John Cale

THE SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE, LONDON

Monday December 15, 2003

Rescued from his latest career cul-de-sac by an EMI Radiohead associate with clout and taste, Cale’s unlikely major label comeback has attracted a relatively sparse crowd tonight. Perhaps word hasn’t yet got around that last year’s 5 Tracks EP and HoboSapiens album saw him applying new technology and post-9/11 paranoia to the abiding concerns of his greatest work: states of loss and limbo, exile and the lonely human soul. So Cale carefully structures this 20-song set to reveal the secret, interwoven consistencies of his astonishing career.

Playing London with a full band for the first time since he gave a back-alley beating to his songbook on this same stage in 1996, he steers clear of such self-destruction tonight, instead offering focus and too much restraint?the subdued concentration of a 61-year-old recalled to the big leagues, nervous of fucking up. Trim-haired in a black boiler suit, although his long fingers splay over his keyboard like Nosferatu’s, the life-saving healthiness of Cale today no longer permits true fear or excess. Instead, he concentrates on ransacking and rearranging his back catalogue, songs standing in for psychosis.

Launching into the brutal “Evidence” (from ’79’s Sabotage) then the muffled pop of “Dancing Undercover” (from ’96’s Walking On Locusts), even tossing in a metallically menacing, crowd-shocking revival of the Velvets’ “Venus in Furs”, the set seems random at first. But its coherence, with new tunes shedding light on old, is gradually unveiled. Early ’70s evocations of exile “Andalucia” and “Ship Of Fools” bracket HoboSapiens’ 21st century dislocation epic “Caravan”. “Set Me Free”, written in the wake of the doomed Velvets reunion, is stripped to acoustic strums, and 5 Tracks’ eerie “E Is Missing” becomes a blasted dirge, as Cale moves onto more personal pain. HoboSapiens’ semi-classical, majestic “Magritte” is carved open with flashes of Memphis guitar, then brilliantly paired with its distant cousin “Paris 1919”, itself reupholstered into rasping, speeding rock.

The theoretical dazzle of Cale’s career reconstruction doesn’t, though, replace the old high-wire excitement for the considerable crowd exiting before the encores. Their loss, as 1974’s New York noir “Gun” sees him, though still shy of true abandon, at least simulate savagery. Snuffling like a hog, he shrieks, “I’ll go for your neck with a chicken wi-i-ilRRRE!”, over the stalking beat of chopping-block drums, before he spits and whooshes like a death-train stopping. More barks and snarls accompany the lonely terror of “Cable Hogue”?”you can’t leave me here, can you?” Then it’s “I Keep A Close Watch”, the threateningly tender, generation-defining No 1 ballad that never was, one more buried landmark in this secretly towering career. Cale disposes of it quickly, blows us a kiss, and is gone.

You know when someone announces they’re off their face on drugs, and after that, whether they’re “joking” or not, you notice something a little askew in their mannerisms, comments and observations? Tonight this is the case with Rickie Lee Jones. An early onstage anecdote?in jest or otherwise?colours our response, means we perceive something sinister in her slurred, erratic diction and freeform scatting. The anecdote goes: “I asked a friend what it’s like to take ecstasy, cos I’ve taken just about everything else?especially tonight. He said, ‘If you’re in an empty car, you’ll fall in love with the steering wheel.'” She dispenses with any steering wheel, and it makes for a show that’s alternately harrowingly inspired and watch-through-your-fingers disastrous.

She starts an hour late, the delay blamed on Roald Dahl’s play The Twits running overtime. Thus the bar’s still advertising “worms and bananas,

Fleetwood Mac

EARL’S COURT, LONDON

Wednesday December 10, 2003

There’s a hip young gunslinger of Uncut’s acquaintance in the audience tonight who normally writes about futuristic electronic dance music for a well-known weekly music paper. And he is so moved by this performance by Fleetwood Mac, not just a guilty pleasure but his all-time favourite pop group, that he’s in tears, with the lowing sounds that accompany proper sobbing.

Fleetwood Mac have the strangest effect on the least likely people. They’re MOR with edge. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, who turned the drama of their disintegrating relationship into one of the best-selling albums ever made (1977’s Rumours), are that edge. They flaunt it tonight. Buckingham and Nicks, the Meg and Jack White of dreamy, druggy ’70s adult soft rock, act like this is the epilogue to the longest-running soap opera in rock’n’roll. He kisses her hand. They hug. They slow dance. They sing “Say Goodbye”, one of two valedictory ballads that climax the recent Say You Will comeback set, not to the crowd but to each other as if to apologise, right here, in front of several thousand fortysomethings in sensible knitwear, for hurting each other in the name of love. Then?and Uncut shits you not?during faster number “What’s The World Coming To” Stevie plays the bull to Lindsey’s matador and, hunched forward, charges across the stage at his invisible cape with her index fingers poking above her head as horns. There is no weirder group in mainstream rock.

And this is odd music for a stadium. Buckingham, pop’s most handsome studio nerd, takes centre stage for a thrilling version of “Big Love” that is vaguely like a speeded-up madrigal, with amazing guttural expulsions at the end. Nicks classics such as “Rhiannon” and “Gypsy Woman”, meanwhile, feature fantastical imagery more suited to a rainswept beach at midnight, or a hippie-chick’s candlelit boudoir. Stevie’s voice hasn’t aged, but then she always did sound world weary. The still sexy couple duet for “Beautiful Child”, like Gram and Emmylou with a pop sheen.

Lindsey diffidently introduces two songs from the entirely Buckingham/Nicks-penned Say You Will, but it won’t be long before their latest and greatest work achieves the recognition it deserves. The fact that it wasn’t persuasively marketed on giant billboards across the globe as RUMOURS II: THIS TIME IT’S CATHARTIC represents something of a missed opportunity on the part of the record company. The blistering “Come”, with Buckingham, a much-underrated guitarist, soloing ferociously like Neil Young in Warren Beatty’s body, and the breathtakingly adventurous “Everybody Finds Out”, should be soundtracking the lives of the millions of teenagers who bought Rumours, all grown up now with ruinous affairs and catastrophic marriages behind them.

Never mind, because here comes big Mick Fleetwood?the safe base around whom Stevie and Lindsey whirr madly?lurching towards the front of the stage with synthesiser pads attached to his waistcoat like the percussive equivalent of a suicide bomber. Only instead of blowing himself up, he’s going to entertain us with a riot of drum samples. Suddenly he goes all bug-eyed and starts blurting in tongues like some Masai warrior?or something you’d cross the street to avoid at the Edinburgh festival?and, quite unexpectedly, the B&Q brigade roar their approval. Weird band, strange fans, crazy night.