Music Arcades: John Cale: Walking on Locusts

I bought this a few years after it came out, January 1999, in the midst of one of my bouts of Cale obsessiveness. I'd seen he was playing at Cambridge Corn Exchange on Sunday 17 January, but had prevaricated about going. Then the night before, after returning from a birthday party in Buxton, I had a dream about Cale. I got up determined to go to the show. But the Corn Exchange box office was closed on a Sunday, and wouldn't re-open until an hour or two before the gig: to be sure of getting there on time, I'd have to be on the road at least three hours before it started. So I set off down the A1 without knowing whether it would turn out that it was sold out, in which case I'd have to turn back. But I had briefed M to phone the box office and book me a ticket as soon as it opened. I spoke to her from a layby (using my first mobile phone, which I'd had for barely a fortnight at that stage) and she told it was game-on. So I parked by the back of Magdalene, had a bite to eat in the Rose & Crown, now re-named, pointlessly, the Town & Gown, and then headed down to the gig.

I ordered Walking on Locusts shortly afterwards. It was Cale's most recent album at the time. And there this little romance comes to a rather anti-climactic end, for the CD has never really grabbed me. It comes across as the most nondescript album that I've heard from him. I don't hate it, since has occasional flashes of things I like, but mostly it's just bland. I'd put it down as the main reason why I haven't bought any of Cale's albums since then. Aside from the towering achievement of Fragments of a Rainy Season (which is all old songs), the 1990s were a particularly barren period for new John Cale material. He seems to have picked up more momentum again since, but once bitten…
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One of the side-benefits of Music Arcades is that occasionally you attract the attention of people who really know what they're talking about — people like RP Inverarity, whose Fragments of a Cale Season blog has been in my RSS feeds ever since he (I think he's a he) chipped in last September. Sadly it seems to have gone quiet over there in the last couple of months, but two-thirds of my way through Walking on Locusts, I decided to check what he thought of the album. Maybe I was missing something (again).

As usual, his three assessments (so far), contain much contextual and interpretive material that I had indeed missed (like Secret Corrida's basis in the Balkan conflict and David Byrne's role on Crazy Egypt). But generally RP's views of the album are unequivocal: "by far my least favorite Cale album", "artificial-feeling", "lumpen, leaden, vague, clichéd, tuneless…so banal lyrically". Well that makes me feel more confident in my originally milder disdain.