John Cale announces first UK tour in almost a decade
The Velvet Underground man hits the road in July
By Joe Goggins
John Cale will tour the UK this summer – his first full run of dates in the country for nine years.
The Velvet Underground legend will play seven shows in July, taking in Liverpool, Whitley Bay, York, Bexhill-on-Sea, Cambridge, London and Birmingham. He hasn’t hit the road in earnest in Britain since the UK leg of his ‘Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood’ European tour in October 2012.
In the interim, Cale has played one-offs here and there, including a show at Liverpool’s Sound City Festival in 2017 that marked the 50th anniversary of ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’. He was joined by an array of special guests, including The Kills, Wild Beasts, and Fat White Family. He played a couple of shows in Brooklyn later that year to round off the anniversary celebrations, collaborating at those with MGMT, Sky Ferreira, Animal Collective, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, Kurt Vile, Oh Sees, Connan Mockasin and Caroline Polachek.
The multi-instrumental avant-gardist will “perform songs from throughout his career, which is now in its sixth decade, and has earned him an international reputation as a musical pioneer”. Cale has 16 solo albums to draw from, in addition to The Velvet Underground’s oeuvre and four collaborative full-lengths from over the years, having made records with Terry Riley, Lou Reed, Brian Eno and Bob Neuwirth. The full UK tour dates are beow.
Last year, Cale was featured extensively in ‘The Velvet Underground’, Todd Haynes’ acclaimed, career-spanning documentary on the icons of New York City sixties cool, offering fresh insight into his Welsh upbringing, his fractious relationship with Reed, and the band’s synergy with Andy Warhol’s pop-art scene. In related news, Netflix this week dropped the first trailer for the six-part Warhol documentary, ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’, which will see the legendary art figure read from his journals from beyond the grave thanks to an AI-generated voice.
John Cale, July 2022:
15 – Liverpool, Philharmonic Hall
18 – Whitley Bay, The Playhouse
19 – York, Barbican
21 – Bexhill-on-Sea, De La Warr Pavilion
23 – Cambridge, Corn Exchange
24 – London, Palladium
25 – Birmingham, Town Hall