Velvet Underground

John Cale's Melancholic Return Home

John Cale, a founding member of The Velvet Underground, returns home to his Welsh roots with an expansive and sentimental audio-visual installation at the Wales Pavilion shown during the Biennale. Cale’s film, entitled Dyddiau Du/Dark Days, explores his arms-length relationship with Wales, the home country he left, he says, for “the eternal optimism of American society.” A camera swings through his old house and Cale’s intonation sounds “like a cross between Dylan Thomas and William S. Burroughs played on an old radio,” writes The Guardian. Velvet Underground may not have a reunion in the works—after Cale was fired from the band, he and Lou Reed rarely reconnect—so fans will have to subsist on this, an “elaborately filmed concept album.”