Friday 12 February 2016

Welsh language music day / dydd miwsig cymraeg

There's an awful lot of stuff going on at the moment but I'm way too busy to get into it all, while other bits aren't for public consumption right now, so you're spared one of my classic VoleRants for today.

Instead, I'll mark Welsh Language Music Day. I had the extreme good fortune to pitch up at Bangor University in 1993, just as the wave of young Welsh bands later clumped together as Cŵl Cymru were getting started, so I got to see them all the time: Gorky's, Catatonia, Super Furries, David Wrench, Topper, Melys and many more. There was also a great record shop in Bangor called Cob, staffed entirely by drone-rock experimentalists determined to fill my shelves with their unsuccessful albums. Despite the cheerful contempt with which they greeted my own choices, I bought everything they shovelled at me, so I discovered the joys of Ectogram, Datblygu, Llwybr Llaethog, Tystion, Y Cyrff, Anrhefn and so much more.

Here are some representative samples (though possibly slight outdated as I'm quite old now). I'd love to put something from David Wrench's first album Blow Winds Blow on but it's all been removed from Youtube, as has Super Furries' Mwng album.

























2 comments:

Phil said...

Ooh, ta. I'm actually listening to Y Dydd Olaf right now - bought partly on your recommendation. I'm vaguely hoping that listening to this stuff will semi-osmotically revive my second-year Welsh, or better still improve on it (I think they only started conjugating verbs in third year, which has always left me feeling like a speaker of a pidgin).

Dave M said...

At one point, Dave Edwards of Datblygu occupied a basement room in a house I lived in, in Aberystwyth. Sleep became difficult!