Of all the rock'n'roll veterans who are booked to play the new Vicar St venue this coming autumn, John Cale has to be the most intriguing and enigmatic. The craggy Welshman with the avant-garde streak has never enjoyed the commercial success of his former Velvet Underground partner, Lou Reed, but the 56-year-old Cale still commands huge respect for his varied artistic achievements; these include sparse, unsettling solo works such as Fear and Vintage Violence, collaborations with Reed, Brian Eno and Bob Neuwirth, and neo-classical projects like Words For The Dying, in which Cale set the poems of Dylan Thomas to music, using a Russian orchestra.
Cale's music has been tagged "baroque'n'roll", but that doesn't adequately describe the rich, rolling breadth of his muse. Born in Garnant, Wales in 1942, Cale was a child prodigy; by the age of eight he was already composing music for the BBC. He went on to study classical piano and viola at London's Guildhall School of Music, and - if it hadn't been for a move to New York, a growing interest in the city's avant-garde scene, and a chance meeting with Lou Reed at a party - Cale's future as a straight, tie-and-tails classical musician might have been assured.
The Velvet Underground was New York's arty alternative to the prevailing hippie movement in America; with Andy Warhol as their mentor and totem figure, Reed and Cale, along with Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker, worked together on Reed's dark, dissolute pop tunes, and the unlikely combination of classically-trained Welshman and cool Noo Yawk denizen made for some of the most dynamic, discordant rock music ever made. The creative clash of personalities soon led to a split, however, and Cale was kicked out of the VU in 1968. He has since reunited with Reed on the 1990 album Songs For 'Drella, a record dedicated to Warhol, and he collaborated with the VU's erstwhile femme fatale, Nico, on the album June 1st, 1974. As recently as 1993, The Velvet Underground were reunited for a European tour and live album; when Cale was asked by the American TV chat show host, Jay Leno, why the Velvets were reforming, he replied drily: "Money". The lure of the mighty dollar, however, couldn't keep things smooth in the Velvets' camp, and the band fell apart once again, largely because Cale and Reed just couldn't get on. Nothing like a fractious relationship to keep the rock'n'roll world turning.
If you want the real John Cale, though, you need to get him on his own. Listen to his stark, almost minimalist solo albums, and it's apparent that Cale's music can often shine like burnished copper in the muddy wastes of rock'n'roll. When he comes to Vicar St next Tuesday he'll be alone again, playing superb, evocative tunes such as Paris 1919, Fear (Is A Man's Best Friend) and A Child's Christmas In Wales, accompanying himself on piano and guitar. If you want a foretaste of Cale's stripped-down live power, then get the live album, Fragments Of A Rainy Season, recorded during his 1992 world tour - it'll give you a bare bones idea of what may be in store for us next Tuesday.
"I think it's very good, in contrast to some of the stuff I've done with a band," Cale says of Rainy Season. "I've just come off a tour with a band, and it's very nice to go back and start doing the songs in a different way." He is talking on the phone from Italy, and the band he refers to is none other than The Creatures, aka Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie, with whom he recently toured the US. An unlikely pairing of punk queen and avant-old garde? Not really - having produced albums by Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Siouxsie & The Banshees, Cale is just as comfortable in the company of New Wavers and rock'n'roll rebels as he is with orchestras and string ensembles.
"I got invited to perform on a Dutch television show called With A Little Help From My Friends, so I invited Siouxsie to come and perform on it - we wrote a song together, and that was the beginning of it. And I tried to see what the interest was in a combination tour of the US and everyone seemed interested, so it worked out pretty well."
If a man is defined by his work, then the 56-year-old Cale is as well-defined as his facial features. Right now he's working on the music for two separate films, and he has just completed the score for a ballet based on the life of Nico, who died in 1998. "The idea came from the Scapino ballet company in Rotterdam," says Cale. "They thought, here was a heroine who was unappreciated - she stood for something people had not been able to define when she was alive, and I don't think they're having too much success defining it now that she's gone. She was writing songs in a foreign language, and she was a blonde model who became a very dark personality - she was very much a European figure, a cultural icon."
Cale himself is the subject of a documentary to be shown on BBC television some time in December, and there is talk, as yet unconfirmed, of a Later... special around the same time. He is about to publish his autobiography, co-written with Viktor Bokris, entitled What's Welsh For Zen?, and future projects include an opera about Mata Hari, which Cale has finished composing and is now trying to stage. Thirty years after he was expelled from the Velvet Underground, it seems that Cale's cult following is coming home to roost, and the gruff, granite-faced Welshman is finally going to be acknowledged as a modern musical genius who can straddle the genres of rock, classical and avant-garde with one sweeping arpeggio.
"They all work in very nice contrast to one another," says Cale about his varied workload of projects. "But you don't want to get away from an audience for too long."
It's difficult to get Cale off the subject of his musical projects and on to more personal matters - he's happy to discuss the electronic trio he's developing, which features guitar, bass and programmer, but less than forthcoming when asked about his personal life (married, one teenage daughter, lives in New York) or the volatile history of the Velvets. If we want any shocking revelations about Cale - such as the time in 1977 when he beheaded a chicken onstage in a misguided moment of rock'n'roll madness - then we'll have to wait for the autobiography, but don't expect Cale to rehash all the gory details which have already been well-documented.
"It deals with things fairly head-on," says Cale. "I think it's fairly honest. It'll be some journey all the way from Wales to New York. But I don't go over old ground." Cale doesn't regret reforming The Velvet Underground in 1993, even though that reunion ended in bitter recriminations. "The payoff for all that was that people could really see how much Sterling and Mo contributed to what the four of us were doing. I don't think anyone really realised it until they saw the two of them up on stage, and heard the noise which was coming from them."
Though Cale and Reed fell out once more on the eve of the Velvets' US tour, at least Songs For 'Drella showed the true creative power of this fragmented partnership. Was it important to pay tribute to their late leader, Andy Warhol, the man who sat at the centre of a strange, swirling universe of art, avant-garde and popular culture?
"We both had our own views about what happened, and some of them were contradictory, and I thought it was important to keep the contradictions. And that was something we agreed on, because I didn't remember some of the things Lou remembered, and Lou didn't remember some of the things I did. All in all, there was a lot of reminiscing going on, and it became part and parcel of that piece. So I think that leaving in all the contradictions, it was a very honest album."
By a strange, celestial coincidence, Cale and Reed will come within shouting distance of each other in Ireland this coming week: Reed is performing at the Liss Ard festival in Skibbereen tomorrow evening (Saturday 5th), just three days before Cale's show in Vicar St. Does he still keep in touch with his old sparring partner?
"Oh, yeah, I see him every once in a while. Things are very calm at the moment - it's very good." But though the pair are still on speaking terms, there's no talk of them working together on future projects, suggesting that relations between them are cool but cordial. Cale, however, is unwilling to concede that his musical collaborations may thrive on friction and personal discord.
"I don't know about friction, but it requires growth. You really want to bring out something that hasn't been brought out before, and have some kind of development, both in me and the other person. I think it's important to do that."
* John Cale plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on Tuesday
