:00:00. > :00:14.Welcome to HARDtalk, I'm Stephen Sackur.
:00:15. > :00:17.In the chequered history of rock and roll, there have been relatively
:00:18. > :00:20.few artists who have managed to create a genuinely new,
:00:21. > :00:23.The Velvet Underground achieved just that in mid-'60s New York,
:00:24. > :00:24.combining youthful anger, musical creativity, with
:00:25. > :00:41.Today John Cale continues to experiment with new sounds.
:00:42. > :00:44.To many, his music is challenging, even bleak, but is that
:00:45. > :01:25.John Cale, welcome to HARDtalk. Hi, how are you? It's fair to say most
:01:26. > :01:29.people associate you with a particular time and place because of
:01:30. > :01:35.your musical history, New York 60 in the mid to late sixties. Yes. But I
:01:36. > :01:38.wonder if that's where your creativity was forged or whether you
:01:39. > :01:44.would look much further back to your upbringing in Wales? About yes, it
:01:45. > :01:49.would come from Wales, but I veered towards New York very early on. I
:01:50. > :01:57.mean, as soon as I started reading books about New York poets and
:01:58. > :02:01.writers, then I ran into John Cage's writings and I immediately
:02:02. > :02:06.wanted to gravitate towards... I thought that was where the new avant
:02:07. > :02:11.garde was coming from. When I talked to Cage about it, he said it was the
:02:12. > :02:17.place, but I'm not the person any more. I read about Lamont young, and
:02:18. > :02:23.I just went down and auditioned for his group. You got to the US on a
:02:24. > :02:27.musical scholarship? Yes, I was very lucky, I got to Tanglewood
:02:28. > :02:32.masterclass of competition. You were a brilliant kid, a bit of a prodigy
:02:33. > :02:37.with your music, I want, in a way, to start there with you as a kid in
:02:38. > :02:41.a pretty isolated village in the Welsh valleys, traditionally a
:02:42. > :02:45.mining place, because all of those things you have just talked about,
:02:46. > :02:50.the interest in the avant garde, that is pretty unusual for a kid
:02:51. > :02:55.from the Valleys. Year, but I latched onto the local library,
:02:56. > :02:59.there was a little library, there was a miners community library and I
:03:00. > :03:05.found I could go there and fill out a little form and say I want this
:03:06. > :03:10.piece of music by Lucketti, brand-new from Universal publishers,
:03:11. > :03:14.and they don't have it. You apply for it to see if they have it, if
:03:15. > :03:18.they don't then they will get it for you. I learned so much that way, I
:03:19. > :03:23.got all the books I wanted from Karl Marx, the rest of it came from that
:03:24. > :03:26.library. What I also take from breeding a little bit about your
:03:27. > :03:32.childhood is the incredible importance of music partly because
:03:33. > :03:36.you found it easier to communicate with music than words with language,
:03:37. > :03:39.and that is partly because of the strange thing about your mother and
:03:40. > :03:45.your father speaking to you in different languages? Yes, it was my
:03:46. > :03:48.grandmother who really ruled the roost. She was the one that really
:03:49. > :03:54.didn't think much of the fact my mother married and of uneducated
:03:55. > :03:59.coalminer. She was really such a tyrant with the rest of the boys,
:04:00. > :04:06.her boys, she got them out of the coalmine and into the education
:04:07. > :04:10.system. My mother was a teacher, she would run new programmes for the
:04:11. > :04:14.local education authority. Your grandmother was a Welsh beaker, your
:04:15. > :04:19.mother was a Welsh figure. She didn't like the fact she married an
:04:20. > :04:24.English-speaking uneducated coalminer, and it made life very
:04:25. > :04:32.uncomfortable. The progeny, she got the same. And therefore, because it
:04:33. > :04:36.was difficult for you in a sense, especially to speak to your dad when
:04:37. > :04:41.you were very young, Welch was your language and he didn't speak Welsh.
:04:42. > :04:45.Yes. Music was an incredible way for you to break through and
:04:46. > :04:50.communicate? I found it happened one day when the BBC was coming around
:04:51. > :04:53.with a radio van, they interviewed people from different schools and
:04:54. > :05:02.they came to a grammar school and they talked about the orchestra. It
:05:03. > :05:07.was all to support local towns. They found I had composed a piece of
:05:08. > :05:12.music, a piano piece, they asked for the score, I gave them the score, it
:05:13. > :05:18.was a Jakarta in the style of catch it Julian. They came back. They
:05:19. > :05:23.asked me to play the peace. I said, let me have the score and I will
:05:24. > :05:26.perform it. What happened was they didn't have the score and I had to
:05:27. > :05:32.improvise the end of the piece, and that really opened my eyes. You've
:05:33. > :05:36.got to do it, you've got to finish this piece off. So I improvised the
:05:37. > :05:41.finish of the piece and I came out of there, like, sweating bullets but
:05:42. > :05:47.I was so amazed at what you could do if you just let yourself go. That
:05:48. > :05:51.opened my mind to improvisation. Which, in a sense, takes us to New
:05:52. > :05:57.York City and the experimental music scene, which you were a huge part
:05:58. > :06:00.of. And once we start to talk about the meeting with Louie and the
:06:01. > :06:05.creation of Velvet Underground, we're into a kind of music which was
:06:06. > :06:10.pushing boundaries and which was, to a certain extent, fuelled by anger,
:06:11. > :06:16.youthful anger, rebellion. It was protest writing. Where was your
:06:17. > :06:21.anger and rebellious feeling coming from, what were you angry about? I
:06:22. > :06:24.never figured it out, I was impatient with the present state of
:06:25. > :06:32.events. I wanted to jump on ideas that were clear. Louie was a poet,
:06:33. > :06:36.he was an expert on improvisation, at the drop of a hat he could talk
:06:37. > :06:41.about what you went through that morning in the cafeteria, very easy
:06:42. > :06:49.for him. Having spent a year and a half holding... That kind of
:06:50. > :06:53.experimental music that was about holding one note and driving people
:06:54. > :06:58.crazy with that insistent sound. But you learn from it. Things happen.
:06:59. > :07:02.People would come to concerts and they would say, who played trumpet
:07:03. > :07:07.in that part, and the hallucinogenic side of things crept into the
:07:08. > :07:12.music. We were happy with that. Was it drug fuelled? When you got to New
:07:13. > :07:19.York at 21 or 22, were you taking drugs? Not at that time, there was a
:07:20. > :07:22.lot of drinking, but it wasn't until Velvet Underground that things
:07:23. > :07:27.changed. Let's look at a first piece of music, this is been as in Furs,
:07:28. > :07:31.one of the very well known and loved Velvet Underground songs, let's have
:07:32. > :07:42.a look at it, you playing it much later in life -- venous in Furs.
:07:43. > :07:52.So that is using in. Obviously in the original version it was Louie
:07:53. > :07:58.singing, and your relationship with Louie defined the two or three
:07:59. > :08:01.golden years of Velvet Underground. Creatively were you always
:08:02. > :08:07.experiencing friction together or was it a very, sort of, easy working
:08:08. > :08:12.relationship? It seems if you create him with a package, if you do this
:08:13. > :08:16.and I do that then this will happen. As soon as we had done
:08:17. > :08:23.venous, I knew we had something that would really be hard to define but
:08:24. > :08:30.it had an amazing theory of arrangement behind it. The drone
:08:31. > :08:34.worked in the nest, it would give you a tapestry behind which all of
:08:35. > :08:38.these songs... That was the idea, he would improvise the songs, we would
:08:39. > :08:42.do concerts, we would never make records we would do different
:08:43. > :08:47.concerts, if you recorded a concert, that's fine, that's what
:08:48. > :08:54.the bases... It was all about live, you weren't thinking about creating
:08:55. > :09:01.record after record, just performing live. And new songs all the time.
:09:02. > :09:06.And Andy Warhol, you were part of a scene that wasn't just about music,
:09:07. > :09:11.it was about art and Warhol and the factory was at the centre of it. But
:09:12. > :09:17.Warhol wasn't a musician, but he ended up being your manager. What
:09:18. > :09:22.was all that about? He was a Svengali. You know? The thing about
:09:23. > :09:27.Andy is he has very simplistic solutions that sounded like perfect
:09:28. > :09:33.ones. Really brilliant commercial ideas came from him. That's for sure
:09:34. > :09:37.because look at what he did with his own art. Did you want him to do that
:09:38. > :09:43.with you? We didn't know what was going on, we were just part of a
:09:44. > :09:48.scene. What we were happy about was that it was all about work. You walk
:09:49. > :09:52.into the factory and Gerard was on his knees thanking silkscreens and
:09:53. > :09:56.that takes hours of real oil. We had a place to play which is all we
:09:57. > :10:01.really wanted, we would sit down and play and improvise every day, day
:10:02. > :10:06.and we would come up with a song. That is the kind of situation that
:10:07. > :10:08.really nurtured us. I tell you what fascinates me about Velvet
:10:09. > :10:13.Underground, we all know the music because it is lived as a part of
:10:14. > :10:17.rock 'n' roll history in the last 50 years, but it's important to
:10:18. > :10:24.remember at the time while you had critical acclaim and people, sort
:10:25. > :10:27.of, saw you as an influential cult band, you didn't sell that many
:10:28. > :10:31.records. We were more popular in Europe than we were in America, that
:10:32. > :10:36.was a healthy dose of anti-American is that went with it because it was
:10:37. > :10:42.the Vietnam War era. When you think about doing anything that is
:10:43. > :10:47.detrimental to American society, you do it in the culture. Looking back,
:10:48. > :10:54.the official stat is that in the US you sold 30,000 records of the first
:10:55. > :10:59.Velvet Underground album. We are not talking gold and platinum albums
:11:00. > :11:02.here. Brian Eno, who you work with a lot, one of the most influential
:11:03. > :11:05.contemporary musicians, he said the thing about Velvet Underground is
:11:06. > :11:09.that every one of those 30,000 people that bought that record
:11:10. > :11:13.became a performer, a musician themselves, that was the level of
:11:14. > :11:17.influence. That's great, that's really influential and it was great
:11:18. > :11:21.to have that. It's great but I wonder if a part of you is bugged by
:11:22. > :11:26.the fact you came a cult, you became influential but you never became a
:11:27. > :11:30.rock 'n' roll superstar. But we never wanted to do that, maybe Louie
:11:31. > :11:37.wanted to do that but I just wanted to have the ideas. There was a
:11:38. > :11:43.meeting of the minds about the texts... The first conversation we
:11:44. > :11:47.had was who was it in novelists you like and who was the best novelist
:11:48. > :11:57.for taking risks, and talks about risks? Who was yours? Mine... Wait a
:11:58. > :12:04.minute, let me think. I remember his, he was Selby, last exit to
:12:05. > :12:13.Brooklyn, which I never read. And when I did read it, I got his ideas
:12:14. > :12:18.straight. Here's the thing, it an amazing golden moment in New York at
:12:19. > :12:23.the heart of this creative scene with Louie, it ended in a flash, you
:12:24. > :12:28.fell out and you left the band within three years of its
:12:29. > :12:32.formation. Why? There were a number of events, firstly he fired Andy
:12:33. > :12:38.without telling anybody. Andy being? Andy Warhol. He was no longer
:12:39. > :12:43.managing you by the time you walked away? Yes, then he got a new manager
:12:44. > :12:51.which was somebody trying to sell shirts, pop shirts or something.
:12:52. > :12:56.Basically, did Lou said to you, John, I've had it with you, you're
:12:57. > :13:03.out. A lot of discussions went on around the point. The manager came
:13:04. > :13:07.in and said, this is Lou's band, you're a side man, big mistake. We
:13:08. > :13:11.had gone through all this crap putting this band together and
:13:12. > :13:16.hanging on to what we had, putting to records together that we were
:13:17. > :13:20.really proud of, and we had the difficulty of going on the road and
:13:21. > :13:25.all that. Then it came down to, I want to write more pretty dull tees
:13:26. > :13:31.songs, I don't want to write venous, I don't want to do that any more,
:13:32. > :13:35.because we will have more of a chance of selling records. It all
:13:36. > :13:40.comes down to that. I said, you may be surprised to know that I don't
:13:41. > :13:46.agree with you. You're going back to folk music. He started with the
:13:47. > :13:51.acoustic guitar. We are on the edge of doing something really great
:13:52. > :13:55.here. Slowdown for a bit. But there was no slowing down and
:13:56. > :14:01.eventually... It was just too difficult. Did it really hurt you at
:14:02. > :14:05.the time? It was a shock, I immediately went into second gear
:14:06. > :14:09.and said I wanted to be a producer. You did that plenty of times with
:14:10. > :14:14.Patti Smith and the happy Mondays and a whole bunch of people, and you
:14:15. > :14:19.had big success, but you also had a lot of success as a solo performer
:14:20. > :14:24.but it seems to me in that period from the late 60s, early 70s through
:14:25. > :14:29.to the early 80s, you were getting yourself into a very dark place. I
:14:30. > :14:34.think there were a lot of drugs, the lyrics to some of your songs were
:14:35. > :14:38.just beyond bleak, suggesting, if I'm to take them really seriously,
:14:39. > :14:42.that you couldn't see much point to life. Is that true?
:14:43. > :14:53.There were definitely moments. I think the characters in all the
:14:54. > :14:56.songs, they all tended to fill trapped. They had pressures on them
:14:57. > :15:02.to figure out what the next step was. At one point he said that you
:15:03. > :15:06.two are pretty much every drug that New York City had to offer. Yes, I
:15:07. > :15:10.think it is true of everybody in the art world at the time. Some people
:15:11. > :15:15.handled it better than others. In a way that is what I'm getting at. Now
:15:16. > :15:20.that you look back on it, whether it was getting in the way of your
:15:21. > :15:25.creativity. I found that he did but I didn't realise until after I
:15:26. > :15:28.stopped. As soon as my daughter was born I said, give better wake up all
:15:29. > :15:35.you will miss the best part of your daughter's life. You make it almost
:15:36. > :15:42.sound easy, but it can't be easy? No, but I said, OK, I'm going to
:15:43. > :15:50.channel fitness. I went to learn the most difficult game I can think of,
:15:51. > :15:56.squash. And when I got through it it was clear. I was more productive
:15:57. > :16:02.than that I have been for years. All of a sudden the gates opened and I
:16:03. > :16:06.was writing loads of material. People who follow your music will
:16:07. > :16:10.certainly provide music for a new society, the old and new released in
:16:11. > :16:15.1982, as a watershed for you because it was innovative, it was different,
:16:16. > :16:19.it was kind of hard to listen to. Yes, I would imagine. It was
:16:20. > :16:26.improvised and you can hear the wheels grinding during the
:16:27. > :16:31.performance. And all the characters in there certainly felt trapped.
:16:32. > :16:34.Yes. I mean, I've interviewed quite a few artists and many of them have
:16:35. > :16:40.been through tough times and mentally have dug very deep into
:16:41. > :16:48.themselves. Did you ever come close to, you know, the thinking there was
:16:49. > :16:52.no point to a degree to which you wanted to quit work and maybe quit
:16:53. > :16:57.live? Yes, but that happened when I was a teenager. The usual teenage
:16:58. > :17:00.stuff. Sitting in front of the mirror with a razor blade. That's
:17:01. > :17:07.just something that happens to a lot of teenagers. I don't want to drag
:17:08. > :17:11.too much pain into this, but you have talked about it a little bit.
:17:12. > :17:15.Was that partly connected to the fact that you've said, as a child, I
:17:16. > :17:21.think around the ages of 12-13, you were sexually abused. Was that part
:17:22. > :17:24.of your make-up that was very dark and difficult to access? That's
:17:25. > :17:27.where you're trapped. You don't have any friends, you can't talk to
:17:28. > :17:33.anyone about it because nobody's interested. And you really don't
:17:34. > :17:41.know what to do. It's all part of the music. Because the worst episode
:17:42. > :17:50.for you was I believe with a music teacher? Yes, the organ teacher. I
:17:51. > :17:57.was learning high church organ playing, services... Yes. I think
:17:58. > :18:02.society is much more open now about talking about this. Many people have
:18:03. > :18:07.suffered what you have suffered. I wonder if you know where can I that
:18:08. > :18:14.it has coloured a lot of your music, over many years? Absolutely.
:18:15. > :18:18.I will admit to that. It comes straight from that, music. That was
:18:19. > :18:21.an improvised album and when you went down to which you have to come
:18:22. > :18:25.up with images of whatever you were talking about and they come out of
:18:26. > :18:31.where? Your worst experiences. Let's look at the second piece of video.
:18:32. > :18:32.The remixed version of one of the songs on this album that we've been
:18:33. > :18:53.talking about, let's have a look. It's interesting looking at that,
:18:54. > :18:56.because that are highly polished music video, not the kind of thing I
:18:57. > :19:00.would necessarily associated with you. But is that an indication that
:19:01. > :19:05.even some of the old songs, you are now in a different place in sound
:19:06. > :19:09.and style? Yes I think my experimental side has really cut
:19:10. > :19:17.loose a lot more than it was... I was always cautious, trying to put
:19:18. > :19:23.it in gently. As a consequence I could really take this on the part.
:19:24. > :19:29.-- apart. It takes a good set of musicians to do it. I'm lucky.
:19:30. > :19:32.Another thing that interests me about it, and it can only be
:19:33. > :19:36.discussed with the musician like yourself, who has had the longevity
:19:37. > :19:42.to basically spanned 50 years in contemporary music. You can now take
:19:43. > :19:48.some of your old songs and you can completely reinterpret them and I
:19:49. > :19:52.wonder whether that is exciting or in ways it's something you do for
:19:53. > :19:55.the fans because you know they still want to hear those songs? The
:19:56. > :20:00.original one had a lot of strength to it and I really wanted to take
:20:01. > :20:03.that strength and prop it up with a bit more and see whether there was
:20:04. > :20:09.any more I could get out of it. But he changed it fundamentally? Yes,
:20:10. > :20:14.but that's where it took me. A new product, really. And another thing
:20:15. > :20:17.you happened when you were remixing and taking this old songs and
:20:18. > :20:22.playing around with them was that he learned of the death of Lou Reed and
:20:23. > :20:27.I wondered what... With talk about your relationship, how complex and
:20:28. > :20:33.difficult it was. It was a big disappointment. I mean, I heard that
:20:34. > :20:39.he had started drinking again and I just thought, what's going on here?
:20:40. > :20:42.Because the one thing that we both really were adamant about was that
:20:43. > :20:48.the work was important. When it came to working together and writing, we
:20:49. > :20:53.had three weeks to write one of the albums... The one he wrote after war
:20:54. > :20:58.hogtied. We got down to it and it was no problem. And that was after
:20:59. > :21:01.you had fallen out but you can back together after Andy Warhol guided
:21:02. > :21:04.people thought, these guys can work together again, maybe we can get a
:21:05. > :21:09.new Velvet Underground, you albums. But it never went further. It was
:21:10. > :21:15.about the writing of the material. --As far as the writing. We just
:21:16. > :21:19.worked on it. Work was the link. As soon as it was done, and all the
:21:20. > :21:24.other nonsense that came along with it, it altered the complexion was
:21:25. > :21:33.--of everything and we were back to the same old thing. That's a
:21:34. > :21:36.horrible thing about the end of Lou. He didn't think the work was
:21:37. > :21:43.important any more. It was like... Wire? You clearly do. You've still
:21:44. > :21:48.got a passion for this work. -- why? I am from a working-class
:21:49. > :21:51.background. You're always working. You work with a lot of contemporary
:21:52. > :21:55.magicians today. You've doubled in hip-hop and all sorts of things that
:21:56. > :22:01.run around in the mid- 60s. -- newsy shins. Does the music scene today
:22:02. > :22:05.excite you? We talked about innovation, pushing boundaries,
:22:06. > :22:08.being truly creative and different. There's so much of it and you never
:22:09. > :22:12.know where you will find it. The ideas from hip-hop, they listen to
:22:13. > :22:19.some of the things that come out of Georgia, some of those things don't
:22:20. > :22:22.even approximate what you could think was behind it. It is just
:22:23. > :22:29.really rough. Raw. People coming off the street, doing this. That's
:22:30. > :22:33.healthy. It really gives you energy. You want to work with these young
:22:34. > :22:41.guys? You want to keep their in the place where it is raw? Yes. They are
:22:42. > :22:46.all good, they're strange, they got all sorts of anger at it all comes
:22:47. > :22:50.down to a really creative way in the songs. This is a really irritating
:22:51. > :22:55.question but I must ask you because I am entitled to, because I am an
:22:56. > :22:58.old geezer myself. You are in the contemporary music business and you
:22:59. > :23:01.are in your 70s and some people will say, give it a rest, give it a
:23:02. > :23:13.break. How many people have said that? ! Well, what the response? Get
:23:14. > :23:16.lost! Because? There's a lot of work to be done. I still hear things that
:23:17. > :23:20.really make me jump of the year and try that. Music has always been
:23:21. > :23:27.exciting to me. No matter where it comes from. The writing of it and
:23:28. > :23:30.the playing of it? Yes. The playing is where it pays off with the
:23:31. > :23:36.audience. There are things in the air that really change the way the
:23:37. > :23:42.music sounds and feels. It's kind of magical, being on stage. No stopping
:23:43. > :23:46.you? No. Well it has been a real pleasure having you in the studio.
:23:47. > :24:08.And he very much. -- thank you very much.
:24:09. > :24:12.There is certainly some proper winter weather out there.
:24:13. > :24:16.Temperatures have been plunging and, in some places, we've had