John Cale to bring POPtical Illusion UK tour to Nottingham Playhouse

A boundary-pushing musician is set to kick off the UK leg of his latest tour in Nottingham.

John Cale will bring his POPtical Illusion tour to Nottingham Playhouse on March 20, 2025, as part of a UK and Europe tour.

It follows the release of his most recent album, the critically acclaimed POPtical Illusion, earlier this year.

The tour will be his first since 2023, and will take in Nottingham, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Bexhill, Cardiff and Liverpool.

John Cale has always been a musician of the times, helping to usher in titanic shifts in sound and culture — the bleeding edge drones of his Sun Blindness Music opened the path to The Velvet Underground, and the frantic rock of Fear and Slow Dazzle, not to mention his production with Patti Smith and the Stooges, framed a half century of punk, post-punk, and art-rock to come.

His curiosity about the way electronics could be more than a gimmick in rock music served as an inspiration to an uncountable number of crucial scenes.

Once again, on new album POPtical Illusion, Cale stands as a musician of these times. He looks at the orchestrated turmoil of recent history, furrows his brow in disgust, and then turns on his heels toward a future, even if he doesn’t know just what he’ll find or who exactly he’ll be there.