John Cale
John Cale is a Welsh musician, composer and producer, born in Garnant in 1942 to a Welsh-speaking mother and an English-speaking father who could not easily talk to each other. He studied viola, won a scholarship to New York, and worked with La Monte Young before co-founding the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, where the drone and the viola are his. He left after two albums and has since made solo records across six decades and produced debuts for Nico, the Stooges and Patti Smith.
Movies (3)
TV (2)
Music (7)
Where to start with John Cale
Paris 1919 is the solo album to start with, orchestral and deceptively pretty, and nothing else in his catalogue sounds like it. Songs for Drella is the Andy Warhol song cycle written with Lou Reed. Wrong Way Up is the Brian Eno collaboration, and MERCY is the late record.