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‘Hip-hop is the new avant garde’: John Cale on Lou Reed, anger and continual reinvention

He made rock history with the Velvet Underground and produced landmark albums for the likes of Patti Smith. At 82, his 18th solo outing proves he’s still at the bleeding edge

“I feel like he always wants to push the envelope,” Natalie Mering (AKA Weyes Blood) told the Guardian on its release, describing how she arrived at his Los Angeles studio to find that there were no traditional instruments, just a selection of miniature toy pianos. The latter is a song about bloody revenge that begins with the line: “The bugger in the short-sleeved shirt fucked my wife.” For a time, the uneasy highlight of his set was his transformation of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel into an extended psychodrama that often ended with him crouched, foetal-like, under the piano. It seems emblematic of Cale’s diagonal approach that, by immersing himself in a dramatic reworking of his own work, he found a way to exorcise the demons that stalked his fractious creative relationship with Reed, and, at the same time, pay homage to him.

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