As he hits 80 and releases a softly raging album inspired by the ugliness of the pandemic years, the ever restless and eternally avant-garde musician unburdens himself
ohn Cale is wearing a priest’s black cassock and a string of pearls where the dog collar should go. A shock of white hair completes the outfit, which he proudly sports in the video to his recent comeback song Story of Blood. In it, he plunges his hands into red pigment as tinted photographs of burials and baptisms flicker by. “This is the story of blood,” he repeats, his weathered voice cradled by the warm alto of Natalie Mering, AKA Weyes Blood. “It moves all around, brings you down.
Velvet days … clockwise from lower left, Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Nico and Sterling Morrison.But the mood on Mercy is more resigned than confrontational. He’s no longer angry – he’s disappointed. “What do you do in the circumstances that we’re dealing with?” he recalls asking himself. “Do you just get annoyed, and dress your annoyance up in a different kind of complacency, or what?”
Zen took a lot off my shoulders. I mean, my background as a Welsh Presbyterian was not fed by any Buddhist ideas A grounding in eastern religion also helped him grapple with the strange new music he was making with jazz saxophonist turned minimalist doyen La Monte Young and experimental violinist Tony Conrad in their ensemble, the Theatre of Eternal Music. “‘How abstract do you want to go?’ That was the rule of the day,” he says of their groundbreaking collaboration.
If Cale’s contribution to the canon seems obvious now, it hasn’t been to him for most of his career. After leaving the Velvet Underground in 1968 he felt stranded between disciplines: should he pursue classical rigour, avant-garde experimentalism, dirty old rock’n’roll – or all three at the same time? His results were often out of step with prevailing trends.
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