Paris 1919 - John Cale (1973)

John Cale was definitely the brainy, high-concept part of the Velvet Underground. While his first couple of solo albums were cerebral and difficult, they were still the underground rock sound that his former band had pioneered.

With Paris 1919, though, we started to get Cale as a musical mastermind as well as a lyrical one.

A loose concept album on the chaotic state of Europe at the end of World War I, we get an album full of genuinely new sounds: orchestral and piano-based tunes that are accessible, even if some of the concepts are impenetrable.

Overall, the music is wonderfully baroque and pleasant, but hides so much pathos underneath as Cale builds a landscape of worry and fear under otherwise pleasant surroundings.

Graham Greene is particularly interesting and vexing track. It seems like it fits exactly into that post-war era, with mentions of the “civil servant Carruthers” being a reference to the pre-war policital and spy novel The Riddle Of The Sands. For that to be true, it would be titled not for the author Graham Greene but for Sir Graham Greene, secretary to the Admiralty and head of Naval Intelligence in WWI. So it would make sense as the narrator experiencing the cognitive dissonance of being part of polite society and rubbing elbows with people who sent so many young men to die.

But then the last verse is about Enoch Powell, an MP with controverisal views on race who was barely born by WWI and didn’t become nationally known until he popped off about the dangers of immigration in the 1960s. Maybe this is Cale’s way of showing that the underlying problems of rulers who think they know better is something that never really goes away.