered voice, before opening up into a crescendo of harmonium and drums, only to fade out immediately after, just as it had begun.

On Paris 1919 Cale's compositional maturity is by now fully evident, his greatest strengths lying in a sharp melodic sense and in meticulous arrangements, even if at times a little too overblown.

At the end of the year Cale moved to London, where during 1974-75 he would experience one of the happiest and most prolific periods of his career. Just as the glam movement had been inspired by the Velvet Underground's dark rock, the two leading minds of that group found new artistic stimulus in early-70s London among glam's most artistically valid exponents: Lou Reed found a mentor in the icon David Bowie, while John Cale struck up a close relationship with the other standard-bearers of decadent rock, Roxy Music, specifically Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera. Signed to Island Records, and after taking part in the celebratory concert "June 1st, 1974" alongside Kevin Ayers, Eno and Nico, Cale released three albums crucial to his career (later collected in The Island Years, issued in 1996), in which his songwriting perfectly merges with certain electronic and noise-based elements, strongly influenced by his collaboration with Eno and Manzanera (Cale would return the favour by contributing to "Another Green World" and "Music For Films").

All this is abundantly clear on the first of these records, Fear, whose title track is probably the ultimate synthesis of Cale's art: a piano ballad that spirals into pure delirium, noise and convulsive, psychotic screams, encapsulating that paranoia and claustrophobia that have always accompanied Cale as a vital component of his art and of his life itself: "Fear is man's best friend". Besides the strong influence of Eno's work, the album finally also showcases one of Cale's major influences, the Beach Boys, paid tribute in the Wilson-esque "The Man Who Couldn't Afford To Orgy" and even more directly in "Mr. Wilson", the opening track of the following Slow Dazzle. This record is, in a sense, a rereading of 50s rock'n'roll: emblematic of this is his very personal revisiting of "Heartbreak Hotel", marked by an obsessive guitar riff, Eno's electronic noises and an anguished, intensely felt vocal performance; a symbol of suffering and despair tinged with madness, this song is another of the absolute high points of Cale's output. The rest of the album contains songs that are solid in their own right (above all the classic "Guts", in many ways comparable to "Fear"), but it begins to suffer from a certain overproduction, something that would become even more apparent on the following Helen Of Troy. The album was released at the end of 1975 without Cale's knowledge, at the record label's behest, an episode that led to the abrupt end of his relationship with Island. The album is more violent than its predecessor, and alongside the elements already familiar from his work, it contains pre-punk traits that would define Cale's next artistic phase; worth noting is his cover of "Pablo Picasso" by Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers, a band Cale himself had recently discovered and produced.

From that point on, a new phase of Cale's career began, opening with his production of Patti Smith's "Horses", which would see him become one of the key figures of the punk and new wave ferment: he became a fixture on New York's CBGB's circuit, jammed with Talking Heads, produced the Police's first demos and the work of seminal punk bands such as Sham 69; his music turned towards ever harsher, more jagged sounds, and his shows accordingly grew increasingly eccentric: most memorable of all is the famous "Croydon Incident", during a 1977 concert in which Cale decapitated a chicken on stage, causing no small amount of shock among both audience and musicians.

In terms of records, the period was not among his most prolific: besides the compilation Guts (which includes the classic "Leaving It Up To You", cut from "Helen Of Troy" over references to Sharon Tate), Cale only released the EP Animal Justice (1977), steeped in punk aesthetics (the memorable "Chickenshit", to which Joy Division probably owe something), and the live album Sabotage (1979), documenting shows held at CBGB's that same year. Made up essentially of previously unreleased material, the album is a snapshot of "punk" Cale: neurotic screams, pulsing new-wave-style bass, searing guitars, rhythms ranging from danceable to unbridled, politically engaged lyrics (the anti-militarist jibe "Mercenaries"); the sound is raw and direct, but there's no shortage of intense moments such as the tender "Only Time Will Tell", entrusted to the almost childlike voice of Deerfrance (a CBGB's regular) and pervaded by Cale's viola, and the epic closer "Chorale". Also of interest from this period is the album Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, released in the mid-80s and containing unreleased songs dating back to the same "Sabotage" shows.

At the start of the 80s, besides the single "Mercenaries" (which includes "Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores", soon covered by Bauhaus), Cale released the album Honi Soit, which is in a sense a return to the more "rock" sound of his mid-70s records, albeit without the same innovative drive; nonetheless, the album contains some interesting tracks ("Riverbank" and "Magic And Lies", dating back to the "Sabotage" period).

After meeting and marrying his current life partner Risè Irushalmi, in 1982 Cale created the masterpiece of his "mature" output: Music For A New Society. Having explored the boundaries of rock, classical and the avant-garde, Cale finally arrived at conceiving a "new" music for a "new" society indeed. Behind these futuristic intentions, the record is actually a place where the artist lays himself completely bare before his own raw emotions: nostalgia, regret, but also the inevitable claustrophobia. The album unfolds as a succession of moments of pure lyricism, at times reaching true catharsis: the poignant "Chinese Envoy" (inspired by a story by Guy de Maupassant), the nostalgic "Taking Your Life In Your Hands"; the intense "Broken Bird"; the disarming "Close Watch", the record's peak, already heard on "Helen Of Troy" in a decidedly heavy-handed arrangement, here presented in a version that finally does justice to its beauty: just piano and voice, minimal organ touches, closing with the distant sound of bagpipes, as if nostalgically recalling Cale's Welsh origins.

There's also the usual experimentation, as in "Damn Life", where Cale builds a song around Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". On almost every track (except "Changes Made") the sound is stripped-down, minimal; often the voice is left alone, accompanied only by background sounds and noises: the effect is disorienting yet at the same time beautiful. In this dimension, Cale's art reaches its most mature and original form, freed from the heavy-handed arrangements that had marred many moments of his past work; his output would rarely reach such heights again. In the years that followed, in fact, Cale's work suffered a drop in quality, reaching its low point with the mediocre and utterly forgettable Caribbean Sunset (saddled with the embarrassing single "Oh La La"), followed by the now hard-to-find live album John Cale Comes Alive.

1985 saw the release of Artificial Intelligence, a modest record, only marginally better than its predecessor, though it does stand out in places for some interesting percussion-driven rhythmic choices. Worth mentioning in any case is the presence of another Cale classic, the intense and deeply autobiographical "Dying On The Vine", which in terms of lyricism and evocative power would not have been out of place on "Music For A New Society".

The rest of the 80s, besides various collaborations (the "Sid And Nancy" soundtrack, 1986) and the usual appearances behind the mixing desk (producing Happy Mondays' debut, 1987), would see Cale involved in two ambitious projects of considerable artistic weight, culminating respectively in Words For The Dying (1989) and Songs For Drella (1990). The first of these efforts is the recorded form of a work our man had created in Moscow in 1987, the "Falkland Suite", an orchestral piece in seven parts, made up largely of poems by Dylan Thomas, set to music and performed by Cale himself, accompanied by an orchestra and a boys' choir. The rest of Words For The Dying is "Songs Without Words", another instrumental piece in two parts; the record closes instead with an original Cale composition, "The Soul Of Carmen Miranda", which clearly bears the mark of Brian Eno, the album's producer: this episode would pave the way for Wrong Way Up, the pair's 1990 collaboration.

Cale's other project, besides having considerable value in its own right, would also have significant consequences for the immediate future of his career. Songs For Drella is a cycle of 15 songs written and performed together with Lou Reed, who had grown close to Cale again following the death of Andy Warhol (to whom the cycle is dedicated) in 1988. The result is this work of rare beauty, born of the combined talents of both former Velvets, reunited after 20 years to work together again. Staged in 1989, Songs For Drella was released the following year, and is without doubt one of the high points in both "survivors'" discographies: it is not only a heartfelt, candid and affectionate tribute to the life of their mentor Warhol (as well as a flashback to their days at the Factory...), it is also a synthesis of their art, in which their respective contributions, in perfect balance, make this song cycle a unique, unrepeatable work. This renewed closeness between the two former bandmates would gradually lead to an unexpected, spur-of-the-moment Velvet Underground reunion, which in 1993, with the original lineup, would embark on a successful European tour (immortalised on a double CD and a videocassette) that, once old resentments resurfaced, would come to an abrupt end, definitively closing the book on the Velvet Underground's story (not helped by the death of Sterling Morrison in 1995).

The 90s thus opened with the aforementioned Wrong Way Up, co-written with Brian Eno, who is also the album's main vocalist; among the tracks sung by Cale, the striking "Cordoba" stands out. The 90s would see Cale mainly occupied with film scores (among the many, worth recalling are "Paris s'eveille", "Eat/Kiss", "Basquiat", "American Psycho"); he would produce some tracks on "The Rapture", the album marking Siouxsie & the Banshees' temporary comeback (and there was also talk of a possible production credit on "Da Qui" by Italy's own Massimo Volume); as a performer, besides taking part in the Leonard Cohen tribute album "I'm Your Man" (to which he contributed a beautiful version of "Hallelujah", covered shortly afterwards by Jeff Buckley), in 1992 he released a live album titled Fragments Of A Rainy Season. This record, which finds Cale performing his classics alternating between acoustic guitar and piano, is not only a summation of his career but also one of the finest and most intense testaments to Cale's art, both as a writer and as a performer. Stripped of all adornment, his songs take on an unprecedented, timeless dimension here: the performance is catharsis, the symbiosis between the artist and his work total. In concert, Cale lives his songs, rather than simply performing them. The music is neither pop, nor rock, nor classical: it is, quite simply, the music of John Cale. For anyone coming to his work for the first time, Fragments Of A Rainy Season is an excellent place to start.

Aside from the compilation Seducing Down The Door (an operation repeated in 1999 with Close Watch: An Introduction To John Cale) and the 1994 collaboration with Bob Neuwirth (Last Day On Earth, a cycle of spoken-word songs), Cale's "rock" output in the late Nineties was limited to Walking On Locusts (1996). This album, which features David Byrne on a few tracks, has an ethnic flavour and is yet another sign of Cale's peculiar conception of rock: music free from any definition whatsoever, where any contamination is permitted. Even if the results are uneven, Walking On Locusts remains an interesting album.

These days, Cale hasn't stopped working on soundtracks ("Paris", 2002); he has collaborated with Super Furry Animals ("Rings Around The World", 2001), Jools Holland and Gordon Gano ("Hitting The Ground", 2002). In 2003 he returned to "rock" with the album Hobosapiens, preceded by the decent Ep 5 tracks (notable for "E is missing", dedicated to Ezra Pound). Today John Cale proves to be in great shape: Hobosapiens is an album that surprises with its arrangement choices, its sounds (the man himself has admitted to admiring the sound of Beta Band and bands like Radiohead), and its form, forever balanced between song and experimentation. His music is certainly not easy listening (it never has been, after all), but Mr. Cale's latest effort is a deep, inspired record, full of moments that manage to surprise, from the electronic, almost hip-hop opener "Zen", to "Look Horizon" (how can you not be moved by the sound of that viola, under a sonic carpet somewhere between jazz and electronics?), from "Things" (featured in two versions, one "pop" and one very "acid"), to the playful house-like "Bycicle", from the (apparent!) sunniness of "Reading My Mind", which provides the musical backdrop to a bizarre tale that evokes, thanks also to spoken parts in Italian, the atmosphere of certain Italian films of the Fifties, right through to the closing "Over Her Head", the album's climax, with its dramatic tension building to a surprising, explosive noise conclusion, once again led by the viola. And with every new listen there's always something new to discover; every track seems to hide its own secret.

In his sixties, the former Velvet Underground man proves he's still one of the most interesting artists around, confirming that he remains up to that fundamental role which, over the years — partly by choice, partly unfairly — he has often played outside the spotlight within modern music.

Black Acetate (2005) returns to more conventional sounds. "GravelDrive" is the most backward-looking track on the record, a gentle lullaby with an ecstatic synth intro, a serene arpeggio, and the Waits of those legendary ballads peeking through in the vocal register. His friend Bryan Ferry, meanwhile, seems to soar through the proud, seductive singing of "ForARide", with flanger-soaked guitars giving rise to a distorted coda of rock symphonism. "InAFlood" is a roots track with banjo and synth, and "Satisfied" lays out an oasis of strings and xylophone to support a chorus that resonates with the orchestration. The overture ("OuttaTheBag"), on the other hand, veers into glam tones with a Stevie Wonder falsetto, a rubbery electro-acid-jazz-inspired bass, and light sampler intrusions. On "Hush" the mood starts out almost industrial-dance, but is then softened by a well-crafted soul sing-along. "Brotherman" dares to experiment, with electro pairings, a three-in-one vocal (spoken, falsetto and dark lo-fi) and some tasteful cut-up work on the overall harmony.

The album's third dimension (re)discovers a genuinely fearless rocker in Cale, especially on the trio of "Perfect"-"Sold-Motel"-"Woman". Cale allows himself an electro-rock freedom that banishes the ghosts of old age, just as his viola does when it magnificently introduces the chorus of the phantasmagoric "Wasteland", or in the crescendo of surreal arrangements in the coda of the metaphysical anthem "Mailman (TheLyingSong)", which closes the album.

The great viola player finally returns with Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood (2012), with which he almost entirely abandons urban desolation and throws himself into a form of intellectual dance reminiscent of synth-pop.

Cale sounds awkward ("I Wanna Talk 2 U", written and produced with Danger Mouse, "Hemingway"), but — thanks also to the lavish production — he can still rise to hymns rediscovering his own folklore, as on "Living With You", or to meditations like "Mary", and can still indulge, to excess, in his usual avant-garde sounds, as on "Midnight Feast".

Despite the release of M:FANS in 2016 (a dance-electronic reinterpretation of Music For A New Society), John Cale's true comeback came in 2023 with Mercy, an apocalyptic blend of hip-hop, r&b, funk and electro-soul that evokes the urban-soul of Blue Nile, the Bowie of "Station To Station" and "Blackstar", the transhumanism of Tom Krell, and the sumptuous rap of Kendrick Lamar.

Mercy is a bitter, static, icy album; John Cale stages a solemn sonic ritual, aided by a number of major names in modern music: the voice of Weyes Blood on "Story Of Blood" sets free the airiest, most ethereal and imaginative melody on the record, Laurel Halo amplifies the neon lights illuminating the title track, the ambiguous seduction of Animal Collective corrupts the psych-soul of "Everlasting Days", and the decoy laid down by Fat White Family on the funk/r&b hybrid "The Legal Status Of Ice" is positively subversive.

No Copernican revolution marks Mercy, even though experimentation remains at the core of the whole project; what's certainly sharper are the lyrics (ecological apocalypse and Europe's crisis), while the sound is oily, wrapped in avant-soul textures projected into a leaden, distant future, on a par with the best pages of Hats by Blue Nile ("Noise Of You", "Not The End Of The World") or of the aforementioned Thin White Duke ("Night Crawling").

Mercy is the album of an artist aware that everything has been said and nothing has been understood; its more than seventy minutes, spread across 12 tracks, ultimately amount to a spiritual testament (on a par with the last records by Bowie or Cohen), an improbable, extreme nihilistic masterpiece that invites abstraction more than reflection.

Discovering that behind the dazzling comeback of Mercy lay a treasure trove of as many as 80 songs, written during lockdown and ready to feed into new projects, was both shocking and exciting. Poptical Illusion (2024) contains as many as 15 of these songs, conceptually and stylistically close to the refined electro-soul, hip-hop, r&b and funk digressions of the previous record, but the chiaroscuro of Mercy has given way to an attention to light and colour that partly shifts the perspective.

Cale delights in losing himself among the crowd, whispering about fear of the future, love and anger, with biting humour. Anxiety and apprehension have given way to a mild cynicism and a touch of anger — the latter more evident in some of the titles than in the actual sound: the lyrics open up to more social themes, highlighting the greed and dishonesty of the political class, while the songs vibrate with apparent lightheartedness and joy. The songs urge us to start again from our own mistakes without worrying about the consequences — "Make it happen to you in the future, a better life than your past, avoid all the mistakes we made when we were younger" ("Davies And Wales") — the underlying pop cadences are enticing and recall the brilliant album made with Brian Eno, "Wrong Way Up".

"Shark, Shark" is not only one of the two singles that preceded the album's release, but also one of its most cutting and sarcastic invectives against the horrors of modern life, an industrial-tinged blues rock number that roars like a modern-day "Sister Ray". What's clear is John Cale's knack for getting under your skin: this happens especially with the muted trip-hop growl of "Funkball The Brewster", with the dreamlike, dark "I'm Angry" and with the noir groove of "Edge Of Reason" — three tracks that, together with the digital-noise of "Company Commander" (an attack on the right-wing book-burners, as in "Fahrenheit 451"), scratch gently but leave an indelible mark.

Cale remains one of the true subverters of rock and pop codes: he blends the minimalism of Terry Riley with the sensuality of soul and trip-hop on "God Made Me Do It (Don't Ask Me Again)", offers pop lightness and wisdom on the vivid "All To The Good", and dispenses genuine romanticism over the pulsing rhythmic patterns of "Laughing In My Sleep". A couple of little masterpieces to be treasured also make an appearance. On the first, "There Will Be No River" (a beautiful poem on the cyclical nature of historical events), Cale picks up the viola again for a piano ballad in the style of Erik Satie, while on the even more striking "How We See The Light" the Welsh musician unleashes a wealth of harmonic and melodic ideas that evolve and intertwine with the same clarity as the best work of Blue Nile or Lcd Soundsystem.

The eighty-two-year-old musician from Carmarthenshire bids farewell to old age with an enjoyable, intriguing album that shows no sign of fatigue or decline. Simplicity has never been so complex, and Poptical Illusion is not just another record to file away among the curiosities of contemporary production: John Cale's artistic and expressive clarity is such that one wonders why nobody has put him forward for the White House – the age is right, and the mind is as sharp as a young man's, but then again, that too is a poptical (pop and political) illusion.

Contributions by Michele Saran (“Black Acetate” and “Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Mercy”, “Poptical Illusion”)

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