First off, it’s properly rammo in the Wales Millennium Centre’s big theatre for John Cale’s Llais 2022 opener – notwithstanding the perpetually low lighting, I couldn’t see an unoccupied seat from my vantage point. This is a tonic, you’d imagine, for Llais, which under its pre-rebrand name Festival Of Voice didn’t exactly pack them in with its 2021 programme. Most seats this evening cost £20, which is a stone bargain for a unique two-hour concert by someone who many would call the most important Welsh musician of all time.
John Cale’s cornerstone performance promised “special guests” when announced in July, confirmed as James Dean Bradfield, Cate Le Bon and Gruff Rhys earlier in October. It probably nudged ticket sales a little (audience reactions suggest there are card-carrying fans of JDB and Gruff present) but this still would have been a fine show without them. Cate is up first with renditions of Gideon’s Bible and Ghost Story; Bradfield sings Buffalo Ballet and Ship Of Fools, two songs from Cale’s Fear LP. (Cale joins him on acoustic guitar for the second of those, otherwise seated behind his keyboard for the duration.)
Gruff’s pair, Dead Or Alive and the obscure Jack The Ripper, are given brassy technicolour treatment by Sinfonia Cymru and end up sounding like novelty mid-90s Britpop, which isn’t optimal. The orchestra’s involvement takes various forms and sometimes none – Guts is a blessedly unadorned rocker, more protopunk than the original – and, for my possibly unrepresentative two cents, I could have enjoyed plenty more incidents of stormy massed atonality like we get on the soon-released Mercy and (of all things) Cale’s cover of Heartbreak Hotel.
The Endless Plain Of Fortune, the second song in the set, is a brilliant pop song in its original incarnation on 1973’s superlative Paris 1919 LP, both ornate and understated in its arrangements. It’s to Cale’s credit that tasking an actual orchestra with buffing it up is doomed to… not fail, but fall short of the platonic ideal for this exercise. Two other songs from that same album, Half Past France and Hanky Panky Nohow, are played relatively faithfully.
This might be one of the few places the currently-touring Cale can play where attendees don’t necessarily think of him as the guy from the Velvet Underground above everything else. Which is to say that the evening’s two references to that group – a rebuilt version of I’m Waiting For The Man and a lyric from Style It Takes, originally a late-80s duet with Lou Reed – are perhaps less of the essence than his interpolation of Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. At the other end of both the concert and the scale of solemnity, Cale and a gospel choir see us off with his ludicrous high-society pervert anthem Ooh La La and a pledge to see us again soon. In his ninth decade, any further activity would be an added-time bonus, but this evening was an objectively good and worthwhile exercise.
Llais: John Cale & Sinfonia Cymru, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Fri 28 Oct
words NOEL GARDNER photos POLLY THOMAS
