John Cale, Royal Festival Hall, review: a finely crafted last goodbye from art-rock's underground hero

Telegraph

22-03-2025

Even after turning 83 earlier this month, Welsh-born rocker John Cale showed no signs of relaxing his high-art principles in a rare London appearance at the Royal Festival Hall.
From a background in classical and avant-garde minimalism, Cale helped revolutionise pop music in the late 1960s in The Velvet Underground, the radical New York City ensemble bankrolled by Pop Artist Andy Warhol, where he wrought sonic havoc on the songs of Lou Reed with his droning viola and uncompromising aesthetics.
His relationship with that music, long since enshrined in rock history's uppermost pantheon, has always been prickly at best. Though he has characterised his collaboration with Reed as 'that once-in-a-lifetime perfect fit', an early-1990s Velvets reunion proved fractious, and fleeting. While it arguably kickstarted 'heritage rock', Cale himself has never hidden his contempt for lazy nostalgia.
He has remained cravenly forward-facing, and expectation-refuting, and it would have been a shock if he'd suddenly started showboating on this latest tour, which, of course, may prove to be his last. Not for him an album-in-full jaunt à la Patti Smith, who tours this coming autumn with Horses, the 1975 proto-punk classic that Cale himself produced.
When the octogenarian avant-classical sage first materialised onstage, he stood at the front with an electric guitar – rarely, if ever, his favoured instrument – applying a textural strum to Shark-Shark from last year's POPtical Illusion, the second of two albums whittled down from some 80 songs that he composed during the pandemic.
While garish floor-to-ceiling movies blitzed behind, he soon settled at a Kurzweil keyboard and led his three-piece trio through a 100-minute set-list, voicing with a keening mid-Atlantic tenor and peering through school-masterly spectacles to pick out deliberate chords.
Where, say, Bob Dylan expresses his showbiz disdain with nightly mutilations of his most popular tunes, Cale simply bypasses his in favour of 'deep cuts' in lively new renderings.
Earlier in the evening, there was The Endless Plain of Fortune from 1973's Paris 1919, its skipping piano construction emblematic of this restless creative's mission to break free of rock cliché. There followed his near-comically deconstructed stab at Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, and heads-down, often improv-leaning nuggets such as My Maria, its original chunky riffing from Roxy Music's Chris Spedding subjected to a 'shredding' makeover by this trio's guitarist, Dustin Boyer.
The highlight, possibly, was Frozen Warnings from The Marble Index, the torrid 1968 collaborative masterpiece he made with his fellow Velvet Underground alumna, Nico. It drifted by in a sublimely dreamy haze, with bassist Joey Maramba eliciting a low-end drone with a violin bow that mirrored Cale's methods of old, but without emotive reminiscence about another fallen associate.
Soon, Cale was hustling his trio off the stage, and, as the audience perhaps sensed that this may be goodbye rather than au revoir, the Festival Hall filled with urgent cries for an oft-aired encore of the Velvets's I'm Waiting for the Man. Then, the lights went up, and Cale's austere vision of artistry remained intact to the last.