Biography John Cale
Childhood in Wales
John Davies Cale is born March 9th 1942 in Garnant in the Amman Valley, Carmarthenshire, Wales.
"My only memory of the Second World War is my mother taking me into our beautiful little garden and the two of us staring at a giant red glow over Swansea. Later, I remember hopping up and down with two other kids singing, 'We won! We won! We won!" Then the United Kingdom fell into a gloomy and damp depression. This was the first stage of the Cold War. My parents and uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, the lot, suffered from coupon rationing and black-market vice, which kept the poor downtrodden in Britain for the next twenty years."
Cale's father William Arthur George Cale was a fitter in the Gelly Geidrum coal mine in the Alman Valley.
"A fitter is a guy who goes in and puts the wrenches and the bolts and everything together. He doesn't go down shoveling coal or any of that. He just puts gear together."
"Until I was eleven he was on the day shift, but he was so exhausted and bitter in the evening that he would wash the coal off his body, then sit stupefied by the radio until he went to bed. Working in the mines is a soul-destroying job. My father never stood a chance. He was trapped and he knew it. The only benefit was that he did not have to fight in the war because mining was an important defence industry."
His mother Margaret Davies was a school teacher, until she married Arthur at the age of 36. John was their only child.
"My mother was a different kind of person. She married my father when she was thirty- six, after an exciting and impressive career in the Welsh school system. She had pioneered a new form of teaching in the village primary school, created around the idea of inductive learning as opposed to learning by rote. Because of her work and the recognition of it she was a vibrant, driven woman full of joy. She played her piano for pure enjoyment. I was her only child and she made me her career for the next twenty years. I still write and sing about her. In retrospect, despite the fact that my childhood sounds as if it comes straight out of the film How Green Was My Valley (based upon a novel by Richard Llewellyn about a family working in the mines - HW), I was one of the luckiest boys ever born in Garnant."
They move in with his maternal grandmother after he is born. She is a formidable lady who does not allow English to be spoken in her house, which means he can't communicate with his father - who doesn't speak Welsh - until the age of 7 when he learns English at the primary school in Garnant where his mother had been a teacher.
At the same age he was signed up by his mother for classical piano lessons. She played the instrument herself and hoped that John would like it. He took to it like a duck to water:
"The course required me to take four examinations per year and after a while I started to do well. I realized that playing music gave me a stronger sense of who I was. I realized that playing music gave me a stronger sense of who I was. In the event, it defined who I was. That was an unexpected prize, but I was upset that my mother was not playing with me. She had stopped playing altogether after my grandfather's death. I was so inspired and comfortable when she was there that I began to see her presence as crucial. Thus was born a lifelong reliance upon a collaborator to complete not only the work but me."
He starts playing the organ - a Rushworth and Draper instrument - in the local church at the age of twelve. The organist is impressed with his aptitude, but is even more interested in trying to jerk off young Cale, a sentiment that is shared by his music teacher. He did not like growing up in highly religious environment:
"Growing up in Wales was a pretty Draconian experience with religion."
Still, he is sure that being Welsh is special. His love for the people, the language, and the landscape runs deep:
"I spent my first eighteen years in a rural mining village near the banks of the Amman River in the foothills of the Brecon Beacons. This was a strange, remote, some said mystical land. It was rich in the Arthurian legends, and had retained its identity through centuries. It was one of the few parts of Britain that neither the Romans nor the Normans conquered. Our part of Wales was cut off from the body of the country by natural defensive barriers of rivers and mountains. When the Romans came, we waited for them out in the hills. When the English came, we withdrew deeper into the caves. During the reign of Henry IV, Owen Glendower became a lifelong scourge from the stronghold of the mountains. Through these wars one can chart the growth of the Welsh nation. Our language, our literature and our music gave us a cherished sense of nationhood."
As a child, he suffered from severe bronchial issues. A prescription for opiates, Dr. Brown's, is laced with opium which help him sleep, but also sets the tone for a dependency on drugs during his adulthood until he decides to go clean after his daughter Eden is born in 1985.