John Cale - Another View

What do you ask a legend? John Cale famously avoids speaking about the Velvet Underground, the band that defined the core tenets of 20th Century music, from sunglasses on stage (to stop the band getting dazzled by Andy Warhol's projections) to the punk rock, one-two beat. He doesn't really get on with Lou Reed, his antagonist and muse in the sixties. He is a towering figure in pop music, recording the Stooges, Patti Smith, even the Happy Mondays. It's impossible not to be a little intimidated.

Thankfully though, Cale seems in buoyant spirits, greeting The Skinny by yelling "big up big up" down the phone in his booming Welsh accent. He has a wicked cackle, somewhere between a witch and Samuel L Jackson, and chuckles heartily when asked if he's met Glynn from Big Brother on his recent visit home. At the moment, he's over in New York, recording and producing a band called Ambulance who incorporate a vocal trio and rely heavily on improvisation. After working with such legendary figures, how does the new band measure up? "Well, well," he says, "I mean there's a clear idea of what we're doing. When I worked with the Happy Mondays, I never really understood the process. It passed by in a jiffy, in a jiffy bag in fact. I'd stopped drinking and doing all sorts of other naughty things. I got a lot of flak for eating tangerines all the time. With Ambulance, I have a better handle on what's going on."

Yet improvised chaos and dissonance have long been part of Cale's bag of tricks. He refuses to boss bands about, preferring to let them play as they would live, only stepping in to record when he thinks they've hit the right groove. Before meeting Lou Reed, he played with La Monte Young and The Dream Syndicate, playing titanic drones for hours at a time through tiny, sixty watt hi-fi speakers. "It was an exercise in sensory deprivation. People would come up to us afterwards and tell me they'd been hallucinating." He started the Velvet Underground, incorporating the viola drones of his avant-garde past, because "with La Monte Young, the fun quotient was really low. The Beatles were exploding around me, everyone was making movies, all the flammable elements in society were starting to catch light." He acknowledges that the music they made was important, timely and pioneering, yet refuses to listen to it now, preferring to engage with what's around him. This means, bizarrely enough, hip-hop. "You want to talk about the avant-garde, about minimalism? You've got to talk about Pharrell and 'Drop it Like It's Hot.' It's all there."

With this engagement with hip-hop comes a whole new lingo. "That shit is wack," he says, talking about untranslatable phrases. He's recently recorded an album featuring Gruff Rhys and other Welsh stars. By using his own language, it let him use ideas that were hard to translate into English. "There are these ideas in any language you can't translate into any other. Using Welsh, we were able to talk in a way that you just can't in English."

Of course, Cale's own last album bubbled along like a Beta Band LP, of the effort he muses, "I make reams and reams of this shit every day." He laughs from his belly when prompted to discuss it. "I suppose I've always been interested in the new stuff going on around me." He loves the Beta Band comparison too. "Thank you very much, they're great," he affirms. Humour and self-parody, something Lou Reed lost the moment he appeared on Jools Holland with a troupe of bizarre yogic dancers, are key to the Cale method of working. Although his forthcoming album, Circus Live, is back to the serious classicism of his past, a double album, a sort of retrospective that starts with a drone and finishes with a drone. "It's a serious piece of work," he says, "certainly not easy listening."

Of course, Cale has always been at the cutting edge, regardless of how many sidewise moves he's made. His CV must read like a Guinness Book of Rock History. Thus far, his favourite of the artists he's produced has been Nico, the icy cold chanteuse of the Velvet Underground and sometime lover and muse to Lou Reed. "She allowed me to exercise my European classicism and was this amazingly complex songwriter. I look back on those albums with a lot of pride." For an artist of his lineage to still be engaging with all the music around him, refusing to simply bury his head in the past, sets him out from his contemporaries, The Skinny suggests. "Lineage? Now there's a word you wouldn't hear in hip-hop."