The songwriters’ circle is very nearly as straightforward and intimate as an evening’s entertainment can get—a handful of musicians take turns discussing and performing their songs, one at a time, almost invariably acoustically, in a round-robin. The long-running BBC program Songwriters Circle is a straightforward take on the concept, but the participants are big names, and the show adds a tantalizing dash of collaborative elements. So when, in September of 1999, the show featured John Cale, Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave, they were all in superb form, and it was full of fine performances. (When the show went badly, it could be pretty amazing too; Ryan Adams acting like a sullen tween on the episode he shared with Janis Ian and an increasingly frustrated Neil Finn is pretty legendary.)

Cale’s contributions drew largely from his 1974 album Fear, though “Dying on the Vine” from 1985’s Artificial Intelligence gets a lovely treatment here, as does “Ship of Fools,” on which Hynde and Cave accompany him. Hynde, for her part, also leans heavily on classics, with a guitar assist from the Katydids’ Adam Seymour, himself a latter-day Pretenders member. The newest song she performs is her 1996 ballad “I’ll Stand by You,” which became better known later for a cloying pop-country makeover by an American Idol winner. Cave jumped around his ‘90s catalog, performing “Henry Lee” from Murder Ballads, “The Ship Song” from The Good Son, and two songs from The Boatmans Call. It’s interesting to note that NONE of the three artists participating had new albums to hawk at the time of this broadcast. I wonder what the show’s curatorial criteria are—I have trouble imagining an American television show spending an hour with three musicians who have no new product. The program ends with all of them doing the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.”

You can watch the entire broadcast here. I’ve indexed it for you so you can skip around if that’s your thing. The times mark the beginnings of the introductions, not the songs.

00:00 Ship Of Fools (Cale, rehearsal footage)
01:07 Thoughtless Kind (Cale)
03:33 Talk of The Town (Hynde)
07:21 West Country Girl (Cave)
09:31 Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend (Cale)
14:05 Kid (Hynde)
17:45 Henry Lee (Cave)
21:14 Dying On The Vine (Cale)
25:19 I’ll Stand By You (Hynde)
29:44 Into My Arms (Cave)
34:30 Ship Of Fools (Cale)
39:33 Back on the Chain Gang (Hynde)
43:32 The Ship Song (Cave)
46:54 I’m Waiting For The Man