Art rock’s veteran on his return to Wales – and why he doesn’t miss Lou Reed
John Cale talks to Jasper Rees about Lou Reed, David Bowie, his childhood in Wales – and opening the Festival of Voice in Cardiff
It’s a quirk of music history that the co-founder of the most influential US band of the Sixties spoke only Welsh until he was seven. John Cale, the coalminer’s son from Garnant in Carmarthenshire, met Lou Reed in 1964. One was a young prodigy of classical viola, the other a promising poet whose muse had been snuffed out by electroconvulsive therapy. With Andy Warhol’s support, the Velvet Underground applied electrodes to American rock’n’roll.
“Lou was aghast at the idea that somebody from Wales could come to New York and force him into making music again,” recalls Cale. “As soon as we started improvising, it happened. He was like, ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’ From his point of view, in Long Island, Wales was Moldova. We won’t go into the similarities.”
Wales won’t look much like Moldova when Cale opens Festival of Voice tomorrow night in Cardiff. A celebration of vocal music promises such novelties as Bryn Terfel duetting with Van Morrison and Charlotte Church rethinking The Little
Mermaid. Visiting stars include Rufus Wainwright, Laura Mvula, Ronnie Spector, Femi Kuti and Hugh Masekela.
“It’s the best thing that has happened to Wales in years,” reckons Cale. He has no intention of turning his homecoming into a sentimental celebration, so there will be no rendition of Child’s Christmas in Wales, his sublime homage to Dylan Thomas that opens Paris 1919, the best-known of his 16 solo albums. But the concert will have a Welsh flavour, with a couple of choirs and possibly a brass band. The latter idea came to him when he was watching S4C to brush up on his Welsh.
“My Welsh is terrible,” he says. “I don’t get very much opportunity in LA, but I can’t blame LA, it’s me. And it stirs up a lot of s---. Why did a Welsh-speaking musician leave Wales and go to America and use English as his poetic language?”
Cale’s complex relationship with Welsh goes back to his youth, when his mother spoke only Welsh to him, thus cutting him off from his Englishspeaking father, who worked nights and slept in the day. “My grandmother was the source of the problem. She did not like the fact that my mother had married an English-speaking, uneducated coalminer. That’s three strikes against him right away. So any of the progeny of that marriage were doomed.”
Cale’s escape was the viola. “I played timpani in the orchestra and I said, ‘I want to play something else.’ All the violins were gone, trumpets were gone. They said, ‘We’ve got a viola, so you can have that.’ It was like my life’s work was to save the viola from itself.”
He even thrust one into the hands of David Bowie in the Nineties at a benefit concert in New York. “I said, ‘I’ve got a song called Sabotage. There’s a little riff in it. I’ll show you how to play it.’ He was up for it. He stood there and he awkwardly played the riff. Then we went down the Mud Club and got drunk.”
While Reed and Bowie have fallen to cancer, at 74 Cale is very much the craggy magus of art rock whose eclectic CV includes producing the debut albums of Patti Smith, the Stooges, Happy Mondays and Squeeze. He shuffles in with a hint of a limp, the remnant of a twisted knee sustained two years ago when training for a skyscraper marathon in which participants jog up 75 floors of the tallest building in LA.
There will be a smattering of Velvet Underground songs at Festival of Voice, but Cale is coy about revealing more. Perhaps there’s a clue when he says: “I think Lou wrote some of them originally for me. Sunday
Morning, Venus in Furs, he wrote for me to sing. Waiting for the Man.”
Theirs was a densely complicated partnership. Cale was sacked from the band in 1968. “It was a bolt from the blue,” he remembers. “I was p----- because we didn’t figure out a solution. A lot of stuff had happened close to that time. One was he’d fired Andy without telling anybody. He’d then hired this jerk named Steve Sesnick. When Lou introduced him, he said, ‘Look, this is Lou’s band, you guys are side men.’ Big mistake.”
Cale and Reed didn’t work together again until 1990, when they recorded
Songs for Drella in memory of Warhol. “As long as we focused on the work, we were fine and dandy. When we got to perform it, it suddenly went downhill fast. Then he wants to take my name off the record? Get out of here!”
Does Cale miss Reed? “No, we’d grown apart. Around the Metallica time, I was trying to figure out, why is this person shouting at me? [Reed released an album two years before his death in 2013 in which he ranted over music by Metallica.] And then, when I learnt that he’d started drinking, I thought, ‘That’s not a good thing.’ At some point he cut the cord: he wasn’t interested in music any more. That was a shock. And when he got sick it felt like a very public suicide.”
Towards the end of Reed’s life, they exchanged emails. “I didn’t quite know where he was from one minute to the next. I don’t think either of us thought goodbyes were relevant. I found this police photograph of Stravinsky. He was busted because of an arrangement he did of The Star-Spangled Banner for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So I sent it to Lou and said, ‘Hey, you think you’ve got problems.’ He liked that.”
There’s no indication that Cale, who has had three divorces and one daughter, is losing interest in his first love. “If you asked me where home was, I’d have to tell you it’s in the next hotel room. I like surprises, and as long as I live in that vague state of suspended animation, maybe I can improvise myself into something really good. Work is more fun than fun. I’m working class, what can I tell you? My grandfather was a coalminer and a communist. The importance of having work to people who are poor – you can never underestimate it.”
So, work is a state of mind, and so is Wales. Cale is reminded of a daily ritual from his childhood that comes straight off the pages of Under Milk
Wood. “I’d go down and get my mother a paper at four o’clock, I’d bring it back and the first thing she’d do, she’d go to the obituary column, and she’d say, ‘Oh look, look’.” Long may her son keep out of those pages.
‘Lou was aghast at the idea that somebody from Wales could come and force him into making music again’
Festival of Voice is from tomorrow until June 12. John Cale plays St David’s Hall tomorrow. Details: festivalofvoice.wales