Sedition and Alchemy: A Biography of John Cale

This is an interesting book for those who like the music of John Cale. There is no other book about this unique musician, apart for "What's Welsh for Zen?"

Difficult to write the life of a musician. Many serious musicians say that everything is in the music. Tim Mitchell's effort is in some ways quite uneven. The early years don't get a huge amount of depth. The last years are really just a list. (I read in the Time Out guide to the Velvet Underground that this title was heavily cut down by the publisher, which may be the case). What's good is that Mitchell is genuinely interested in the music, and that pays off. He's also interviewed more than 25 key people and had the cooperation of Cale himself so there's a lot of detail here you can't get anywhere else. I would start with ' What's Welsh for Zen: Autobiography of John Cale  but Cale is good so you need to read this too.

This informative biography of the innovative musician John Cale covers the period 1942 to 2001. It includes about 40 black and white photographs from early pics of Cale in a school play to the creative sixties and seventies with Cale together with the usual suspects like Nico and other musicians.The text includes interesting descriptions of his solo albums and his contributions to Velvet Underground albums. These passages are often placed in historical context, for example the album Words For The Dying with its centrepiece The Falklands Suite and the time of its composition after the Falklands War.There are also e-mail messages from Cale following the destruction of the Twin Towers. The main text ends with a performance by Cale, Brian Eno and Marianne Faithfull on 2 February 2002 at the Old Billingsgate Fish Market overlooking the Thames, in celebration of the opening of the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery in London.The book contains extensive discographies of his solo albums, singles, albums with Cale as guest musician, Velvet Underground albums with John Cale, his own compilation albums, various compilation albums with exclusive John Cale tracks, videos/DVDs with soundtracks by Cale, official John Cale videos and finally, albums on which Cale was the producer/co-producer/arranger. This excellent work concludes with a thorough index. I also recommend the biography by Victor Bockris, titled What’s Welsh For Zen.

Being quite a JC freak (although the good and/or original moments in his music and concerts have been rare in the past 15 years), I had to have this one, of course. I'd read What's Welsh For Zen, and that was a simply stunning read, from content to design, mainly because it was writting in the first person and because it focused on the emotional wanderings of Cale, rather than little nibbets of facts. Despite, or because of this, it contained many inaccuracies (especially discography-wise) and was a bit imbalanced, with -because of Bockris' research for other bio's probably- relatively quite a lot of Velvet Underground era material, but the story got a bit thin and scetchy towards the end.Now we have this Sedition and Alchemy, the second bio of Cale to appear in less than 5 years. Red alert! And indeed, the book makes up for everything that was flawed in Zen. Unfortunately, it fails rather miserably on all other fronts. Firstly, the guy (forgot his name and I can't be bothered to check) simply can't write, compared to Bockris. It reads like a trimmed summary of a very well structured PhD thesis, subject: "The Lifetime Accomplishments of Mr. J. D. Cale: An Uncritical Compedium for the New Millennium." O yes, I can find out about the exact amount of hours Cale spent in exactly what studio at exactly what date to record what album, and who was recording in the room next to him, and that's all very well (though who cares? except for the die hard fan), but there's absolutely NO literature involved. Secondly, the book's quite thin, compered to Zen, so it's clear that all these details made the cuts of more literate and potentially interesting stuff inevitable. What's left is hardly readable, while at the time I simply couldn't stop reading in Zen.Do yourself a favour, and buy What's Welsh for Zen (in hardcover or paperback). Even if you're not a big fan, you'll like it, which is more than can be said of this piece of archive-writing. Two stars, but only because I'm a fan.