Excert from a recent John Cale interview:

LP – Finally, there’s a popular story about you cutting the head off a chicken onstage with a meat cleaver…

JC – It was a really nice meat cleaver. I bought it in Berlin. So beautifully balanced. It didn’t take very much. There was no sawing, you just lowered your arm and the weight of the cleaver carried it.

LP – There’s been no explanation why you had a chicken and a meat cleaver onstage together in the first place. Presumably it was premeditated?

JC – Yeah. My band left over it. It turned out they were vegetarians. We got the chicken from a farm outside of Oxford. I told my tour manager to put it in a box and just come out with it. Of course, he had to grandstand it. He came out holding the bird, right up high, and that was it. We were screwed.

The bird was on the floor of the van all the way to London. The band had all this time to ruminate over what was going to happen. They were like ‘What are you going to do with the bird?’ Nothing. ‘Are you going to hurt it?’ Of course not.

Around that time everyone was gobbing on musicians. Tom Verlaine came over to play the Marquee, and he couldn’t believe that people would drink beer and spit it at you as a form of adulation. So I took it a step further. I threw both the head and body out into the crowd. Everyone was kicking it away from them like it was contaminated. After the show, the band came up to me and said, You lied to us. You said you weren’t going to hurt it. I said I didn’t hurt it. It didn’t feel a thing.