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John Cale pays disjointed tribute to The Velvet Underground legacy – review
Of all the bands I regret not seeing live, The Velvet Underground top the list. Serving as an antidote to the Californian flower-power of the Sixties counter-culture, Lou Reed and his New York nihilists were all about the dark din, their songs twisted elegies to heroin, sadomasochism and death. Listen to 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico and it’s clear why it’s one of the most revered records of all time, whose influence reaches from punk and glam-rock to goth and grunge. It was unlike anything ever heard before – or since.
“We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible,” John Cale, the band’s most avant-garde member, once said of the Banana Album (so-called because of its iconic, Andy Warhol-designed cover).
So it should have been a treat to see Cale – the only surviving founder of The Velvet Underground – perform the album in its entirety in Liverpool, for a one-off European gig celebrating its 50th anniversary. As a solo artist, he’s always been exciting and innovative, drawing on a capacious catalogue of styles: classical, proto-punk, unsettling electronica. But here his set didn’t quite come off. Headlining Sound City, a festival that takes place on the post-industrial landscape of Clarence Dock, he was joined onstage by several “special guests”, the most famous of whom were The Kills, purveyors of trashy, bluesy rock.
As a statement of intent, Cale opened with I’m Waiting for the Man, a droning tale of a $26-dollar drug score during which the 75-year-old aimed for the snarling intonations of Reed, but wound up evoking the adenoidal timbre of Bob Dylan. It was oddly subdued, despite flailing guitar wig-outs from Kate Moss’s ex-husband Jamie Hince. From there, the set chugged along with a gritty energy, without ever transcending what we’ve heard on record. Take Femme Fatale, for instance – here goth-pop singer Nadine Shah couldn’t match the icy insouciance of Teutonic vocalist Nico.
Of course, with songs this brilliant, the evening was never going to be an outright dud. Having observed a minute’s silence for those killed in the Manchester terrorist attack on Monday, Cale handed the mic to Fat White Family frontman Lias Kaci Saoudi, whose vocals on the epic Heroin lurched from folky tenderness to screeching chaos and back again. It was terrific.
And yet, as a whole, the night was disappointingly disjointed, lacking the coherence of Reed’s deadpan delivery to hang everything together. Welsh-born Cale, meanwhile, was weirdly muted between songs – I’d hoped for some insight into the making of the album. As such, it didn’t feel so much like a Velvet Underground gig than a karaoke set, a farrago of sorts with performers who couldn’t achieve the same magic. A missed opportunity, then.