John Cale - Musician HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk, I'm Stephen Sackur.

In the chequered history of rock and roll, there have been relatively

few artists who have managed to create a genuinely new,

The Velvet Underground achieved just that in mid-'60s New York,

combining youthful anger, musical creativity, with

Today John Cale continues to experiment with new sounds.

To many, his music is challenging, even bleak, but is that

John Cale, welcome to HARDtalk. Hi, how are you? It's fair to say most

people associate you with a particular time and place because of

your musical history, New York 60 in the mid to late sixties. Yes. But I

wonder if that's where your creativity was forged or whether you

would look much further back to your upbringing in Wales? About yes, it

would come from Wales, but I veered towards New York very early on. I

mean, as soon as I started reading books about New York poets and

writers, then I ran into John Cage's writings and I immediately

wanted to gravitate towards... I thought that was where the new avant

garde was coming from. When I talked to Cage about it, he said it was the

place, but I'm not the person any more. I read about Lamont young, and

I just went down and auditioned for his group. You got to the US on a

musical scholarship? Yes, I was very lucky, I got to Tanglewood

masterclass of competition. You were a brilliant kid, a bit of a prodigy

with your music, I want, in a way, to start there with you as a kid in

a pretty isolated village in the Welsh valleys, traditionally a

mining place, because all of those things you have just talked about,

the interest in the avant garde, that is pretty unusual for a kid

from the Valleys. Year, but I latched onto the local library,

there was a little library, there was a miners community library and I

found I could go there and fill out a little form and say I want this

piece of music by Lucketti, brand-new from Universal publishers,

and they don't have it. You apply for it to see if they have it, if

they don't then they will get it for you. I learned so much that way, I

got all the books I wanted from Karl Marx, the rest of it came from that

library. What I also take from breeding a little bit about your

childhood is the incredible importance of music partly because

you found it easier to communicate with music than words with language,

and that is partly because of the strange thing about your mother and

your father speaking to you in different languages? Yes, it was my

grandmother who really ruled the roost. She was the one that really

didn't think much of the fact my mother married and of uneducated

coalminer. She was really such a tyrant with the rest of the boys,

her boys, she got them out of the coalmine and into the education

system. My mother was a teacher, she would run new programmes for the

local education authority. Your grandmother was a Welsh beaker, your

mother was a Welsh figure. She didn't like the fact she married an

English-speaking uneducated coalminer, and it made life very

uncomfortable. The progeny, she got the same. And therefore, because it

was difficult for you in a sense, especially to speak to your dad when

you were very young, Welch was your language and he didn't speak Welsh.

Yes. Music was an incredible way for you to break through and

communicate? I found it happened one day when the BBC was coming around

with a radio van, they interviewed people from different schools and

they came to a grammar school and they talked about the orchestra. It

was all to support local towns. They found I had composed a piece of

music, a piano piece, they asked for the score, I gave them the score, it

was a Jakarta in the style of catch it Julian. They came back. They

asked me to play the peace. I said, let me have the score and I will

perform it. What happened was they didn't have the score and I had to

improvise the end of the piece, and that really opened my eyes. You've

got to do it, you've got to finish this piece off. So I improvised the

finish of the piece and I came out of there, like, sweating bullets but

I was so amazed at what you could do if you just let yourself go. That

opened my mind to improvisation. Which, in a sense, takes us to New

York City and the experimental music scene, which you were a huge part

of. And once we start to talk about the meeting with Louie and the

creation of Velvet Underground, we're into a kind of music which was

pushing boundaries and which was, to a certain extent, fuelled by anger,

youthful anger, rebellion. It was protest writing. Where was your

anger and rebellious feeling coming from, what were you angry about? I

never figured it out, I was impatient with the present state of

events. I wanted to jump on ideas that were clear. Louie was a poet,

he was an expert on improvisation, at the drop of a hat he could talk

about what you went through that morning in the cafeteria, very easy

for him. Having spent a year and a half holding... That kind of

experimental music that was about holding one note and driving people

crazy with that insistent sound. But you learn from it. Things happen.

People would come to concerts and they would say, who played trumpet

in that part, and the hallucinogenic side of things crept into the

music. We were happy with that. Was it drug fuelled? When you got to New

York at 21 or 22, were you taking drugs? Not at that time, there was a

lot of drinking, but it wasn't until Velvet Underground that things

changed. Let's look at a first piece of music, this is been as in Furs,

one of the very well known and loved Velvet Underground songs, let's have

a look at it, you playing it much later in life -- venous in Furs.

So that is using in. Obviously in the original version it was Louie

singing, and your relationship with Louie defined the two or three

golden years of Velvet Underground. Creatively were you always

experiencing friction together or was it a very, sort of, easy working

relationship? It seems if you create him with a package, if you do this

and I do that then this will happen. As soon as we had done

venous, I knew we had something that would really be hard to define but

it had an amazing theory of arrangement behind it. The drone

worked in the nest, it would give you a tapestry behind which all of

these songs... That was the idea, he would improvise the songs, we would

do concerts, we would never make records we would do different

concerts, if you recorded a concert, that's fine, that's what

the bases... It was all about live, you weren't thinking about creating

record after record, just performing live. And new songs all the time.

And Andy Warhol, you were part of a scene that wasn't just about music,

it was about art and Warhol and the factory was at the centre of it. But

Warhol wasn't a musician, but he ended up being your manager. What

was all that about? He was a Svengali. You know? The thing about

Andy is he has very simplistic solutions that sounded like perfect

ones. Really brilliant commercial ideas came from him. That's for sure

because look at what he did with his own art. Did you want him to do that

with you? We didn't know what was going on, we were just part of a

scene. What we were happy about was that it was all about work. You walk

into the factory and Gerard was on his knees thanking silkscreens and

that takes hours of real oil. We had a place to play which is all we

really wanted, we would sit down and play and improvise every day, day

and we would come up with a song. That is the kind of situation that

really nurtured us. I tell you what fascinates me about Velvet

Underground, we all know the music because it is lived as a part of

rock 'n' roll history in the last 50 years, but it's important to

remember at the time while you had critical acclaim and people, sort

of, saw you as an influential cult band, you didn't sell that many

records. We were more popular in Europe than we were in America, that

was a healthy dose of anti-American is that went with it because it was

the Vietnam War era. When you think about doing anything that is

detrimental to American society, you do it in the culture. Looking back,

the official stat is that in the US you sold 30,000 records of the first

Velvet Underground album. We are not talking gold and platinum albums

here. Brian Eno, who you work with a lot, one of the most influential

contemporary musicians, he said the thing about Velvet Underground is

that every one of those 30,000 people that bought that record

became a performer, a musician themselves, that was the level of

influence. That's great, that's really influential and it was great

to have that. It's great but I wonder if a part of you is bugged by

the fact you came a cult, you became influential but you never became a

rock 'n' roll superstar. But we never wanted to do that, maybe Louie

wanted to do that but I just wanted to have the ideas. There was a

meeting of the minds about the texts... The first conversation we

had was who was it in novelists you like and who was the best novelist

for taking risks, and talks about risks? Who was yours? Mine... Wait a

minute, let me think. I remember his, he was Selby, last exit to

Brooklyn, which I never read. And when I did read it, I got his ideas

straight. Here's the thing, it an amazing golden moment in New York at

the heart of this creative scene with Louie, it ended in a flash, you

fell out and you left the band within three years of its

formation. Why? There were a number of events, firstly he fired Andy

without telling anybody. Andy being? Andy Warhol. He was no longer

managing you by the time you walked away? Yes, then he got a new manager

which was somebody trying to sell shirts, pop shirts or something.

Basically, did Lou said to you, John, I've had it with you, you're

out. A lot of discussions went on around the point. The manager came

in and said, this is Lou's band, you're a side man, big mistake. We

had gone through all this crap putting this band together and

hanging on to what we had, putting to records together that we were

really proud of, and we had the difficulty of going on the road and

all that. Then it came down to, I want to write more pretty dull tees

songs, I don't want to write venous, I don't want to do that any more,

because we will have more of a chance of selling records. It all

comes down to that. I said, you may be surprised to know that I don't

agree with you. You're going back to folk music. He started with the

acoustic guitar. We are on the edge of doing something really great

here. Slowdown for a bit. But there was no slowing down and

eventually... It was just too difficult. Did it really hurt you at

the time? It was a shock, I immediately went into second gear

and said I wanted to be a producer. You did that plenty of times with

Patti Smith and the happy Mondays and a whole bunch of people, and you

had big success, but you also had a lot of success as a solo performer

but it seems to me in that period from the late 60s, early 70s through

to the early 80s, you were getting yourself into a very dark place. I

think there were a lot of drugs, the lyrics to some of your songs were

just beyond bleak, suggesting, if I'm to take them really seriously,

that you couldn't see much point to life. Is that true?

There were definitely moments. I think the characters in all the

songs, they all tended to fill trapped. They had pressures on them

to figure out what the next step was. At one point he said that you

two are pretty much every drug that New York City had to offer. Yes, I

think it is true of everybody in the art world at the time. Some people

handled it better than others. In a way that is what I'm getting at. Now

that you look back on it, whether it was getting in the way of your

creativity. I found that he did but I didn't realise until after I

stopped. As soon as my daughter was born I said, give better wake up all

you will miss the best part of your daughter's life. You make it almost

sound easy, but it can't be easy? No, but I said, OK, I'm going to

channel fitness. I went to learn the most difficult game I can think of,

squash. And when I got through it it was clear. I was more productive

than that I have been for years. All of a sudden the gates opened and I

was writing loads of material. People who follow your music will

certainly provide music for a new society, the old and new released in

1982, as a watershed for you because it was innovative, it was different,

it was kind of hard to listen to. Yes, I would imagine. It was

improvised and you can hear the wheels grinding during the

performance. And all the characters in there certainly felt trapped.

Yes. I mean, I've interviewed quite a few artists and many of them have

been through tough times and mentally have dug very deep into

themselves. Did you ever come close to, you know, the thinking there was

no point to a degree to which you wanted to quit work and maybe quit

live? Yes, but that happened when I was a teenager. The usual teenage

stuff. Sitting in front of the mirror with a razor blade. That's

just something that happens to a lot of teenagers. I don't want to drag

too much pain into this, but you have talked about it a little bit.

Was that partly connected to the fact that you've said, as a child, I

think around the ages of 12-13, you were sexually abused. Was that part

of your make-up that was very dark and difficult to access? That's

where you're trapped. You don't have any friends, you can't talk to

anyone about it because nobody's interested. And you really don't

know what to do. It's all part of the music. Because the worst episode

for you was I believe with a music teacher? Yes, the organ teacher. I

was learning high church organ playing, services... Yes. I think

society is much more open now about talking about this. Many people have

suffered what you have suffered. I wonder if you know where can I that

it has coloured a lot of your music, over many years? Absolutely.

I will admit to that. It comes straight from that, music. That was

an improvised album and when you went down to which you have to come

up with images of whatever you were talking about and they come out of

where? Your worst experiences. Let's look at the second piece of video.

The remixed version of one of the songs on this album that we've been

talking about, let's have a look. It's interesting looking at that,

because that are highly polished music video, not the kind of thing I

would necessarily associated with you. But is that an indication that

even some of the old songs, you are now in a different place in sound

and style? Yes I think my experimental side has really cut

loose a lot more than it was... I was always cautious, trying to put

it in gently. As a consequence I could really take this on the part.

-- apart. It takes a good set of musicians to do it. I'm lucky.

Another thing that interests me about it, and it can only be

discussed with the musician like yourself, who has had the longevity

to basically spanned 50 years in contemporary music. You can now take

some of your old songs and you can completely reinterpret them and I

wonder whether that is exciting or in ways it's something you do for

the fans because you know they still want to hear those songs? The

original one had a lot of strength to it and I really wanted to take

that strength and prop it up with a bit more and see whether there was

any more I could get out of it. But he changed it fundamentally? Yes,

but that's where it took me. A new product, really. And another thing

you happened when you were remixing and taking this old songs and

playing around with them was that he learned of the death of Lou Reed and

I wondered what... With talk about your relationship, how complex and

difficult it was. It was a big disappointment. I mean, I heard that

he had started drinking again and I just thought, what's going on here?

Because the one thing that we both really were adamant about was that

the work was important. When it came to working together and writing, we

had three weeks to write one of the albums... The one he wrote after war

hogtied. We got down to it and it was no problem. And that was after

you had fallen out but you can back together after Andy Warhol guided

people thought, these guys can work together again, maybe we can get a

new Velvet Underground, you albums. But it never went further. It was

about the writing of the material. --As far as the writing. We just

worked on it. Work was the link. As soon as it was done, and all the

other nonsense that came along with it, it altered the complexion was

--of everything and we were back to the same old thing. That's a

horrible thing about the end of Lou. He didn't think the work was

important any more. It was like... Wire? You clearly do. You've still

got a passion for this work. -- why? I am from a working-class

background. You're always working. You work with a lot of contemporary

magicians today. You've doubled in hip-hop and all sorts of things that

run around in the mid- 60s. -- newsy shins. Does the music scene today

excite you? We talked about innovation, pushing boundaries,

being truly creative and different. There's so much of it and you never

know where you will find it. The ideas from hip-hop, they listen to

some of the things that come out of Georgia, some of those things don't

even approximate what you could think was behind it. It is just

really rough. Raw. People coming off the street, doing this. That's

healthy. It really gives you energy. You want to work with these young

guys? You want to keep their in the place where it is raw? Yes. They are

all good, they're strange, they got all sorts of anger at it all comes

down to a really creative way in the songs. This is a really irritating

question but I must ask you because I am entitled to, because I am an

old geezer myself. You are in the contemporary music business and you

are in your 70s and some people will say, give it a rest, give it a

break. How many people have said that? ! Well, what the response? Get

lost! Because? There's a lot of work to be done. I still hear things that

really make me jump of the year and try that. Music has always been

exciting to me. No matter where it comes from. The writing of it and

the playing of it? Yes. The playing is where it pays off with the

audience. There are things in the air that really change the way the

music sounds and feels. It's kind of magical, being on stage. No stopping

you? No. Well it has been a real pleasure having you in the studio.

And he very much. -- thank you very much.

There is certainly some proper winter weather out there.

Temperatures have been plunging and, in some places, we've had