It Took Seconds

Four minutes and five seconds: So what’s going on in “Paris 1919”? A Pitchfork review of the 2006 reissue suggested the whole John Cale album is a loose concept record about the post-World War I settlement. This idea doesn’t quite sit right with me, even though an inter-war Weimar vibe tickled many 70s European songwriters (and Cabaret had come out on film the year before, to enormous acclaim.) Certainly though this title track must relate to the 1919 peace conferences - if it relates to anything - or at least be set in amongst them.

You can hear it as a song by someone - a diplomat, a functionary, a secretary - caught up in these events. Which must have been honestly extraordinary - we naturally view the activities of 1919 with bitter hindsight because the attempt to come together and end war forever was a hideous failure. But to have been part of a delegation making that attempt, without the knowledge or suspicion of what was to come! To be occupied with affairs of high politics, global politics for the first time, in a city less than a day from the annihilated mudscapes of the former Western Front, while all around delegates from Japan, America, Arabia, British and French colonies mingled, argued and flirted…

Cale’s prissy, jittery, thrillingly hopeful music catches all this, both the excitement of the time and the mockery of history’s judgement on it. And he wraps it all up inside what’s surely a love song (that surge of chorus feels like a love song), though perhaps a love song to a ghost.

What would your 4’05” track be?