I spent an afternoon with the dark lord of the New York avant garde in a Kensington basement. Got some great stories, as I hoped, about his work on The Stooges, Iggy and Nico etc. He’s a sensitive soul, though...
PT: All the albums you’ve produced seem to have an edge of madness - but there’s a kind of logic to them, too. Is that you?
JC:... which ones?
PT: The Stooges, Marble Index, Horses...
JC: I have no idea. I just.. I mean, the word logical has all sorts of downside connotations in that they’re not different. I’m trying to get what you’re saying , that they’re orthodox.
PT: No, I mean there’s a kind of clarity there. The Stooges’ first album is mad, but precise and targeted, you can hear every element clearly, the Nico stuff is intense but there’s an European intellectualism to it, Horses is a punk album but it has an intellectual element to it too...
JC: Yeah, well I did choose to work with all of them them. I was intrigued about what that element, the monotony element in the Stooges was, it was just a nice ominous rock’n’roll... [but] if you’re saying they sound similar, you’re saying that there’s a conservatism there, there certainly didn’t seem a conservatism… For all I know I could be a consummate record company man, I know what they want, I know what they are doing and there you go… um.. I still think.. I would like to think there was a little pushing of the boundaries.
We continued in this vein for a while, with Cale defending himself against charges of musical conservatism I’d never made. In the end I placated him by reminding him how, in the ‘80s, I’d attempted to get him to produce my band. In the end, though, the Welsh bard betrayed my outfit for our Beggars Banquet label-mates, goth twin duo Gene Loves Jezebel. Funny how that album doesn’t crop up too often on the Cale CV. Bastard!