SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT

Paris 1919: John Cale and Heritage Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London, 5.3.2010 (GDn)

 

He’s not an old man, John Cale, and he clearly has many years of creative activity ahead of him, yet there is something very fitting about a retrospective concert based on a seminal 1973 album. Paris 1919 represents the point in his early solo career where it became clear that he had an approachable side after a series of more avant garde collaborations. The start, then, of his rise to solo superstardom, making it both a poignant and a saleable reconstruction exercise.

Cale’s catalogue is something of a Jekyll and Hyde affair. He has charmed audiences with the civility of his ballads, their respectability founded on his classical training as a musician and his taste for erudite literary references. But rock and roll is the basis of his art, and he is just as famous for the moments when the veneer of civility drops and he unleashes his rhythm section.

Paris 1919 is very much in the Dr. Jekyll category, the songs lyrical and emotive without ever really rocking out. The stage setup consisted of Cale at the electric piano (no grand, more’s the pity) lead and bass guitars, drums, and the so-called ‘Heritage Orchestra’ - an ensemble of about 20 strings and a brass section of two horns, trumpet doubling flugel and trombone doubling bass trombone. The last two both got their moments to shine, but the rest of the orchestral group was strictly a repiano unit. I say that John Cale is not old, but he certainly seemed so by comparison with his colleagues; he was probably the only person on the stage who had even been born when the album was released.

The current fad for album-based concerts is a curiously postmodern construction. Once was the time that the record aspired to imitate the live performance, now the performance strives to match its timeless counterpart. Commercial pressures are perhaps the cause, but is such a ruse necessary to fill the Festival Hall with John Cale fans? Perhaps he, or his label, are hoping to boost sales of the CD transfer.

The format probably makes some sense in the case of a concept album, but this isn’t one. We are presented with both the variety and integrity of the original release, but it doesn’t quite work the same way live. To hear a performer who is so famous for extending his songs ad absurdum into crazy, disorientating jams, but here giving a live imitation of a fadeout every three-and-a-half minutes is deeply frustrating. And the orchestra don’t really add much, a consequence perhaps of the sound setup. Cale’s voice was miced as if it was a one man show, too much ego at the soundcheck perhaps? He needn’t have worried, his voice still has all the richness and clarity he needs to get his lyrics across, but the backing really suffered. For the most part, he led a muddy, homogeneous ensemble, with little timbral or textural variety.

Then, after a short break (so short that it caught out half the audience) he returned and made good with a second set that brought out his Mr. Hyde. In fairness, he is clearly committed to the album-to-concert format, and everything in the Paris 1919 set was done with soul, but this second set was on a different plane, with numbers extended into long, crazy codas, some spectacularly messy piano riffs, and an array of musical styles that spanned everything from 1973 to the present day. His Dylan number (Dylan Thomas that is) Do Not go Gentle a dark and wilfully unmelodic setting. The Velvet Underground number Femme Fatale was taken at a hard rock pace. (A few problems with his upper register here; he struggled to match Nico but it didn’t stop him trying.) An industrial/grunge reading of Heartbreak Hotel was the most powerful number of the set, and a soulful but driving Hedda Gabler (complete with his youthful string section) rounded the evening off.

With John Cale you have to expect the unexpected, and this evening demonstrated how what we came for wasn’t necessarily what we wanted. He’s got a good few other classic albums awaiting the same treatment. Perhaps the idea will have gone out of fashion by the time he gets round to it. But any excuse to hear him on the London stage is to be welcomed, just ditch the strings next time and don’t throw your weight around so much in the sound check.

Gavin Dixon