Welsh Journals

'Home is living like a man on the run': John Cale's Welsh Atlantic DAI GRIFFITHS 1 Introduction I've no business being in rock and roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my musical personality by dabbling in rock and roll.1 This line of John Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, sug- gests the confusion and ambiguity at the heart of his now substantial output. There is, on the one hand, a profound sense of disdain for rock and roll, the art form which, after all, has sustained him for nearly forty years; but at the same time, on the other hand, there's a faith in individuality and self-expression which is either supremely confident would you talk about your musical personality? or, as 'over and over again' suggests, the sense that no one is listening, an indication of someone who lives, as Cale's great obsessive song has it, 'down at the end of Lonely Street'.2 Some of the soundbites Cale comes up with feel like the ones you'd get from some of rock's loners and blabbers: Zappa, Costello, Lennon, Van Morrison; Morrison is another Celt on record reminding everyone that pop music is just his way of slumming it: 'I personally don't have anything to do with rock, in any shape or form I just find it hard to be a so-called pop star. It conflicts with creativity.'3 Cale is bothered seemingly less by commerce per se though he and Morrison are both well clear of hits, and have had to keep on producing but by a more refined and reified idea of classical music. That Cale (or Victor Bockris, his editor) feels no need for inverted commas anywhere in the phrase 'classical composer' in a book pub- lished in 1999 about says it all; it starts to point us away from the simple observation about the difference between pop music as having to do with playing in bands and classical music as writing orchestral music, and towards the complex roots for this mix-up in South