John Cale was born in Garnant, South Wales in 1942. The only child of a coal-miner and a schoolteacher, he recalls his teenage years as being filled with fantasies of either suicide or a longed-for escape to New York.
That escape, when it finally came, was inspired by his love of music - classical, avant-garde and rock 'n' roll - and his subsequent influence as a musician was to be a major one. A founding member of The Velvet Underground, Cale has often been described as one of the finest musicians to have ever involved himself in rock.
And there was creative life after the Velvets. As a producer Cale's effect on pre-punk, punk and new wave was huge and among his production credits are The Stooges and Patti Smith. He also continued to make records of his own, collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and Bob Neuwirth and in 1990 he was back with his most famous musical collaborator Lou Reed on Songs For Drella - a tribute to their old mentor and manager, Andy Warhol.
Collaboration is at the very heart of John Cale's career. In his recent book, What's Welsh For Zen?, Cale dwells at length on his special relationship with his first musical collaborator - his mother. He describes himself as being "inspired and comfortable" in her presence and explains this as the origin of his absolute need for a fellow-traveller - not just to complete the music, but to complete himself. There is little doubt that these collaborations, notably with Reed, were to produce both his finest and his most difficult moments.
' As a 13-year-old violinist Cale joined the Welsh Youth Orchestra and later moved on to Goldsmith's College in London where he met musician Cornelius Cardew. This took him yet another step closer to the American scene and soon the inspired Cale was in correspondence with both John Cage and Aaron Copeland who interviewed him for a place at Tanglewood College in Massachusets. New York was suddenly in sight and on his last day at Goldsmith's, Cale performed La Monte Young's X. Pallbearers carried a body and dustbin lids while Cale knelt at the piano and thumped the keys with his elbows. This was his final gesture and a definite statement of intent. Only in New York City would John Cale prosper.
"It was really a function of the radio. When my uncle bought me a short wave radio I just listened to Radio Moscow and Voice of America, and what was going on in the rest of the world became much more interesting than what was going on next door. So it was really about getting close to the future and not just the music. It was almost like a blind adoration of the future. It was also an abstract idea of a 24-hour society where you could really do anything you wanted."
When he finally made it to New York, it was at a time when the Beat Poets were just about still around, Lenny Bruce was still on top form and film-makers such as Jack Smith were seeing their films impounded and their audiences arrested. Cale threw himself into the undergound artistic life of the city and was soon performing with La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music and working at his own ideas of what music could achieve - a music very much in the challenging outer reaches of the experimental.
"This kind of music is not meant to be easy to get into. It's meant to push the envelope. There's nothing easy about holding a drone for an hour and a half - either performing it or listening to it. It really is sensory deprivation in the end. People come up to you and say: `Hey who was playing trumpet on that?' And nobody was playing trumpet - you were hearing things - because that's what this music does to you.
"When La Monte was in Cologne he attended those lectures where Stockhausen said you have to control and calculate change into the music. La Monte said no, you didn't have to do that at all, that the change was already in the music."
Cale rehearsed with La Monte Young every day, three hours a day, for a year and a half. The intention was to develop a brand new music but, in the end, Cale felt that Young didn't really have the desire to make the music either world-wide or in any way accessible. It was also around this time that he first met a young musician called Lou Reed who was working as a production-line songwriter for Pickwick Records. Cale was asked to join a non-existent outfit called The Primitives in order to promote one of Reed's Pickwick hack-jobs and the rest is in the rock 'n' roll history books. The Ostrich, as the song was called, was an inauspicious beginning certainly, but Cale had found both a vital collaborator and someone who took rock 'n' roll just as seriously as he did.
"It's a commercial form of classical music. Classical music is really reinterpreting or re-listening to old music. You can imagine that if some people enjoy listening to music that was done 200 years ago, then 200 years from now some people will listen to the Velvet Underground and appreciate it for what they think was going on at the time.
"Also, for me, rock 'n' roll seemed like the way to get the girls. When you turn 11 or 12 you are trying to assert your individuality and rock 'n' roll fulfils a specific function for everybody at a certain age. It's the one thing that really clicks with everybody no matter if you're in Indonesia or Russia. There's something about electric guitars I guess."
And so The Velvet Undergound began to work on their very original approach to rock 'n' roll. Each of the band brought something very different to the mix, and with Andy Warhol hovering and drugs being consumed at an extraordinary rate, one of music's most influential outfits launched themselves on New York.
"I think it was a determined effort by all of us to do something different. Lou was ready to do something different. He was fed up doing what his record company was telling him to do and he was unsure whether he could actually get his favourite stuff done. For me it was the fact it had literary connotations which just broadened the whole approach to what we could have done. The fact I had the rigours of La Monte's rehearsal regime in my head, that was the only way I knew how to go and crack this thing - and so we did it and it happened. I just realised there was a certain point when we were working that we suddenly started sounding like something I'd never heard anywhere else."
Cale dismisses all talk of the extraordinary influence of The Velvet Underground. Rock 'n' roll is, he says, based on individuality rather than influence and points out that many of the thousands of bands who supposedly sound like the Velvets, simply do not.
"We worked very hard at making ourselves very hard to copy. Yes we had our favourites too, like Green Onions and this humbucker guitar sound from Chuck Berry - but when we got down to doing our own stuff, we made it really difficult for people to copy."
Critics tend to suggest it was precisely the tensions between Reed and Cale, which led to the best work, but Cale himself wonders aloud if it really must be such a "war of attrition". His search has always been to find what he calls "the joy of completion" he once felt as a child - something rarely possible in The Velvet Underground. In What's Welsh For Zen?, Lou Reed is depicted as the villain of the piece, with Cale remarking that because Reed was born just one week before him, the older man always had the edge.
"Well, that was a joke. He has certainly has had the commercial success that I haven't had and I admire his songwriting. But The V.U., we were four people, that really didn't get along together, playing music. But one of the things that happened with us was that when we got bored with something, things happened. It was strange. If you listen to the boxed set you'll see the development that went on in The V.U. In the space of a year, it went from one thing - the folky kind of thing - into another thing which was very, very different and unique. And that was only by dint of effort.
It wasn't because we were really angry or anything - it was just a case of `let's fix the damn thing'."
John Cale plays the National Concert Hall Dublin on May 3rd.