The story of the Welsh music scene of the 1990s, and how it briefly popped it’s head above the parapet to invade the charts.
The 1990s proved to be an interesting decade for music. Having been born in the 1950s, pop music dominated the sixties with mod, ska, flower power and the first rumblings of heavy rock. The seventies saw the arrival of glam, prog, dub, funk, disco, heavy metal and punk. Through the eighties we had post-punk, anarcho-punk, goth, indie, new romantics, the return of mod and acid house. There were, of course, many more sub genres than I have just listed, but these scenes came with tribal followings, clothing fashions and haircuts. It seemed like every five years a new culture war would break out. But as the clock clicked over into the final decade of the millennium, everything seemed to melt into one big sonic soup. Many waited for the next musical revolution but it never came. There were scenes that tried to kick start something new but they were generally recycling previous scenes, or so eclectic it was impossible to realistically call them a scene.
It didn’t stop the music press trying to manufacture scenes where they didn’t really exist. Brit Pop being the perfect example. Pulp, Oasis and Blur had very little in common musically, but that didn’t stop them being lumped together.
There was one interesting development though, chart music actually became mildly interesting for a while. The likes of Wet Wet Wet, Bros and New Kids on the Block were pushed aside as guitars started showing up on Top of the Pops.
Advances in technology meant that the DIY rebelliousness of Acid House was able to morph into really interesting territory, with deep house, trance, and drum n bass. Handbags were kicked off the dancefloors, night club dress-codes went out the window and dance music started to merge with rock music to bring us interesting and exciting forms of music that defied categorisation.
There has always been music coming out of Wales. Budgie, Man, Racing Cars, Young Marble Giants, Tom Jones, Bonnie Tyler, to name but a few. Very few of them made much of a deal about their Welshness. In fact people like Steve Strange, Green Gartside and Larry Love moved out of Wales to make their names with Visage, Scritti Politti and The Alabama Three respectively.
On a parallel track, some musicians went out of of their way to stand up and fly the Welsh flag with pride, by singing in the Welsh language. For many years that meant alienating non Welsh speaking audiences, sometimes willfully so. In the 1980s a new breed of Welsh speaking musicians grabbed hold of contemporary music with both hands and started performing punk, hip hop and reggae with a Cymru twist. Whilst some artists were resistant to performing to non Welsh speaking audiences, barriers started to be kicked down, some sang bilingual lyrics and many started playing across England. John Peel, eternal champion of the underdog, started regularly playing Welsh language records. As is pointed out in the book, if the music is good, the language is not necessarily a barrier. Nirvana were one of the biggest bands on the planet and it’s hard work trying to make out what they were singing about half the time, so if the rhythm is catchy, who cares what the lyrics are?
Guitars have always been a big feature in Welsh music. The valleys have always been, and still are, a hot bed of old school heavy metal and rock fans. So guitars coming back into fashion provided an opportunity for many welsh ‘rock’ (and I use that word in broadest possible terms) bands to break out into the mainstream.
My personal recollection is that the Manic Street Preachers were the first to demonstrate that you could make it big without moving to London or singing in an American accent. Even though, in the early days, they didn’t want to make a big thing out of their Welshness, the press did. Soon the press were paying attention to the likes of The Stereophonics, 6o Foot Dolls and Catatonia – the latter obviously wearing their Welshness on their sleeves.
In 1984 Simon Phillips and Cheap Sweaty Fun (CSF) started putting on benefit gigs in Newport for striking miners. When the strike was over, they decided they enjoyed it, so kept on putting on gigs. attracting names that would go on to be massive, from Therapy and Fugazi to Green Day and the Offspring. Even Kurt Cobain famously turned up to watch his girlfriend’s band Hole. All good scenes revolve around a venue and after trying out several other venues CSF settled on TJs. The mix of big names playing in the town, an already healthy number of local bands, and a handful of those bands starting to appear on Top of the Pops put the spot light on Newport, with one journalist referring to is as ‘The New Seattle’.
All good scenes also need a good fanzine, and Andy Barding’s Frug zine documented the likes of Novacaine, Flyscreen, Dub War, The Cowboy Killers and the ridiculous number of ace bands that were plugging their guitars in around the ‘Port. The final element, often overlooked, is Rockaway Records, run by the aforementioned Simon Phillips, along with his partner in crime, Dean Beddis. The shop provided a space for people to buy the latest releases, discover new music, meet like minded souls and even form bands.
It was a refreshing change for Cardiff to not be the centre of everything, but beyond the big cities, there were bands ploughing their own furrow, in their own styles, up and down the country.
This is a book about music in Wales, but there’s no such thing as ‘Welsh music’. That’s like saying there’s such a thing as ‘English Music’. Welsh music is as varied as the music of any other nation. Some baulk at the term ‘Cool Cymru’, but as Rhys Mwyn points out, it might be a lazy label, but if it gets bands exposure they might not have otherwise had, who cares.
Neil has covered most bases in this book, we get to learn about the likes of The Poo Sticks, Tystion, Tiger Tailz, Feeder, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Anhrefen, The Alarm, Datblygu, Darling Buds, Helen Love and many more. There are some bands the book dips in and out of through their career, particularly Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia, Stereophonics and Super Fury Animals.
There are discussions about devolution, preservation of the Welsh language, nationalism and a growing sense of pride in the nation.
The book is incredibly well researched and I learnt quite a bit, which is impressive given that I was out and about at the time, going to gigs, whilst Neil hadn’t even started school at the start of the decade.
The book prompted me to go online and stream some of the bands in the book. I was aware of almost all of the bands in the book at the time, but I wasn’t a fan of all of them. Some of that streaming made me wish I had paid more attention, whilst some of that streaming confirmed that I was right to not waste my time. For me, Welsh bands in the 1990s meant The Terrorist Ballet Dancers From Hell, Bhang ii Rights, Smiling with Semtex, Dub War, Cowboy Killers, 100,000 Bodybags, Pod, Audio Airstrike, Llwber Llaethog, Terris, Moonloonies, Manchild and Michael’s Bones.
But that’s just confirmation of how strong and varied music in Wales was in the 1990s, as indeed it is now. It would be impossible to be exhaustive and cover all Welsh bands from the era, and if you did the book would become unmanageable and unreadable. But Neil covers most of the successful and influential bands of the time. I would argue the music scene in Wales is just as good now, in terms of variety and quality, but this is a reminder of a brief time when proper bands, with guitars and imagination, were allowed to dominate the mainstream. And it could be argued, that without the class of the 1990s, today’s artists would still be fighting some of the battles fought by the Cool Cymru veterans over a quarter of a century ago.
Go read it, even if you don’t like half the bands you will find it interesting. If you’re too young to remember the 90s, it will be educational. If you were there at the time, it will bring back memories and make you smile with nostalgia – which is after all what a good book is supposed to do.