VELVET VOICE

Musician, singer-songwriter, and founding member of the Velvet Underground, John Cale speaks with Kieran Owen about rap, Wales and Lou Reed.

“I’d like to see Kokane do Back 2 Tha Clap,” John Cale starts when asked which album he’d like to see performed live. “I mean, that had such a powerful theme in it. It has the Katrina theme and a whole bunch of things. I’ve never seen him live, he came from the whole Snoop scene.”

It’s a strange feeling, that moment of panic as the recently turned 74-year-old namedrops a rapper you’ve never heard of in a voice which reminds you of your old great uncle from the farmhouse in Bancyfelin. The one who used to complain Sundays should be for church and not rugby and smoked cigarettes in bed on a mattress hiding shotgun shells.

It’s not the only time John expresses his love of rap music – he describes his current favourite artist Chance The Rapper as “loveable” and a “breath of fresh air” – which may come as a surprise to those who have only heard John via his work with the Velvet Underground, or through some of his more traditional songwriting in solo albums such as 1972’s Paris 1919.

He discusses his recent shows in Paris, performing The Velvet Underground’s first two albums – with guests including rapper Saul Williams and Pete Doherty and Carl Barât of The Libertines – and the latest rerelease, remaster and entirely new rerecording of his 1981 solo album Music For A New Society, an incredibly modern-sounding reimagining dubbed M:FANS. He speaks, too, about how the idea for the autotune and 808 synthesizer-heavy M:FANS followed a festival in Denmark which required the artist to return to a previous work. He chose the then-out-of-print Music For A New Society.

“When we came back from Aarhus, I said I’m not doing it with strings and voices any more – I’m going to do it with some hard electronics. Those were the things that I was interested in anyway. These hip-hop records, they were really elemental, a voice and two or three other things. It really gives you power.”

During the reworking, late in 2013, his old friend and collaborator Lou Reed passed away. Despite working on a number of projects after The Velvet Underground, the two’s relationship remained fraught. Did John think that Lou Reed, who wrote a much publicised review in praise of Kanye West’s Yeezus months before he died, might be fan of what he has achieved in the production on M:FANS? He laughs, “I don’t think Lou was a fan of anything I did.”

It was reportedly said at the time that John was dismissed from the Velvet Underground because Lou thought his ideas were getting too ‘out there.’ He explains, “Whenever we worked together, it was fine and that was really work well done. It was done on time and it was strong, and that was it.”

On what’s in store for his upcoming headlining performance at the Festival Of Voice in Cardiff this month, he’s just as concise and cautious to reveal: “There’ll be a lot of different things, some material I’ve never performed before from past albums. They’ll be some Velvet Underground – generally they’ll be some identifiable things but they’ll be presented in a different way. They’ll have different arrangements.”

John’s remarkable body of work also includes production credits on landmark records by Patti Smith and Nick Drake as well as soundtracks for films, most notably the score for American Psycho.

Though looking forward to returning to the capital this month, John defines his relationship to Wales as a young man in the early 60s by a sense of wanting to escape to do what he wanted to do in art and music, first in London and then in New York. While discussing his work setting the poetry of Dylan Thomas to music for the 1989 album {Words For The Dying}, he sums this feeling up in a typically conceptual light. Thomas, often referred to as a ‘rockstar poet’, fell into his alcohol-induced and fatal coma at the same Chelsea Hotel in New York that later became central to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

“I always think about why a Welshman with a background in classical music went to New York and ended up in rock’n’roll. So I went back and tried to put it all together in a different way. You get the poems and you arrange them as songs and then you orchestrate them. So that was what that exercise was about. It was about finding a contact with Wales, finding a contact with me, finding a contact with myself as I remembered myself.”

His deep, dulcet voice then explains how there’s still a bunch of tapes of Dylan Thomas poems he recorded that he hasn’t listened to in years, hinting at a revisit. Before saying hwyl fawr, it was worth asking about his recent exchange on Twitter between himself and Michael Sheen. A seemingly impromptu set of tweets regarding the Festival Of Voice has led to John trying to get the actor to feature in his performance. What does he like about Michael Sheen? “He’s had a variety of personae. I like that.”

John Cale, Festival Of Voice, St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Fri 3 June. Tickets: £34-£39. Info: 029 2087 8444 / www.stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk