John Cale
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
“Modern music begins with The Velvets, and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever,” Lester Bangs wrote in 1980. Forty-five years later, John Cale’s POPtical illusion tour proves Bangs’s sense of prescience true, with an atmosphere of legacy and infinity floating around this sold-out show.
“It’s nice to see you – it’s been a while,” Cale says, prefacing the stomping Shark-Shark as if we only saw him yesterday. Backed by an incredible band, Cale sits, stately, at the keyboards, and as he folds in the sprawling, arresting Captain Hook, from his 1979 album Sabotage/Live, he clearly remains iconoclastic.
Letter from Abroad, about modern Afghanistan, tells of “fishermen smashing their boats”, which shares a universe with Company Commander and its heavy-weather instrumentation, and a muscularity that recalls Mezzanine-era Massive Attack.
Cale’s two covers confirm his restless duality. There is a deep tenderness to his rendering of Frozen Warnings, for “my Nico”. Cale takes her 1968 composition and brings new meaning to those “numberless reflections”; it resembles an elegy, as bow on bass strings fills the room. On Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, Cale reshapes it fully, revealing its bloody reality, about the death of the heart as well as body. It is dirge-like and wonderful, with a sinister grace that creeps and affects.
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When Cale revisits the past, he reinterrogates it – My Maria, from 1975, becomes a kind of lovely doo-wop, and on Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, from 1989, it feels as if he is truly communing with his countryman Dylan Thomas, bringing the poem to song, and one that speaks to Cale’s own sense of purpose. That purpose is restated on Setting Fires: “sense and sensibility, that’s all I have,” he sings as he weaves a story about setting trees on fire, and in a way himself, in the hope of answering his central question: “You wanna be alive?”
Flecks of rock opera land on the brilliant Out Your Window, which harnesses a romantic gene in Cale, with its yearning nature and driving keyboards that rattle and clank, and his voice so elegant and commanding that he could make the most mundane scene sound intense.
Villa Albani, from his 1984 album Caribbean Sunset, is completely immersive, so swampy and bluesy that it morphs into a heady psychedelic jam, meditative in its conceit, and seemingly endless; “we can keep going like this,” Cale says, rather cheerfully.
Encores are not promised in his world, but he returns to the stage, seemingly touched by the appreciative audience. “What a surprise you are,” he says in praise.
Then he brings us back to his 1974 album Fear and the playful world of Barracuda. It has always felt like a perfect melding of Cale’s avant-garde and pop sensibilities, as it’s a song that drifts and coaxes, and snaps and snipes, managing to bring a sweetness to a dark tale. And if indeed the “ocean will have us all”, this is a perfect accompaniment, and further evidence of Cale’s droll and doleful beauty.
