“IT’S about making a noise,” John Cale tells us. “Making a noise and getting your feet wet.” He’s speaking about the attitude that feeds “Shark-Shark”, one of the standout tracks on his new album POPtical Illusion – a record on which every song is a standout. But he could just as easily be summing up the fundamental philosophy that has propelled him across a restless career spanning six decades and shows little sign of slowing down, or getting too comfortable.
Cale has seldom been less than extraordinary. The bullet points are well known. Born in 1942 in the tiny mining village of Garnant, South Wales, only child of a coal miner and a primary school teacher, he escaped the future the British class system seemed to offer through sheer talent and bloody-minded will, by winning a scholarship to study music at London’s Goldsmiths College. There, he chafed against a rigidly classical structure to seek out the avant-garde, fascinated by John Cage and Cage’s mysterious successor on the American cutting-edge, La Monte Young, both of whom he worked with when he hightailed it for New York City, en route to altering the shape of rock’n’roll forever as co-founder of The Velvet Underground.
He dented rock severely again as a producer (essential debut albums by The Stooges and Patti Smith, among others) while, as an uncompromising solo artist, he has so far notched up 18 albums, in addition to sundry movie soundtracks, ballet scores, classical pieces and collaborative works made in partnership with everyone from Terry Riley, Brian Eno and his old foil Lou Reed, to, in 2014, a flying orchestra of drones in fancy dress.
Yet even by his own prodigious standards, Cale’s current creative roll is remarkable. Following 2023’s haunting, haunted and universally lauded , is his second album in only 15 months, product of a writing surge that hit him during Covid’s darkest lockdown days – and, as
