John Cale, some thoughts (Charity Shop Treasure 7)

There's been a significant burst of John Cale related activity in the Prime household since I picked this remaster of his classic 'Paris 1919' album up in Oxfam a few weeks ago for the princely sum of 99p. I’m not always up for these ‘expanded, bonus track’ versions of albums that were fine in the first place, particularly when you’re dealing with a key text in early 70’s European rock modernism as it is (think, ‘The Marble Index’, ‘Another Green World’, ‘Autobahn…’), but this version has Cale’s original album set against a full set of alternate versions with different arrangements and a more refreshingly frail, human un-orchestrated take on the finished articles. I knew this album before, of course, and the live album ‘Fragments of a Rainy Season’ is one of my all-time favourites, but I think otherwise my opinions of the Cale oeuvre have been somewhat skewed by the rather ill-chosen ‘Seducing Down The Door’ retrospective that was previously the only other Cale album on my shelves (that and the usual problem of ‘so much music, so little time…’) Anyway, it turns out that all three of his Island albums are very good, particularly ‘Fear’ (and you can get the lot on one 2-disc compilation for not much money) - and both his punky chicken-bothering late-seventies live album ‘Sabotage’ and his icy, arty early eighties ‘Music For a New Society’ are excellent (and, criminally, out of print, though easy to find on the net as a result.) I even sought out his autobiography, ‘What’s Welsh For Zen?’, which is as contrary and officially unavailable as much of the recorded work. Rather pointlessly designed in an early-nineties faux-graphic novel style and illustrated with some scratchy drawings that Dave McKean presumably submitted without bothering to finish, it’s currently out of print and prohibitively expensive second hand. The only copy in the possession of Nottinghamshire Libraries has mysteriously ‘gone missing’ from the Reserve Stock so I had to resort to an Inter-Library Loan (a luxury previously, sparingly used just for ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ and Henry Rollins’ ‘Get In The Van’) only to be delivered of a copy from Huddersfield which has unbound itself from the spine and is missing several pages…! Still, it’s a pretty good read, what remains of it, and it made a nice background for my picture…