Photo:
Well it’s definitely great to see that the older generation can rock out just as well as the youngsters. After "thirty years of rocking" Velvet Underground legend John Cale walks on to the sound of distortion blaring from the speakers and begins a completely mind blowing song. The audience members sit in their theatre style chairs obviously desperate to jump up and rock out. This repression seems to heighten the atmosphere in the room along with the fantastic acoustics inside the Philharmonic hall.
Cale works through a number of quite heavy songs such as 'Helen of Troy', which combines beautiful melodies with heavy bass lines, and some quality distorted guitar. Cale’s band ooze experience and their musicianship is just phenomenal. The drumming is insanely creative and eyes just seem to fix upon the drummer who sits elevated from the kit making it look effortless. The new album 'Black Acetate' explores many different sounds and styles which are on display tonight. 'Hush', for one, has an extremely sexual vibe with a repeated riff that you just can’t get out of your head. The audience seem to really connect with simple, yet effective lyrics such as "hush…put your lips on mine". The rendition ends as gently as it began and leaves the audience wanting more.
Towards the end of the gig and perhaps to the dismay of the younger audience members, the music became extremely country-like which came as a shock after some surprisingly heavy material. However, the major snag of the evening is that the audience definitely got frustrated about was the lack of communication with the audience. Some songs definitely needed at least a little introduction or title for the audience to understand where the song was coming from. This led to some serious heckling, which was funny to see, but caused a slightly awkward feeling between audience and artist. A bit more effort next time please John.
.jpg)
