Música: John Cale, the great Welsh modernist returns to his roots

Posted by Jonathan Jones

Friday 12 December 2008 07.00 GMT

Let's have a singalong. After me: "Abilene ... Abilene." Or how about, "I was living like a Hollywood, but I was dying, dying on the vine."

If the words are unfamiliar and the tunes don't come nostalgically back, you can't be a fan of John Cale, joint creative spirit with Lou Reed of the sublime 1960s musical and artistic entity the Velvet Underground. In the nigh-on four decades that have passed since he left the group - you don't hear his electric violin on late, Reed-ruled recordings such as Sweet Jane and Rock'n Roll - Cale has been a singer-songwriter, producer - and now an artist. Next year, it has just been announced, he is to represent Wales at the Venice Biennale, creating an audio-visual installation in Wales about his relationship with his homeland.

That's right, Wales. It was far from being the only reason I used to spend countless hours when I was 16 listening to the Velvet Underground. But as a Welsh teenager it was certainly interesting to hear Cale's unmistakable accent. I remember being puzzled and amazed the first time I listened to The Gift, a spoken-word composition in which Cale tells a grisly comic horror story about a young man who tries to post himself to the girl he loves. The story was clearly told in a south Welsh accent, which baffled me because just about all I knew about the Velvet Underground was that it was a New York outfit. Was this a put on? Was Reed's henchman some kind of Welsh-American hybrid? Eventually I discovered that Cale did in fact come from south Wales, had gone to America to study classical music and worked with the avant garde composer La Monte Young before meeting Reed.

When I became a journalist I had opportunities to revisit the band I'd been obsessed with as an adolescent and learn more about their milieu. In New York I met Gerard Malanga who used to dance with a whip on stage with the Velvets. I even visited Young's apartment, set up as a light and sound installation. Above all, I was once lucky enough to interview Cale briefly on the phone. His accent is still, after all those years away, powerfully inflected with deep south Welsh tones. It is a marvellous voice.

But it was Cale's musical radicalism that was his great contribution to the Velvets' recordings - the scary violin on The Black Angel's Death Song, the unsurpassed chaos of feedback that is European Son. His solo recordings allowed him to emerge more clearly as a writer, even a poet. The collaborative Andy Warhol homage he created with Reed, Songs for Drella, includes the beautiful A Dream in which Cale - once again, as in The Gift, speaking his lines - personifies Warhol describing a weird ghostly return to the Factory. "It was a very cold, clear fall night ... "

A Dream is an Anglo-Welsh poem transplanted to New York. It will be fascinating to see this great Welsh modernist return to his roots.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2008/dec/12/john-cale