“I sent him some songs… he recorded something and sent it to me. And it was… well, it made me cry”: Charli XCX on how a phrase John Cale once used about the Velvet Underground’s music led to a Wuthering Heights collaboration

Charli XCX has long been vocal about her love of the Velvet Underground and frequently namechecks Lou Reed in her interviews, but it still comes as something of a surprise to learn that House, the first song to be released from Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, features John Cale.

Cale, of course, was one of the Velvet Underground’s founding members, and in an Instagram story, Charli XCX told the story of how she ended up collaborating with him.

It turns out that she got the call from Fennell last year, and that writing a song for the Wuthering Heights project (she eventually ended up creating several) appealed to her immediately.

“After being so in the depths of my previous album [2024’s Brat] I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite,” she wrote. “When I think of Wuthering Heights I think of many things. I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the Moors, I think of the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit.”

She goes on to describe how taken she was by Todd Haynes’ 2021 documentary on the Velvet Underground. She was particularly inspired by a quote from Cale, who said that a “key requirement” of the band’s songs was that they had to be both “elegant and brutal”.

This stuck with Charli while she and writer-producer Finn Keane were working on the music for Wuthering Heights, and as the “bare bones” of House came together, she was still thinking about what Cale had said.

“So I decided to reach out to him to get his opinion on the songs that his phrase had so deeply inspired,” she says, “but also to see whether he might want to collaborate on any.”

We’re guessing that Cale must have appreciated the gesture, because it was this contact that led to the pair working together.

“We got connected, we spoke on the phone and wow… that voice, so elegant, so brutal,” says Charli. “I sent him some songs and we started talking specifically about House. We spoke about the idea of a poem. He recorded something and sent it to me. Something that only John could do. And it was… well, it made me cry.”

The finished song will be released on Monday (10 November), but a 10-second teaser is available now. It definitely sounds a world away from Brat - which, by the sounds of it, is exactly as Charli hoped.