Before they take to the stage with Cale for his 80th birthday concert, the three reflect on how Wales’s greatest living musician subverted what it means to be a Welsh musician
One afternoon a few years ago, Cate Le Bon opened an email that made her shake. Before she knew what was happening, she was crying. “It isn’t like me to have that kind of reaction to something,” she says. Its message was simple: “John Cale is looking for you.”
Le Bon was raised 30 miles or so from Cale’s home village of Garnant in Carmarthenshire, but the invitation to play with his band at the Barbican in London during the spring of 2018 reached her at a furniture-making school in the Lake District, where she was studying following the release of Crab Day, her fourth album of prickly psych-pop. “I spent a long time trying to explain to the master craftsman who John Cale was and what he meant to me,” she says. “We had to compare it to football players.”
