Biography John Cale
Attending Ammanford Grammar School
Cale composed his first piece while attending Ammanford Grammar School: Tocatta in the style of Khachaturian. He listens to the New Music programme on BBC radio, where they played contemporary composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
"It can't be that easy!"
His musical teacher, Mrs Roberts, tips off BBC Wales and he performs it for two impressed representatives. A second performance is taped. They did not bring his score, so he had to play from memory and to improvise the rest.
"It was two and a half minutes in all, but those two and a half minutes changed my life. It was a great feeling. I thought, It can't be that easy! There has to be more to improvising than that. Creatively it liberated me; I started to take changes. From then on I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to play music and improvise; I wanted to write music and conduct it."
Picking up the viola, the saddest of all instruments
Because it is the only instrument left, Cale starts playing the viola in the school orchestra. He joins the Welsh Youth Orchestra at the age of 13.
Dutch tour
A tour with the Welsh Youth Orchestra takes him abroad for the very first time in 1957, performing in Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
"A week after the end of the summer term I would go on tour with the Welsh Youth Orchestra. I looked forward to the thrill of getting away from home. They put us up in colleges in different parts of Wales, we'd rehearse a programme and then go on tour and perform in the area. Once we went to the Netherlands. There was a solidarity between the Dutch people and the people of Wales from the Second World War. We got a mayoral reception, everyone got blasted on the champagne at four o'clock in the afternoon."
Mental breakdown
When he is 16, his mother is hospitalized for breast cancer treatment which left her a semi-invalid. His grandmother lays the blame on him for being born. He suffers a mental breakdown and is hospitalized for short while.
Rock 'n' roll
He fully embraced rock 'n' roll, dancing his ass off and having a whale of a time.
"I was one of the guys up on the stage in front of the screen on the weekend dancing to "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley - I was up there. All the women that I would run into in church on Sunday would come up to me and say, "That was really hysterical, what were you doing up there?" I said, "Having a good time."
It was part of being a teenager. Somebody recognizes that you've got taste and you've got energy and you're having fun with music, not sitting at a desk playing a viola in an orchestra. The obvious thing became "How do put a viola into a rock 'n' roll band?" but that didn't happen so I went chasing down the avant garde route and that got me to a meeting with (composer) Aaron Copeland, and that's what got me to America."
Playing Jazz
Jazz was not popular at school. However, Cale did play piano with a group at the schooldance in 1959. The teachers had to admit that they were competent.
School archives thrown out
In June 2007 Ammanford's school records were thrown out by council workers. Cale wasn't pleased. He went on record in the South Wales Guardian:
"Every time I went back to the valley, I would stand at the railings and gawk, listening for the roar of classes changing. I'll be in the skip with the memorabilia now - travelling with it - not even knowing. Diolch yn fawr am bob peth1."
1 Thank you very much for everything.