Charli XCX Met John Cale Mid-Breakdown

They say don’t meet your heroes, but Charli XCX met one of hers while in the midst of a breakdown, and now she’s collaborated with him twice this year. On the Fashion Neurosis podcast, Charli described how she met avant-garde music icon John Cale for the first time. It started when she was working on the song “House,” for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, and remembered Cale saying, in a documentary, that he wanted to make his strings sound “both elegant and brutal.” Given that she’d had a similar goal for “House,” she suddenly had an idea. “I thought, Do you think I could reach out to John Cale?” she says to host Bella Freud. “I started asking the question out loud, not sure what the answer would have been.” She found a way to get into contact with him, and they set up a call.

Unfortunately, on the day of the chat, she forgot it was happening. “The day that we were supposed to speak, I was having a really bad day,” Charli recalled. “I was my very unregulated self.” In the midst of crying with her husband, George Daniel, she got a call. “I picked up the phone, and there was this voice on the end that was gravelly and deep and Welsh,” she said. “I was like, ‘Who is this?’” It was John Cale. “I was like, Oh my God, John Cale is calling me mid-breakdown,” Charli remembered. “I told him, ‘I’m having a bad day, John, but speaking to you on the phone is making me feel so much better.’” Clearly, it worked out. Cale ended up working with Charli on “House” and is now featured on the cover for her upcoming album, Music, Fashion, Film (out July 24), alongside Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. Clearly, he gets what it’s like to be an artist mid-breakdown.