Here’s my updated and reworked primer on Welsh language (and Welsh) punk in honour of St David’s Day 2021, preceded by some chat about class, language (losing / gaining) and resistance, but you can just scroll down for the Youtube goodies. Listen and sit in the sunshine I love you!
Most Welsh kids (in the South, at least) first learn about our history of linguistic suppression on school trips to a living museum called St. Fagan’s, aka the Museum of Welsh Life. This place is potentially second only to LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in the deranged-to-the-point-of-almost-psychedelic museum stakes, owing to the concept, which is ‘let’s deconstruct historically significant buildings across the country brick-by-brick and rebuild them next to each other.’ Juxtapozed with U indeed.
Every year, once a year, we would be ferried into the reconstructed 18th Century schoolhouse, which was always very confusing to me as it looked pretty much the same as the 200 year old village primary school I attended (add your own thoughts here about heritage industry as a collective delusion) and smelt just as dank. We’d take turns to re-enact parts of a psycho Victorian classroom practice aimed at discouraging the children from speaking in their own language. This was done by placing a wooden plaque (known as a ‘Welsh not’) around the neck of any child who was heard speaking Welsh, who could have it removed only if they told the teacher of another child doing the same thing, with incentive provided by the fact that the child wearing the ‘not’ at the end of the day would be duly beaten (thankfully they didn’t re-enact this part, but the terror of a seven year old was real.)
My dad recalled his Mamgu telling him how she had to whisper in Welsh in the playground else, she ‘get the not.’ This practice was considered so ‘effective’ that it was traced to other places Empire went on to patrol, most directly evidenced in Nigeria where the equivalent plaque was referred to as a ‘monitor.’ What first brought Welsh back from the brink of extinction was the translation of the bible into Welsh by Protestant missionaries. In Australia I learnt that Aboriginal advocates now scour copies of the equivalent translated bibles, sometimes the only written records of languages which went on to be ‘successfully’ wiped out, using, of course, tactics of a magnitude more barbarous. (The colonisation of Wales never involved the genocide or enslavement of the Welsh people and as a fulcrum of the British Empire it profited handsomely from it.)
As someone who grew up stubbornly responding in English to my father and grandmother’s Welsh at home, secretly jealous of my cousins’ fluency, all of this pulls at me in a place I can’t really name, in any language. I was uninterested, embarrassed even, as much as I did fight my (English) mother to speak in my normal accent, which was discouraged for a bunch of fraught class anxiety reasons too complicated (or simple?) to go into here. With our voices policed to rid them of a Welsh inflection, I never quite held onto enough of an accent to carry it with me.
Despite being partially self-governed through a National Assembly via a process of devolution begun more than twenty years ago, Wales’ structurally diminished status as a secondary ‘principality’ has had uh, some consequences. Unlike Scotland, Wales still does not control its own legal, criminal or educational system, and where it does have power, social and economic progress has stalled under the craven one party state of Welsh Labour and its councils, whose death drive, hard on for ‘Student Housing’ and apparent deep contempt for the people’s interests continues to delight.
The rules in place prioritising the Welsh language in state institutions and for employment have demonstrably succeeded, or at least visitors have a good old lol about road signs despite the more serious story behind the fight for them. The history is full of these small acts, sometimes inflected with a shades of a certain very Welsh form of sanctimony that can only prompt a simultaneous eye roll and smile. Thinking of one of my uncles who refused to register the birth of his children until a Welsh form was provided. I was blindsided to learn a few years ago that the demand to establish funding for a Welsh-medium TV channel (S4C) was won under intense campaigning that included sit-ins, license fee strikes and the threat of an actual hunger strike by Plaid Cymru MP Gwynfor Evans. Thatcher capitulated to this in 1982 on the basis that a strike could lead Plaid into the hands of the ‘extreme left.’ At least Mamgu got Pobl Y Cwm out of it! It’s a demonstration that where political will is present and stars and realpolitik align, seismic changes can be dragged into being. Around 28.5% of the population can now speak it, a relative miracle all things considered, as this recent smug nugget demonstrates. Even this is not a simple thing, as the class advantages of a middle class Welsh-speaking elite (there lie the consequences of being prioritised for well-paying public sector roles over generations, educational inequality and the natural closed social circuit of a shared language…) play a role in reinforcing inequality.
My cadre of nieces and nephews happily learn Welsh in school alongside refugee children who add it to the other languages they have. A little space beyond the frame of the English language. Something lost, regained! Another Aboriginal language activist I read recently said that language is not just a way of describing the world, but a way of creating it, so when those languages die (or are killed off, as is more usual) the worlds they create fade away with them. As I sit here aged thirty-five, trying to write lyrics in Welsh for a new project, constructing phrases in my pidgin attempts, vocabulary coming from places only my child brain remembers, but not giving up this time, I feel a world opening up. Another frame.
Iawn, Welsh language punk.
I have to start with Llygod Ffyrnig (‘fierce mice’) four seventeen-year-olds who self-released the first Welsh language punk single exactly a year after the Buzzcocks made Spiral Scratch.
They were from Llanelli, a small town on the doorstep of West Wales that sits just beyond the grey sludge of an estuary I crossed to get to school, where wild horses would occasionally drown when the tide rushed in too suddenly for them. It’s also the closest town to the small village where I visited my Mamgu most Sundays, staring into her psychedelic blue carpet while she regaled us with gossip in rapid fire Wenglish, presumably so mum could follow along. In the early sixties, while Mamgu was still running the village shop as a single parent, my dad got his first job, at Llanelli’s steel refinery, learning how to measure and test the resilience of each slab of steel once an hour, from the bottom of a rigidly enforced pecking order.
Fifteen years later, the subject of Llygod Ffyrnig’s Melody Maker single of the week hit were job prospects at the NCB (National Coal Board.) This gruff yet tuneful proto-hardcore with their sparse, barked lyrics highlight the grim reality of what was a choice between ‘byw ar y dôl’ (living on the dole) or the hot, dangerous and exhausting work as a miner where ‘ddim ond silicosis sydd ar ol’ (only silicosis – an occupational lung disease also known as Miner’s phthisis – is left) succinctly explaining a reality which is often lost when people look back to what was being fought for during the strikes that would come: being a miner was fucking intense. There’s an amazing and incongruous Rush-esque solo halfway through this growling banger, and the B Side has some fun Sais-(English)baiting and a song about snogging a girl called Bethan at the bus stop. I found golden comment exchange on a KBD blog once where one member chastises the other for ‘punching a cow in that barn we used to practice in.’
Anrhefn means disorder in Welsh. Founded by the legend Rhys Mewn in Bangor in 1982, they were definitely one of the best known Welsh-language punk bands of the era, championed by John Peel who frequently played them along with lots of the best Welsh language bands on his radio show. Anrhefn signed to Workers’ Playtime at one point (an Alternative Tentacles subsidiary) who asked them to write and release something in English, and were enthusiastically told where to go.
They did massively well in Europe, where the monoglot stranglehold on pop culture was much less of an issue. They followed a similar trajectory to many of their English-medium UK82 counterparts, softening their edges into a more stadium rock destination at points, and this incredible video of them playing at the visitors centre on top of Snowdon might have been the peak of a playful Welsh Situationism, if only the Manics hadn’t come along and taken the crown.
Y Cyrff (The Bodies) from Conwy come off as a pretty solid mid 80s guitar pop band, with hypnotic New Order-style bass lines and a couple of songs which display the occasional flash of gothy gloomth, like lost Sisters of Mercy cuts… in Welsh. Members would go on to form alt rock triple platinum group Catatonia during the later ‘Cool Cymru’ years with a husky ingenue named Cerys who, I will never let anyone forget, went to my school.
Then there’s Datblygu (‘developing’) who you may already know about due to their cult following and status as a kind of catalyst for a lot of this 80s welsh-language rock boom – they also have a Peel Session!
Sad and often meandering slightly nihilist poetry in Welsh sung-spoken by David R. Edwards over propulsive casio, washy blips and phasey synths courtesy of Patricia Morgan. The lyrics are arch and sternly-wryly-sternly shit talk the limits of Welsh cultural hegemony. David R. Edwards suffered a breakdown just before ‘Cool Cymru’ exploded, a moment in which he and Pat by rights coulda-shoulda found much, much bigger fame and financial security. They nevertheless retained that cult status, playing an All Tomorrow’s Parties a few years ago and releasing a ton of stuff on both Anrhefn recordings (founded by Rhys Mewn) and Ankst, a prolific and still-active experimental label founded in Aberystwyth.
The first Welsh-language single I bought was a reissue of a single by a band called Y Sefydliad. Their only single ‘Cerddor Cymraeg’ came out in 1983 and is weirdly euphoric, punky power pop.
Not to be confused with Ail Symudiad, who are more straight up power pop, and have a song called ‘Garej Paradws’ (Paradise Garage) which was apparently about a punk clothes shop in Cardiff. Delightful stuff, and probably the fastest welsh-language punk I’ve heard, not forgetting Fflaps, which must come close, another Peel favourite and fronted by Welsh language punk Tywysoges, Ann Matthews.
In 1989, Traddodiad Ofnus (Tradition of Fear) made a wicked almost industrial post-punk album called ‘Welsh Tourist Bored’ – the drummer is playing a couple of ‘nuclear’ gas canisters in this video - El Hombre Secretivo - about the Falklands War. They’re floating down the Thames in sunglasses.
One of them also made a record with some teenagers as Pop Negatif Wastad (‘Negative Pop Forever’) which is some wonky synth-based, acid inflected weirdness, very indicative of the time. The welsh-language infrastructure and funding for arts and media caught onto this wave of new bands fast, meaning that a lot of them frequently appeared live on S4C and got the time or funding or platform (or all three) to create these incredible late 88-92 cut ‘n’ paste videos. Who needs MTV?! This one might be one of the best!
Another band of this era called U-Thant (which despite looking like a Welsh word were actually named after the UN General Secretary at the time) deliver tons of these vids too, as well as sick style of football shirts and shades and shoulder-bargey lad shuffle, preceding Gallagher by several years.
Beyond that lot, there are of course bands of pretty much every punk subgenre which formed and were active in Wales, but due to the fact that they sang in English, people don’t always know them to be Welsh. e.g. I very much enjoy a bare-bones very proto-oi banger by the possibly sketchy Welsh band from 1977 called Venom.
This song’s is a primitive terrace-brawler anthem played with zero distortion that is pretty perfect. Shortly after, singer Dai aka ‘Snakey’ went into Swansea town centre with a knife with the express intention of ‘doing someone in,’ stabbed some poor bastard in the arse, and went down for 18 months. Oh Snakey. Much later on (and much, much more right on) there’s the very well-known early 80s Cardiff skins The Oppressed and the Partisans (best song? ‘Killing Machine’ duh) who inflected a bit of the UK82 cockney bark into their delivery but actually hailed from Bridgend. I feel you babes. Oh, and Icons of Filth? Also Welsh, and winners of what should be an award for probably the sickest and most obnoxious use of a phaser on ‘Asking too Much.’
It’s also worth checking out another compilation called ‘Is the War Over?’ which was pulled together by Cardiff post-punk group Reptile Ranch on their Z Block label, who are potentially the first Welsh band to make the cover of MRR (408!) They ‘incubated’ Young Marble Giants prior to their signing to Rough Trade and it shows. For more, there’s an entire Welsh Messthetics (104) comp. It focusses mostly on South Wales and there’s lots of outsider clanging and bleak social commentary to soak up. My favourite jam on that comp is a bonus track from the Tax Exiles called ‘Rough in the Valley,’ a deranged, insanely overdriven and noticeably snottier breed of punk than everything else on the comp, which is from 1977. Total no-fi cardboard box recording that comes off like a thuddy, swaggerless version of the Dead boys but way more shit-fi, like if Stiv Bators had been from from Pontypridd. There’s a sick apocryphal story about the singer John Evans, who is still a punk (!) chasing Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten down a side street for picking on some hippies in the street. My guy.
Diolch am darllen / gwrando! No Tories on Gower, No Nukes on Anglesey, here’s to an Independent Tropical Wales in my lifetime. Da ’bo, bitches!