First released in CD form in 1992, Fragments Of A Rainy Season marked a crucial, pivotal point in the life and career of our greatest living Welshman. After years of alcohol and drug addiction had turned his life into a full-blown shambles, Cale swapped whiskey and cocaine for regular games of squash and full-time commitment to parenthood in the early ’90s. Far from blunting his creative edge, sobriety and responsibility appeared to free him up to take greater risks in the studio, and brought the kind of focus that enabled him to hone his live act down to something like perfection. Gone were the days when he would stand on stage and scream at plants, decapitate chickens or harangue audiences. Through the ’90s to the present, Cale’s live performances have been less concerned with theatrical confrontation and mostly concerned with drilling into the real heart-meat of the songs in his back catalogue.
Recorded in Brussels in 1992, Fragments presents Cale in his most effective live guise. That’s to say: alone at piano or acoustic guitar, oozing a presence that brings to mind both rootless, romantically doomed Graham Greene hero and near-berserk Methodist minister. As live resum