
John Cale
IRS/SPY 1980
A-side: ‘Mercenaries’
Ex-Velvets man weirds-out in bizarre Virgin Mary fever dream.
Proving himself one step ahead of the incoming goth pack, this B-side suggested John Cale was the Velvet Underground’s true agent of chaos (a theory supported by the relative prettiness of Reed’s songs on the last two Velvets albums). Based around a stark drum machine pulse, jerky Wurlitzer gasps and a descending staccato bassline, a very sinister, actorly, Welsh-sounding Cale (distorted in parts) regales listeners with an account of a tired Virgin Mary dealing with “the parasitic scream of whores” hailing from next door. A splintered, drawn-out exercise in slowly building menace that gradually loops back in on itself, it’s among the most outré of Cale’s already offbeat catalogue (reflecting his great comment to Can’s Irmin Schmidt: “I’m a professional musician, but at heart I’m an overstudied amateur”). A non-album outlier, Cale shuffled the song onto the B-side of US single ‘Mercenaries’, a studio version of his anti-war anthem from 1979’s Sabotage/Live set, but has largely left it alone since. Northampton’s dark destroyers Bauhaus immediately included it in their live set, the start of a love affair that found them putting it on the B-side of their cover of T. Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’ just nine months after its original release.