John Cale: The most incredible music, ever?

The converted church is an appropriate venue for this icon, the return of the original rebel, the genuine punk, the man who truly co-wrote one of the most innovative, inventive and influential periods of any NYC waves – The Velvet Underground. The legacy that is the prime rock/punk foundation as much as The Beatles’ is among the pop brethren. Ladettes and lads, John Cale, the most important Welshman since… well, Dylan Thomas. He is previewing his first album of new songs in seven years, ‘HoboSapiens’.

The 61-year-old veteran of rock and avant-garde music has never lost his touch but this could be the most accessible album he’s ever made. It is the case of turning experimental into more populist; the tracks are less atmo and novel but purely mellow they are not, this is Cale’s ‘mainstream’ with atypical detailing. ‘HoboSapiens’ is Cale’s exploration into digital-technology and adopting it into creative process that is, as always, set against a rather vivid imagination.

Although on the artistic voyage for nearly 4 decades the man hasn’t jaded… a single riff! For his new album, ‘HoboSapiens’ (what a cool Latin-isation of the worn-out ‘rolling stone’ jibe!), Cale’s joined forces with Lemon Jelly’s Nick Franglen to create another chapter in ever-expending ‘sound theatre’. The decknology of the new songs are welcomed with enthusiasm and afforded more respect than a first-impression usually evokes because everyone knows that ‘Quixotic’ – in spite of being title to another artist, Martina Topley Bird’s album, released this week – belongs to this man.

Moving between guitar and keyboards, it’s the classics that get everyone just agog and when the violin comes out for VU’s ‘Venus In Furs’ we are just putty in the heat. Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ sounded like he had lived there (and with Andy Warhol directing VU’s early career, it is easy to imagine so), or ‘Hallelujah’ as brooding as the end itself. With few blown kisses, he’s gone.

At times Cale sounds like Roxy Music, at others it’s Leonard Cohen on a depressed day, Bowie in a desert, Eno of a ‘Green World’… Yep, these are some of the people to have been influenced and collaborated with JC; he’s also responsible for producing two of the ultra-seminal rock LPs, The Stooges’ debut and Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’, as well as working with the legendary Nick Drake and, even, The Happy Mondays.

It is such a rare occasion and privilege to watch a real deal during a masterclass of idiosyncratic repertoire, a treat for broad-minded and I felt like shouting, while making mental notes about the state-of-pop, ‘End cruelty to humans!’ Try to get out behind the inner bars and look outside of that ‘sonic sewage’ the industry commonly directs mass attention to. Still, we somehow doubt the clubbing kind would get attracted by a song such as ‘Magritte’ (no, he ain’t no turntablist!)…

As his old sparring-partner, Lou Reed, remarked, “Cale’s incredible. Everybody knows that.” Concurrence, faith.
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Complete setlist:

Over Her Head
Lament
Blonde
Verses
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Endless Plain of Fortune
Venus In Furs
Set Me Free
Things
Fear Is A Man's Best Friend
Paris 1919
E Is Missing
Model Beirut Recital
Gun
Pablo Picasso
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Chorale
Heartbreak Hotel
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Wilderness Approaching
Hallelujah