The first autobiography by a VU member, then, is a significant event. With Sterling Morrison (dedicatee) claimed by cancer in 1995, and their two main collaborators (artist Andy Warhol, icy chanteuse and celebrity heroin addict Nico) dead for a decade, there’s a story here that demands the telling. Not that What's Welsh For Zen? is necessarily that.

For Cale, "the cult of the Velvet Underground is distasteful...all the promise we showed in those two albums, we never delivered...[the] attempt to see their influence everywhere, fatuous." His book is often a catalogue of thwarted promise, sometimes with himself - and his considerable habit - as the stumbling block, but more often than not offering up co-conspirator, collaborator and sometime hate figure Lou Reed for special opprobrium.

Reed effectively had Cale dumped after two LPs and they remained at arms length until Warhol's death in 1987 and the memorial, Songs For Drella. But ego again drove the pair apart until they were cajoled into the ignoble mid-90s VU reformation which ended so acrimoniously when it became simply Reed and his backing band. "He's as stubborn and egocentric as I am," says Cale, referring to them at one point as "an unholy Everly brothers" and only just stopping just short of accusing his musical sibling of killing Morrison.

Not that the book pivots entirely on the notoriously crabby guitarist - much, no doubt, to Reed’s chagrin. John Cale was born to Welsh mining stock, but through the radio cultivated a New York state of mind. A talented classical musician (viola and keyboards from an early age), he studied in London before Aaron Copland and the Berkshire Music Center, Massachusetts held open the chance of America. Subsequent years found him moving within the experimental realms of John Cage, La Monte Young and Terry Riley before that fateful meeting with the then 22-year-old Reed: "I was born on March 9th, 1942. Some 3,000 miles away in Brooklyn, New York, Louis Reed had been born one week earlier. I always knew the bastard had an edge on me."

It was the culture clash - between Reed's acute pop sensibility and Cale's rigorous avant-garde training - that made the band what it was. And since the split, while Reed’s career has been inconsistent, frequently preposterous, but ever upward, Cale’s haphazard path has spanned almost thirty years of erratic solo work (the gorgeous Fragments Of A Rainy Season is all but dismissed), film scores, and era-defining production for the likes of Nico, The Stooges, Squeeze and Patti Smith.

What's Welsh For Zen? is a fabulous, fabulously cantankerous read. Physically, sandwiched between corrugated cardboard covers, it blends Dave McKean’s artwork (elaborate cartooning, montage, textures) with Cale’s words in what is essentially a visual companion to Iain Sinclair's Slow Chocolate Autopsy. As a text it's clearly been constructed by co-author - and self-appointed chronicler to the New York underground - Victor Bockris from Cale's surprisingly candid and self-effacing testimony. The prose is chatty, argumentative and often defensive, with Cale noting towards the end that the abortive VU reunion could only go ahead if everyone acquiesced to Reed's demand that no one "co-operate with Victor Bockris' work on his Lou Reed biography."

Few blushes, including his own, are spared in a book Cale likens to "unpeeling an onion", but after a while you do start and wonder why almost all of his collaborators seem to have been volatile, selfish egomaniacs. Witness, for example, a remarkable mid-80s portrait of "friend" Brian Eno. By the end Cale has retreated into love (for his daughter Eden, for whom the book was written) and, most bizarrely, squash as a means of keeping his violent, self-abusive personality in check. One suspects that a similar work from Reed (and he’s probably already started) wouldn’t be half as mad, bad or revealing.