John Cale review – 83 years old and still forging deeper underground
John Cale is 83 years old. Live, it would be more than understandable to find a musician of that age in a period of slowing down and winding up, cranking out the hits to please old fans. John Cale is absolutely not doing that. An early outing of Captain Hook, a sprawling avant art-rock deep cut from a 1979 live album, sets the tone for an evening that is less about delivering the obvious and more about showcasing the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft.
Sitting almost permanently behind a keyboard, Cale doesn't give his masterly viola skills an outing tonight, but he sounds in remarkable voice for a man returning after several cancelled shows and four days on doctor-ordered vocal rest. Under a deep red light, Cale and his band play a tense, moody-bordering-on-menacing take on Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel, although the heavy-handed delivery of The Endless Plain of Fortune fares less well, feeling drained of all its subtlety and tenderness.
There's a double tribute to Cale's beloved late friend and collaborator Nico, via a groove-locked Moonstruck (Nico's Song) and a deeply textural, atmospheric and moving version of her 1968 track Frozen Warnings, with the immersive sound of a bow scratching against bass strings filling the room like a dense fog. Cale forgoes the predictable once again and ends on Villa Albani, a song from Caribbean Sunset, an album so out of print it's not even officially on streaming: he turns it from a piece of strutting funk-rock into an almost psychedelic jam.
The house lights go up and masses of bodies are already out of the door when Cale and co return and those unmistakable piano stabs of the Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting for the Man ring out. As confused audience members pile back in, the band develop it into a wonderfully elongated and grinding version. By the end of its fiery and hypnotic charge, it feels almost unrecognisable from its beginnings. In his ninth decade, Cale remains more interested in forging new paths than retreading the familiar.
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New European
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- New European
Why we love whodunnits
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It makes sense that a genre that relies on predictable tropes, and whose golden age is thought to have occurred a century ago, would feel the need to reinvent itself in increasingly audacious ways. Poker Face, on the other hand, places more faith in its audience and is overall more satisfying. Natasha Lyonne stars as Charlie Cale, a straight-talking, sharp-witted, chain-smoking drifter-turned-amateur-sleuth who is being chased across the US by various mobsters. The precise reasons behind it all aren't crucial. What matters is that Charlie possesses an almost supernatural ability to detect lies, which allows her to solve the murders that always seem to occur wherever she goes. The internet had long been clamouring for Lyonne to take on a role like this. Her whole career (and I mean this as high praise) has basically been one long Columbo audition. Her spiritual connection with Peter Falk often seeps into her mannerisms, even when she isn't on set. So, when Rian Johnson (who is also behind the Knives Out films) created a detective role with Lyonne in mind, it was only natural that both Falk and Columbo would be major influences. Beneath Cale's exterior of 1970s thrifted clothes, unruly hair, and 'voice like a rusty clarinet' lies genuine vulnerability and heart, qualities she shares with Columbo, and that some of the other near-superhuman detectives lack. Cale solves intricate murders, one after the other, not because she's on the police payroll or finds the whole exercise intellectually stimulating, but driven by loyalty to the friends she's made in her travels, a strong moral compass, and, of course, her in-built lie-detector. Like Columbo, Poker Face is not strictly a whodunnit but a 'howcatchem,' in which crime and culprit are known by the audience from the start. 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