Latest news with #JohnCale
Time Out
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Adelaide's largest light festival has unveiled a dazzling 2025 program that rivals Vivid
One thing's clear about Adelaide lately: the city is gunning to equal Melbourne and Sydney's status as year-round cultural capitals of Australia. And what better way to cement that status than by hosting an after-dark winter festival to rival those on the East Coast. Illuminate Adelaide is set to literally and figuratively light up the South Australian capital from July 2 to 20 in its fifth year, with 134 free and ticketed events. The 2025 program features nine world premieres and 23 Aussie exclusives, including a new immersive journey at Adelaide Botanic Garden, a debut drone show over Adelaide Oval, an electrifying 12-hour music festival and an all-new culinary program. If you're after some free, after-dark fun, Illuminate Adelaide has got you covered with its annual City Lights display. More than 40 projections and installations will light up the CBD from July 4 to 20, switching on at 5.30pm every night. Each large-scale projection will showcase the talents of local and international artists, brightening landmarks like the Art Gallery of South Australia, State Library and Adelaide Railway Station. Once you've worked up an appetite, head over to Base Camp at Lot Fourteen, the festival's central hub, where you can hydrate, refuel and enjoy family-friendly performances. Or enjoy winter warmers at Adelaide Central Market, which will also come alive with immersive art installations and fresh acts. What has us most excited in 2025 is Horizons, a one-night-only world premiere that will transform Adelaide Oval into a living canvas using hundreds of glowing drones. Taking place on the banks of Karrawirra Parri / River Torrens, Horizons will take you on an incredible 60,000-year journey through South Australia's past, present and future. Another Illuminate Adelaide exclusive is Night Visions, a brand-new, multi-sensory light trail in Adelaide Botanic Garden, featuring cutting-edge lasers, projections and sound. Other ticketed highlights include 10-Minute Dance Party – an immersive, DJ-powered experience inside a shipping container; Universal Kingdom: The Next Era – a prehistoric after-dark adventure at Adelaide Zoo; Offline Club – a series of Dutch digital detox experiences; and Unsound Adelaide – the Southern Hemisphere's only outpost of Europe's cult experimental music festival, featuring legendary Velvet Underground founding member John Cale and more. Debuting in 2025, Illuminate Adelaide will unveil a brand-new culinary program, offering exclusive dining experiences at Adelaide's top restaurants and bars, including 2KW, Aurora, Station Road and NOLA. The festival will also launch Supersonic – a fresh, 12-hour music festival taking over the city's West End for one night only. And that's just a taster of the music program this year... Illuminate Adelaide draws millions of people out of their winter hibernation each year, and we suggest you join them in 2025. Tickets go live at 9am on Wednesday, April 30. You can explore the full program here.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
John Cale, Royal Festival Hall, review: a finely crafted last goodbye from art-rock's underground hero
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.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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.
