John Cale’s two favourite authors
While bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were transforming music in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, over in the United States, The Velvet Underground were rewriting the musical rulebook with their experimental compositions. Their proto-punk and proto-noise rock music, best defined as avant-garde art rock, was hugely influential, although the band failed to gain much commercial success until after they’d split.
Still, The Velvet Underground’s approach to music was revolutionary, and they became staple figures of New York’s countercultural underground scene, associated with pop artist Andy Warhol and his milieu of Chelsea Hotel dwellers and eccentrics. While Lou Reed led the band with his often deadpan vocals, the band wouldn’t have been as incredible if not for John Cale, the Welsh-born multi-instrumentalist who worked closely with Reed to form the band’s first two albums.
Cale co-founded the band with Reed in 1964 after bonding over a shared love for experimental music. With their first record, The Velvet Underground and Nico, the band moved between delicate sounds, as heard on ‘Sunday Morning’ (in which Cale plays the celesta) and ‘Femme Fatale’, and harsh abrasion, as demonstrated by ‘European Son’ and ‘Venus in Furs’.
Cale also recorded White Light/White Heat with the group, which included lengthy experiments in sound and storytelling, such as ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘The Gift’. The musician’s contributions were vital to the band’s unconventional sound, having immersed himself in avant-garde composition as a student.
Unfortunately, Cale departed the band in 1968 due to creative differences, with the Reed finding Cale’s ideas a little too ambitious. Nevertheless, Cale went on to hone a successful solo career, with 17 solo albums currently to his name.
However, Cale isn’t just an avid music fan; he’s also a dedicated reader, once sharing insight into his literary tastes with The Times. He revealed that his two favourite authors are English novelist Graham Greene and French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. He explained: “Greene is an institution, the embodiment of British and what it means to be a man for all seasons — my earlier encounters with his works gave me a different understanding of how to use varied styles to expose multiple meanings to even the most standard subjects.”
“That Greene could hold the topics of political power side by side with literary power further proved the value of how broad a ‘writer’ could be if he gave himself permission to explore,” Cale added.
Discussing Robbe-Grillet, who was also known for writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay Last Year at Marienbad and directing movies like Trans-Europ Express, Cale said: “For more than a decade, I’ve been obsessed — yes, that is the term I choose, obsessed — with the book Repetition by Robbe-Grillet.”
He added: “Personally, I tend to speak in prose, loosely resembling complete thoughts (or so I’ve been told). He relies on atmospheric prose to deliver an almost obscene wealth of characters all performing the necessary twisted plot, continually morphing, changing allegiances, until it becomes clear that the exercise of trying to decipher it all is the best part! When the spy novel is more art than spy.”
