🎵 AotW John Cale - HONI SOIT (SP - 4849)

[LPJim]

John Cale
HONI SOIT
A&M SP-4849

John Cale - guitar, keyboards, viola, lead vocals
Sturgis Nikides - guitar, background vocals
Jim Goodwin - keyboards, synthesizers, background vocals
Peter Muny - bass, background vocals
Robert Medici - drums, background vocals

SIDE ONE

Dead or Alive 3:51
Strange Times in Casablanca 4:13
Fighter Pilot 3:10
Wilson Joliet 4:23
Streets of Laredo 3:34

SIDE TWO

Honi Soit (La Premiere Lecon de Francais) 3:20
Riverbank 6:26
Russian Roulette 5:15
Magic & Lies 3:26

All selections written by John Cale and published by UnderCover Music BMI except "Streets of Laredo" (arr. by John Cale)

Produced by Mike Thorne (also computer processing)
Executive Producer - John Cale
Flight engineer: Warren Frank
Logistics: Louis Tropia

Trumpet: John Gatchell
Background vocals on "Fighter Pilot" - Bomberettes

HONI SOIT (pronounced 'o nee swa') entered the Billboard Top 200 on April 11, 1981, reached # 154 and charted for 5 weeks.

For more information, including biography, discography and current activities, please visit the following site:

http://werksman.home.xs4all.nl/cale/index.html


JB

 

[Mr Bill]

This was Cale's follow up to 1979's Sabotage/Live on I.R.S. Records... (http://www.amcorner.com/irscorner/c/cale.html). While Oingo Boingo is considered the first I.R.S. act to be picked up by A&M as part of I.R.S.'s distro deal with A&M, many argue Cale was. Not likely since I.R.S. was not a true label in the strictest sense of the word during it's first year, but merely a "clearing house" for promising indy artists and labels. Sabotage/Live may be listed as I.R.S SP 004, but it is also SPY Records LP7... Besides, Cale as a cult music figure and independent artist in the truest sense fo the word could go from label to label album to album (and did).

Musically I find Cale to be an "acquired taste" and the stylings of S/L are nothing like what you get on Honi Soit or almost anywhere else in his catalog. Eclectic at best -- but would you expect anything else from a former Velvet Underground member who hung out with Andy Warhol???

 

[Ed Bishop]

No, it's not accessible in the way that VINTAGE VIOLENCE (1970, Columbia) or PARIS 1919 (1973, Reprise) are; on the other hand, it's not wildly eclectic like some of his other work, more of a wilder side to his mid'70s Island work. Good, but yes, acquired taste, definitely.

As for Andy, not sure he was much of an influence on Cale; better to blame La Monte Young, John Cage, Steve Reich, others of that sort, for Cale's precocious nature, heh.

 

[A&Mguyfromwayback]

Just read in Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!) that "Honi soit qui mal y pense" is associated with the British Army.....so I wanted to ask our British friends if 'honi soit' by itself is a sort of shorthand reference to the military, kind of the way we use 'semper fi'....

 

[Mr Bill]

The full phrase is French for "Shame upon him who thinks evil of it." It is the slogan of the English Order of the Garter. htere are a number of student newspapers entitled "Honi Soit" around the world, some often countercultural and a few bordeirng on underground, but just as many official and above board...

--Mr Bill