Cale Force Wind
To mark the 20th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s death, Velvet Underground legend John Cale is playing a commemorative concert in the IMMA.
Peter Murphy, 22 Oct 2007
Y’know, the situation has been repeated in a lot of cities around the world,” Cale says on the eve of his band's Some Days Never End rehearsals in New York. “It seems to be always going on, and they’re happening more often. It used be once every few years there’d be a huge Warhol retrospective. People are hooking up in different ways: some people are doing it with film, some people are doing it with art. A lot of people are really worried that some of that art would not hold up, that it would decay. Not what the ideas were, but the actual objects themselves, like brillo boxes. And I’m thinking, y’know, ‘We were sitting on those things when we were at the Factory!’”
So is Cale still a New York resident?
“No, I move around so much, I mean my daughter’s in New York still and I spend a lot of time there, but right now I just came here to rehearse the band. I’ve gotten a little more solidified in the group of people that I work with, and they really come to terms with the demands of what going on the road with me is all about, y’know, you don’t have to tell them very much what to do, and also they can experiment a lot. You can definitely hear it on Live Circus, that whole CD was built around it. You can hear everybody’s minds creaking, thinking all the time. We have fun up there.”
Cale’s Kilmainham appearance is billed as an ‘acoustimatic’ set, which, he explains, is a hybrid between his fabled solo shows and full-on electric incarnation.
“Y’know, I’m not on tour, so if you’re going to do one concert, you can focus on it being different from all the others,” he reflects. “There’s a part of the set that we do on tour that breaks down into an acoustic combination, but I’ve added some other things, doing material that I don’t do with the rock band. It’s going to be interesting to see how the acoustics and the electronics work this time. If I’m going to do one-off shows like this one in Dublin, then I’d rather do one that gives you something you haven’t heard before. I’m very uncomfortable doing the same things all the time anyway, it sort of makes me twitchy.”
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