39 f Welsh For Six
Eclecticism’s the name of the game for Cerys Matthews, both in her own music and the range she plays on her Sunday morning BBC 6Music show. Chris Conder gets all overcome with fandom.
I
n September of last year, Cerys Matthews appeared on Radio 4’s Great Lives to celebrate the12th Cen- tury nun, prophet, writer, artist and scientist Hildegard von Bingen. Chal- lenging a suggestion that von Bingen may not have composed the music to the pieces accredited to her, Cerys asked, “Why couldn’t a lady have been this gift- ed? Why couldn’t Hildegard have written the music and the text and even written the opera and plays and be a political advisor and be a medical expert?”
One suspects that von Bingen is quite an inspiration to Cerys, the polymath. Still best known as the singer and a songwriter with the rock band Catatonia in the ‘90s, she also has a string of solo albums, is a researcher and interpreter of the folk songs of her native Wales and, further afield, speaks at least four languages, pre- sents a wildly eclectic show on BBC 6Music, has appeared on panel shows, been a men- tor for Goldie’s Band, presented documen- taries on a wide range of subjects and recently had her interpretations of Welsh folk tales for children published. She is also, as far as I am aware, the first person to both be featured in fRoots and take part in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here.
If you weren’t a Catatonia fan (and you missed out if not), you may have first heard Cerys when she dueted with Eliza Carthy at the 2002 BBC Folk Awards. “I never ‘went folk’,” she tells me firmly when we meet a couple of weeks before Christmas last year. “I always think every good music has its roots in the traditional, that’s my thing.” Indeed, Cerys’s relation- ship with traditional song goes back to her childhood, where she learned Welsh hymns and folksongs in school and Chapel. “That’s a good start,” she says. “It makes you love music when you’ve had that natu- rally given to you, just by being born somewhere. I started to play guitar and piano from an early age. I got myself a huge, second-hand Beatles book from a shop and instead of listening to their music I’d work it out and make my own version. Then I just started collecting folk songs [from books] as well.”
Rosy-cheeked and excitable, Cerys
gives off all the enthusiasm in real life that her public persona suggests. We are sitting in the corner of a Mayfair pub, after the plush private members’ club we were sup- posed to meet in decided they didn’t want interviews to be held there. By the time we are settled I haven’t long to conduct the interview, but Cerys is friendly and chatty throughout, going off on tangents and half-finished sentences.
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