The stage is empty and dark for several minutes, a low blue light glinting off the front-of-stage keyboard set-up, as an abrasive scree of harsh electronic noise fills the Picture House, giving one to wonder if John Cale has pinched his erstwhile Velvet Underground sparring partner Lou Reed’s take on Metal Machine Music.
It was Cale, however, who had the avant-garde chops lacking in his twice-time band-mates (both times ending badly). But tonight, all the Welshman wants to do is rock. He wanders on, with a functional three-piece guitar-bass-drum unit made up of young hairy blokes, and launches into a fairly epic instrumental piece from behind his keyboard, flailing at pre-set buttons and touch pads, clearly perturbed by some technical problem which leads to much glaring to stage right.
Surrounded by his extremely tight band of black-clad musicians, Cale himself looks as though he has just wandered in from a long lunch at the golf club. Clad in checked sports jacket, rumpled polo shirt and a pair of blue jeans that Jeremy Clarkson would reject as too unfashionable, glaring with piercing hawk eyes from under a shock of grey hair, he looks like he could be Nick Cave’s grumpy old granddad.
Cale also has little time for pandering to his audience, as befits a man who once gutted a live chicken during a performance. Much of tonight’s two hour set is taken up with new album “Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood”, performed in its near entirety to an audience who have, for the most part at least, clearly not heard it.
Cale’s new songs follow the template of much of his recent work, being chunky multi-textured rhythmic rock filled with technical expertise but little in the way of breathing space. It comes as a relief when he steps away from his keyboard (and the technical problems with which it clearly plagues him) and straps on a guitar for a punishing sleaze-rock remodelling of his classic, “Helen of Troy”, complete with new sing-along chorus of “Baby, I fucked your mother…”
All too soon, though, he returns to the synthetic textures of more recent material. Still, at seventy years old and following forty years of music production, it’s good to see an artist not content to simply trade on former glories. But still, the evening’s highlight comes with a superb 20-minute encore splicing together his own “Gun” with Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso”. Cale’s exceptional band whip up a furiously churning storm of filthy guitar riffs while he himself hunches over his guitar, reclaiming the cutting edge that has been so rightfully his and looking like the coolest pensioner in town.