Past master living in the present By Peter Aspden
All those would-be satirists who have such fun with the notion that ageing rock stars now qualify for free bus passes and Saga holidays should spend some time with John Cale.
It's not just the physical allure of the 61-year-old musician, although his radiant air of well-being is striking for one who has done his share of rowdy living. It is rather the sheer restlessness of the man, an edgy impatience which is at once seductive and intimidating. Catch him on a subject which interests him, and there are plenty, and he is away, riffing on his themes in a rich Welsh-American baritone with a disarming eclecticism, rocking back and forth on the edge of his chair and fixing you occasionally with an intense glare which dares you to disagree.
Ask him a question which he finds boring and he is even more intimidating, answering deadpan and curtly, and challenging you to follow up with a supplementary. (One doesn't. One daren't.)
As a founder-member of the legendary Velvet Underground, he has the memories, the stories, the supporting cast of characters - Andy Warhol, Nico, Paul Morrisey, Lou Reed - but he gives every impression of being simply uninterested in the anecdotal revival of those febrile times.
He wants to talk about the present, about the work he is doing right now. And, in contrast to the generally torpid output of rock music's senior citizens, it happens to be very, very good.
I put to him, having seen a brilliant performance in concert at London's Union Chapel in the summer, that he seems to be in the throes of a creative renaissance, and he has the good grace not to wince at the cliché.
"Yes, I think that is absolutely fair. And if you ask me how it happened, I just don't know. I could talk about methodology, but it is more than that. For the past year and a half something happened with my creative flow, and the way I approached my work. I became interested in playing the viola again, and the piano, and it opened up some kind of window on things."
The result is the recently released 5 Tracks EP and the forthcoming HoboSapiens album. Cale's new songs are riveting, mixing his familiar baroque balladry with a modishly lush electro-pop soundscape and some very out-there lyrics.
I say it is good to hear him playing the viola again. That mesmerising drone that characterised the Velvets' best work was as true and original a trademark of the band as the more famous Reed's languid drawl.
Cale tells me about a track on the new album, "Twilight Zone", on which he put no fewer than eight viola tracks and two drum tracks, to beef up the sound. "It sounded great, really carnivorous. And then I put a guitar on it, and it just died. A really heavy guitar, and it sounded awful. The viola stole all the power. It was fantastic."
The viola remains the most obvious legacy of Cale's classical training. Brought up in a working-class household in south Wales ("a really repressed society - you didn't play music on a Sunday, other than the odd bit of Bach, otherwise silence"), he went on to study at Goldsmith's College in London where he became interested in the avant-garde American scene.
Cale says he found those formative years difficult: "There was an awful lot going around about social responsibility, [in the wake of] the Fu{"}rtwa{"}ngler episode, when he performed for Hitler. A lot of composers were confronted all the time by this question of social responsibility, even before they made their work. And I was completely confused with this notion of where you fit in politically in the realm of creativity. And then John Cage came along. And I thought - hey, there is life after composition. There was fun in zen."
Was he listening to pop music at the time? "Only a bit of Radio Luxembourg. I didn't think the two worlds [of pop and classical music] had anything to do with each other until I got to New York. And then there was the Beatles and all that shit and I realised: I've lost my youth. But I can get it back. It is not too late."
Cale's move to New York, following the award of a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to summer school at Tanglewood, had a mythic quality, the talented boy from the valleys transported in a flash to the lower East Side. He must have felt very dislocated?
"It was deeply scary."
And how had he survived?
"I got some help. Lou taught me a lot about street justice."
And with this solitary, almost-mumbled reference to his erstwhile colleague, sometime friend, occasional nemesis, Cale draws the refinding of his youth to a sharp close.
Cale developed a taste for radical performance from the avant-garde musicians of the 1960s, notoriously decapitating a chicken and throwing its head into the audience during one concert, and earning a lifetime ban from London's Theatre Royal for an incident involving a dummy in nurse's uniform and a blood capsule. Today his live shows are still full of intensity, if shorter on grand guignol.
"I don't feel I can persuade anybody of anything unless I feel it. I can't go through the motions. Even with the 35-year-old songs, I make them sound new."
Cale has always flitted - intellectually as well as physically - between the energising New World values of New York, and the staid, decadent ways of old Europe. An early album, Paris 1919, dealt with the armistice after the first world war. How does he see the relationship between those two at present?
A glint come into his eye. "Are you asking me for my political opinions?"
Maybe, among other things, I say. Cale is a famously voracious follower of the news, and does not shirk from strong views.
He takes a deep breath. "I think that Bush is a disgrace. He has disgraced the office of the president, and disgraced America, and disgraced democracy. For a country that has had so much to do with promoting democracy and the weak-kneed press has just rolled over. I can't stand to watch Fox News. It is propaganda straight out of the White House . . . I don't know where this notion came from that Enron politics is something we all have to live with."
It is hard to stop him in full flow, but I ask about Britain's role in the Iraq war, and he is unexpectedly complimentary.
"I think [Blair] has been pretty smart. He was the pilot fish for Bush. He said the things Bush couldn't say and he did it pretty well."
None of this contempt for America's political classes comes through in Cale's new songs, although there are vignettes of post-9/11 life in New York. On "Waiting for Blonde", a bland, robotic voice intones over a backbeat: "You are New Yorkers. You are the very best."
"That was based on real characters," says Cale. "These conductors on the train, they were telling people to have a wonderful day and then using those words. They were really trying to be deacons in a church."
Cale was in his downtown apartment during the attacks of 9/11. He was emailing his old guitarist discussing tutors for his daughter when the aircraft struck the Twin Towers. The text of his email exchange is reproduced in Tim Mitchell's recent biography, Seduction and Alchemy. I say he sounds incredibly calm and lucid. Was he?
"No."
He pauses. "The question was - are you better in or out? I decided not to move. That building was not going to fall on me. People remember the smells, or the visuals. I remember the noise." It is another topic he doesn't want to dwell on.
After a brief respite from downtown Manhattan, Cale has moved back into Greenwich village, and I ask him if he feels he has put down his roots there or if he feels fashionably stateless.
"I felt like a New Yorker before I went there. Something happened there [over the past two years] which made me feel very uncomfortable. It moved back towards the mainland, and New York has never been part of the mainland. But you can't keep a place like that tied down. It will always have a life of its own. At least I hope so."
HoboSapiens is released on October 6 on EMI Records.