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Home >  Interviews > interview with John Cale - 新作、図書館、ヴェルヴェッツ、そしてポップとアヴァンギャルドの現在

interview with John Cale

interview with John Cale

新作、図書館、ヴェルヴェッツ、そしてポップとアヴァンギャルドの現在

──ジョン・ケイル、インタヴュー

取材・文:イアン・F・マーティン   
訳:野中モモ
Photo by Madeline McManus  
Jun 17,2024 UP

“I think how much anger I could get into the record. But without people noticing it.”
interview with John Cale
by Ian F. Martin

In a career as rich as John Cale’s, it’s hard to know where to start. You could start at the beginning, in the small Welsh village of Garnant, playing organ in a nearby church and immersing himself in sheet music from the local miners’ union library. His early years in London collaborating with the Fluxus art community, or in America working with his near-namesake John Cage and La Monte Young. Creating the foundations for a whole alternative universe of rock with The Velvet Underground — not to mention fostering the parallel rock history that spun out from it through his production work for The Modern Lovers, Patti Smith, The Happy Mondays and more. Any point in his long and diverse solo career is the entry point into a story.

But for both a window into where John Cale is now and into the history that underscores it, his superb new album “Poptical Illusion” is the natural starting point.

For all Cale’s reluctance to attribute too much meaning to the album’s title, a big part of why it works is because it rings true. It’s possible to listen to “Poptical Illusion” as a pop album and it delivers right from the moment opening track “God Made Me Do It (don’t ask me again)” in the hooks, melodies, the crystalline perfection of its production — in that sense, there’s certainly a pop album in there to be found by those with a mind to seek it out.

The illusory aspect is more open-ended. There’s the sense in which all pop is the art of illusion or fantasy: that it lies to you that everything is OK, wrapping you in the comforting embrace of familiar chords and melodies that resolve just how you’re expecting them, even when relaying stories of of sadness. That’s not how John Cale does things, though. Ever since his days with The Velvet Underground, his music constantly finds ways to subvert the familiar and upend expectations. His solo career has followed a path of never letting one success become a formula. His early years took in a largely instrumental collaboration with Terry Riley and the delicate chamber pop of his well regarded 1973 album “Paris 1919”, followed by the deconstructed rock’n’roll and generally starker, lopsided lurch of the subsequent “Fear” and “Slow Dazzle”. From there, he has explored classical, avant-garde and pop extremes, never satisfied to stay in one place, constantly moving on to the next thing.

“Poptical Illusion” itself marks a shift from its predecessor, “Mercy”, which was characterised by its many collaborations with a wide variety of artists. Instead, it’s a far more musically self-contained world. There are nonetheless markers of continuity in the themes, Cale’s distinctive, rich vocal delivery, and also in his lyrics. Perhaps partly due to his early connection with Lou Reed, Cale seems like a songwriter who has never fully got his due as a lyricist, but he has a disorientating talent for telling stories that leave most of the information needed to fully understand them in the gaps between the lines. The way characters in the songs express their fears, anxieties and melancholy, rarely revealing more than fragments of the events and actions that give them context, lends this new album a literary hue recalling the queasy and untethered atmosphere of writers like M. John Harrison or maybe Alain Robbe-Grillet.

And for all Cale’s musical diversity, “Poptical Illusion” shares his past work’s sense of dislocating the familiar, from the stomach-turning lurch out of key in the middle of “Calling You Out” to the layers of distortion that build up through the catchy, looping hook of “Shark Shark”.

In advance of the album’s release, I spoke to Cale online from his home in Los Angeles (transcript edited for concision and flow):

IM:Your new album “Poptical Illusion” comes quite swiftly after last year’s “Mercy”.

JC:I’m trying to get as much work done as possible. It all started because of the lockdown. When that happened, all of a sudden I didn’t know how long it was going to be possible to get the work under my belt because there was no one around to work with me on it. A lot of people were really not around. So I tried to get as much work done as I could when I got going. It turned out that I was pretty aggressive about getting to the end of the project. In the end, I was very happy about how things were going — there were plenty of ideas around and different kinds of aggression in the music. By the time I finished it, I had a whole lot of songs. I didn’t expect it, but I was very happy about it.

IM:Compared with “Mercy”, where every track was a collaboration with other artists, the new one feels more self-contained. Was that the influence of the pandemic?

JC:Yeah. I just got to work, and I got a grip on the kind of aggression that I wanted in the music. And it just came a little bit easier. But the fact I wrote so many songs since that album was finished, and now I have this one so it’s a little easier to bring it out quickly.

IM:You say about a kind of aggression…

JC:Well that’s something that just happened because I was really anxious to get the work finished.

IM:Maybe this is a different sort of aggression, but it feels like some of the themes carry over from “Mercy”. The lyrics maybe approach it from an abstract or oblique angle, but there does seem to be this thread of an ongoing breakdown of society.

JC:Yeah, that’s one of the attractive things about writing lyrics. You have different ways of using language. The chaotic side of things are really attractive to me. It’s not just trying to fit the bill and make sure your poetic side is is ignored.

IM:You’ve said in the past that one of the great things about working with Lou Reed as a lyricist is that he was so good at teasing out the contradictions in things.

JC:Yeah, you could say that. I mean, I took it to heart. It was very important to me that chaos is acceptable.

IM:I feel like there’s also been this influence of Dylan Thomas that runs through your work in the past.

JC:I mean, I try to! And then when I didn’t quite get it together, I just said “To hell with it, I’m going to try to set all of Dylan Thomas’ poems to music!” That was a challenge. You’re really dealing with someone who has a very powerful sense of poetry, so I took what I could and tried to learn as much from it, but his sense of rhythm is just stunning. It’s just one of those things when you grow up in Wales that you… “Wow, I wish I could do that!” It’s very important… “OK, go ahead and do it! Don’t worry about it, get on with it!”

IM:It was on “Words for the Dying” that you went really hard into setting Dylan Thomas’ poetry to musig, wasn’t it?

JC:That’s right.

IM:Growing up with Welsh family, I understand exactly what you mean about the importance of his work. I mean, I think the influence of Wales generally is a topic you keep coming back to, despite having moved away a long time ago.

JC:(Laughs) Yeah, I confess to that! It’s really, once you’ve had that inkling of the warmth and generosity of that place, it stays with you. It’s not something you can get rid of just by getting angry at somebody. Especially the sense of fun. When I wrote “Davies and Wales”, that was something satisfying to me because it showed that side of humour. And “Shark Shark” too, there’s a certain frolic that goes with the territory.

IM:When I heard “Davies and Wales”, what it reminded me of was the Welsh side of my family watching the rugby in the 80s and 90s when Jonathan Davies was captain.

JC:I’ve been grilled about the tapestry of rugby sensibilities!

IM:I could kind of hear my mother crying out “Davies and Wales! Cymru am byth!” once a year during the Six Nations, or the Five Nations it was then.

JC:The Five Nations, it’s kind of scary. It’s kind of funny in a way, and full of life and joy, but at the same time, there’s so much potential there for the same sort of mistakes that have been made everywhere else.

IM:Maybe a kind of violence lurking inside there as well.

JC:No doubt.

IM:In your early days in Wales, I read that the library in your home village was very important.

JC:The library was very important, very important. I learned so much from that small, little building with one room in it that had all the books. And you could go in there and if you couldn’t find what you were looking for, you gave them the name of the book and they would run off and get it. Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, any of the philosophers, you would get within a week, but if you went and asked them for music, I would get the music from Marylebone Public Library (in London), who would make sure they got you the scores for the music. If I wanted Schoenberg or I wanted some obscure composers, they would go and buy it for you. The library was very important. It was very exciting for me if I wanted a piece of music by Haubenstock-Ramati, for instance — one of the finest, obscurest titles in the library! If you suddenly had it in the palm of your hand.

IM:The first piece of news I saw in my social media feed when I got up this morning was a story about a small library like that in Idaho that has just announced they can’t allow children anymore because new state laws make it too legally difficult to let children access books. It reminded me of the lyric on your new album about “the right wingers burning their libraries down”.

JC:I was very satisfied with that. I got a good few licks in there!

IM:But for all of this immersing yourself in chaos, the title “Poptical Illusion”…

JC:I just made that up! The thing with it was that it had a sense of humour that worked, so when I came up with it and said, “Here’s something to think about…” the other person in the room said, “You’ve got to use that!” So that covers a lot of ground, it sneaks in there.

IM:Your work does always seem to be in a sort of relationship with pop music though, doesn’t it? You chose from an early point in your career that you were going to work in what I suppose we could broadly call the marketplace of pop, so pop’s in this conversation with the classical and the avant-garde.

JC:Yeah, it’s a fertile ground. It’s the speed at which you can absorb the best things you can find in life — music and everything else. Libraries and whatever you need. These people are thoughtless: whoever these people are in Idaho are. They’ve no consideration for what is useful in life. I don’t think it ever occurred to them that you’re around here because you have a chance to learn something or absorb what’s available to you, and if you don’t take advantage of it, you’re just wasting time.

IM:I think what’s lurking behind this is almost a fear of children learning too much or a fear of children growing up. A fear of the independence of children.

JC:Yes! Absolutely! It’s shameful. It’s so stupid. You’ve got to call it what it is: it’s just ignorance!

IM:Listening back over your back catalogue this past week, I felt that an interesting aspect of “Paris 1919” was that it’s positive on the face of it but maybe it embodies the seeds of something dark that’s been repressed, waiting to come out again.

JC:I think at one point, Paris 1919 did have a life that had these uglinesses being entertained, shall we say, but by the time the album came out, I thought “What are you doing? You’ve now explained what Europe means to you, you live in L.A., you’re working for Warner Brothers, you’ve written an album that has very peculiar sensibilities in it, and pretty much what you’ve done is you’ve catalogued what it means to go from Wales to L.A. and talk about what’s happening back there… whatever ‘back there’ is.”

IM:I see. I suppose what caught me with it was the time period it references, between the end of the First World War and with the second looming in the future. And in some ways that feels like what we’re going through now, with things that had been bottled up starting to spill out again.

JC:I agree, but it’s also… it’s a set up. Are you doing this to carry on or are you doing this just to observe what’s around you? I think it’s more than that: it’s something you can’t evade. This is what we have: let’s get on with it.

IM:We’re in the midst of what feels like a bit of a dark period right now, but on the new album aren’t there perhaps places where you looking for a bit of hope or light?

JC:Not too hard. I’m not trying too hard.

IM:I’m thinking of “How We See The Light”, where the lyrics seems to touch on these little moments of empathy where the hatreds can dissolve.

JC:Hmm… I mean, that’s such a genteel way of putting it, I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet!

IM:I suppose this might be an inevitable feature of growing older in music, but “Mercy” seems like it was haunted by the ghosts of people who’ve now passed, or who you’ve worked with or were important to you.

JC:That’s the way to put it: not so much people who’ve passed but people who were important to me. You don’t know why, but you recognise it and you pray that the act of recognising it is everything that you need.

IM:Are some of those ghosts still present on this current album?

JC:I’m sure they are. I just haven’t addressed them. I think I’ve got plenty of stuff to work with, but I carry on. Because I think what I’ve done is I’ve put my finger on something in the style of writing and the lyrics, and the energy of the album itself, that’s a lot more passionate about how I’m doing and what I’m doing.

IM:Do you find something that happens is that you’ll write music without consciously addressing something and then after some time’s passed between you and the music’s passed, you think, “Ah! That’s what that was about!”

JC:Yes! Yeah, that’s what I was saying about “Paris 1919”.

IM:I remember reading a comment by Brian Eno about his first album and having a friend come up to him and say, “It’s so brave what you wrote about Bryan Ferry on that song!” and him thinking, “What? Those lyrics were just nonsense!” but then listening back and thinking, “Oh God, this is absolutely about him!”

JC:(Laughs!) Come on, own up, Brian! Come on! We’re all liars in the end.

IM:To come back to this idea of pop and how it interacts with the other disciplines you’ve experience in, was that part of your role in The Velvet Underground? To take something that could be kind of familiar, comforting rock’n’roll and to find some way of complicating or dislocating that?

JC:Yes. I mean, the dislocation was very important. No one had really done what we tried to do at that point. I mean, Lou was enthralled by it and I was hellbent on breaking the boundaries. I think we got somewhere with it!

IM:Definitely! When you moved onto making your solo album after that, with “Vintage Violence”, was there a sense where you had to learn how to write songs in that more familiar, traditional way as well?

JC:I mean, there were a few, but there were also some disjointed experiments in rock writing that got in the way a little bit as well.

IM:So is that approach of always looking for oblique approaches to something that otherwise might be straightforward and familiar something you always gravitate towards?

JC:My problem was that I couldn’t complete a verse or a song with simplicity, so there was always something that I was bumping into. I’d trip over a chest of drawers or something and I’d have to figure out what it was I was going after. And it kept going, even recently. I mean, I’m not clear-headed enough to talk about all of that.

IM:Sure. Though nowadays, with music production technology’s advances, it’s almost like there are almost no technical restrictions on what you want to do if you want to because there are so many options available.

JC:That’s true. It’s more a problem of choosing what it is you want to mess with.

IM:How about this time round?

JC:I think how much anger I could get into the record. But without people noticing it.

IM:How do you go about that?

JC:It’s kind of sly. There’s a trickiness to it. You try and approach the literature side of it in a forgiving way, and people can be pleasantly surprised by the kind of language that comes out of these songs. Not quite as understandable, which was important.

IM:It can be powerful to take a softer approach into something angry. I mean, with punk and how it evolved into noise music, it’s almost like the limits of what you could do sonically to shock reached their conclusion a while back anyway.

JC:The avant-garde used to provide this in reams, and behind it there would be a John Cage smile that would make your life a little easy, saying “Don’t worry about understanding this.” Whereas Stockhausen would have said, “Listen to this or get lost! I don’t care.” So I agree with you that the time has passed for that game. I mean anyway I think hip-hop has overtaken the whole lot.

取材・文:イアン・F・マーティン(2024年6月17日)

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Ian F. MartinIan F. Martin
Author of Quit Your Band! Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground(邦題:バンドやめようぜ!). Born in the UK and now lives in Tokyo where he works as a writer and runs Call And Response Records (callandresponse.tictail.com).

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