John Cale: Fragments of a Rainy Season

This is a biggie for me. One of the two live albums I know that absolutely defines what a live album should be.

It's a beautiful recording of an astonishing performance. And its honest contributes to that. Like most astonishing performances, it's not clear how great its going to be at the start. The first five songs or so are fine, but there's the odd bum note, and Cale's voice hasn't warmed up. However, don't skip forward on the CD, because these shortcomings are important to help both performer and audience find their place and get used to each other. And once you arrive at Fear and beyond there's no going back.

Cale can do beautiful and tutored, and he can do harsh and wild totally convincingly too. There's a moment in Fear where the audience start to clap along. Immediately Cale breaks the rhythm and the song careers off the tracks, accompanied by his screams, and it never comes back.

It's hard for me to pick highlights after that, because every song that follows has something uniquely affecting about it. Yet I cannot not mention the trilogy of Dylan Thomas settings, On a Wedding Anniversary, Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Time stops in the midst of this sequence.

Out of hunger to find out the ingredients of the album, I subsequently bought large chunks of Cale's back catalogue. I bought a book of Dylan Thomas's poetry (I hardly ever read poetry) and a cassette of him reading it. The CD makes me want to go to Abilene, and to Swansea. But none of the ingredients explain what makes this performance so perfect.

A few years ago I saw that a DVD had come out, also called Fragments of a Rainy Season and I snapped it up in a blink. It just adds further evidence to my case that the CD is a one-off: the DVD has most of the same songs, but it's a different performance, and it never takes off in the way that the audio does. It also turns out that you're better off not being able to see Cale. (In 1992 he was still in his fashion-junkie clothes horse period, with an absurd hair style which makes his Welsh granite features look distinctly warped from some angles.)

I've also been to see John Cale several times since I got the album. The first time was at the Belfast Festival in 1998. It was the only time I've seen him solo, and it was superb, if not quite as good as the recorded version. Then I saw him twice at Cambridge Corn Exchange (a long drive from Sheffield and back in each case), first with two accompanists, then with BJ Cole on pedal steel. As of last month, I've seen him a further three times in London, with different configurations of bands and different repertoire each time. This is the performance I always come back to. Scandalously it doesn't seem to be available on CD at the moment — and Amazon's Marketplace prices for a used copy range from £44.41 to £136.44. The laws of supply and demand should work better than that.

MusicBrainz entry for this album