john Cale was a founding member of the band the Velvet Underground among other claims to musical significance. His autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen? (1999) is one of the great illustrated books of our time. it was Neil Gaiman who brought Cale and Dave McKean together for the project, as Neil explained in his blog last year. Mckean did something more than just set the type on almost every page of the 270 page volume. He even found ways to use his familiar comics approach in a few places. It doesn’t tend to turn up in lists of McKean's work; Wikipedia doesn’t mention it while having a list of all his comic books and DVD covers ( “We’ll fix that when we get home, Bart”).

Here are a few random example spreads:




While revisiting the book recently I became fascinated by Cale's brief account of the oddly famous September 9 1963 performance of Erik Satie's Vexations. This musical composition has its own 3,000 word Wikipedia entry. It was organised by American 'avant garde' composer John Cage, described on the Wiki page as being "doubtless instrumental in creating some misconceptions about Erik Satie's work in general". The instructions on the score indicate that it is to be repeated 840 times. It was played the requisite number of times in a public performance by a relay team of players including the 21 year old John Cale. An interesting follow up to the event occurred on the tv show ‘I've got a secret” which teams Cale with Karl Schenzer, the only person in the audience who sat through the whole thing. That sequence from the program is of course is easy to find on Youtube: