John Cale - Comes Alive (1984)

Five years after delivering one of the crucial live albums of the 1970s, 1979's "Sabotage/Live", John Cale turned around and unveiled one of the least necessary of the 1980s, a "Comes Alive" set that, frankly, should have been left for dead. The problem is not the performance  circulating underground tapes of the show in London earlier that year catch Cale and his current band at the peak of their powers, punching through a set built upon, but by no means dependent on, the Caribbean Sunset album and delivering chilling interpretations of his most sainted oldies. "Waiting for the Man" was nightmarish, and "Pablo Picasso" positively surreal. But there was no room for the painter on "Comes Alive", as a 90-minute show was slashed in half and the surviving tapes were so remixed that the very audience sounds like a sample. The result is an album so polished and lifeless that even the ghost of the live show went home before the end. Alarming, too, was the top-and-tailing of the disc with two new studio recordings, the Cale-by-numbers ballad "Never Give up on You" and the oddly amusing skip-rope parody "Ooh la La." The latter worked as a one-off single, in which form it first appeared the previous month; the former would have worked as a bit of album-filler. But they have nothing to do with the rest of the record  and it has nothing in common with the rest of Cale's catalog.

Track listing

01.  "Never Give Up on You"  (John Cale)   - 3:20

02.  "Evidence"  (John Cale)    - 3:24

03.  "Dead or Alive"  (John Cale)   - 4:01

04.  "Chinese Envoy"  (John Cale)   - 3:24

05.  "Leaving It Up to You"  (John Cale)   - 5:26

06.  "Dr. Mudd"  (John Cale)   - 39:30

07.  "Waiting for the Man"  (John Cale)   - 4:27 

08.  "Heartbreak Hotel" (Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden, Elvis Presley)   - 4:21

09.  "Fear"  (John Cale)   - 3:32

10.  2Ooh La La"  (John Cale)   - 3:56

Release:  September, 1984genrePop/Rock

Recorded live at:  The Lyceum, London, February 26, 1984

Label:  ZE/Island Records

Genre:  Art Rock, Experimental

Producer:  John Cale

Remix Engineer:  Stephen Street

Engineers on Ooh La La and Never Give Up:  Roddy Hui, D. Young, D. Lichtenstein, A. Heermans

Personnel

John Cale - guitar, piano, vocals

Andy Heermans - bass

David Lichtenstein - drums

David Young - guitar