John Cale and the shocking Croydon chicken incident: “I decapitated it”
For some unknown reason, there seems to be an alarmingly large correlation between musicians and the deaths of animals in performances.
Most people are aware of how Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat on stage in the early 1980s, and a handful of people know about how he managed to pull a similar stunt at his record label’s offices with a dove, but perhaps fewer think of The Velvet Underground’s John Cale tearing a chicken to pieces in front of a live audience.
This is mainly because of how much shame he feels about the incident these days, and the immense amount of guilt he feels for subjecting those around him to a poultry bloodbath. However, at the time, the Welsh multi-instrumentalist felt as though it would be quite the spectacle, and that his provocative and transgressive behaviour on stage would endear his fanbase to him even more, paying respect to him for choosing to perform such a bold stunt.
It was during a show in April 1977 that Cale took the dramatic decision to defile a fowl on stage, while he was playing at The Greyhound in Croydon on a UK tour. He’d decided that during his rendition of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the Elvis Presley song that he’d covered on his 1975 album, Slow Dazzle, that he called upon his crew to bring on a chicken, which he proceeded to decapitate with a meat cleaver and hurl its bloody parts into the crowd.
In his autobiography, What’s Welsh For Zen, Cale explained his thought process in explicit detail, saying that he had expressly told his tour manager that he wanted to do something shocking. “I told him to stop at a farmhouse and buy a chicken,” he wrote, “But put in a box so that nobody else in the band would know. However, he came out of the farmhouse holding the squawking chicken by its legs. All the way back to the Portobello Hotel, everybody in the band was asking, ‘What’s he gonna do with the fucking chicken? You’re not going to hurt it, right?’”
Cale himself didn’t kill the chicken – that had actually been carried out before the poor creature was brought onto the stage by one of his roadies, but the entire stunt was pre-arranged by the Welshman. Having hidden the cleaver away on stage, he knew that during ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ would be the ideal time to stun his drug-addled audience.
“I decapitated it and threw the body into the slam dancers at the front of the stage, and I threw the head past them,” Cale continued. “It landed in somebody’s Pimm’s. Everyone looked totally disgusted. The bass player was about to vomit, and all the musicians moved away from me. Even the slam dancers stopped in mid-slam. It was the most effective show-stopper I ever came up with.”
However, his drummer, Joe Stefko, a lifelong vegetarian, had given him prior warning that if he chose to go through with his gory antics, he’d quit the band on the spot. True to his word, he left the stage the minute he chose to slice the chicken’s head off, and while he and Cale are able to laugh about it now, he claimed that he didn’t wish to be associated with such a heinous act.
“It was a shame because he was so good,” Stefko proclaimed, “he was just getting bad advice.”
Shocking, it may have been, and it was certainly effective in getting his audience talking about such a bizarre act, but considering most were actively repulsed, not least Stefko who left and never returned, it was probably one of the most misguided stunts he could have ever performed.
