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rying to keep things on track, I ask about her first solo album. After the breakup of Catatonia in 2001, complete with tabloid tales of breakdowns and all, the first thing Cerys wanted to do was make an album of traditional Welsh songs. But instead she
found herself in Nashville. “I hadn’t taken into consideration that I would just completely be head over heels in love with the roots music of the Appalachians and Memphis”, she laughs, her Welsh accent still as strong as ever.
Having initially headed to the States to travel and clear her head, she decided that she wanted to settle there and recorded the album Cockahoop, produced by Bucky Baxter (sideman for Bob Dylan and Ryan Adams amongst others). “It shouldn’t have surprised me that [being in the States] would influence greatly the album. It had to become what it was after spending a year there. Oh, it was so happy! To be able to say, wow, well that part of your life’s over, and you have all this freedom. Complete freedom to do anything you wanted to do with anybody you chose to play with. I was running wild, I was like a kid. I barely took any clothes there, certainly didn’t have any electricity in the place I was staying. I’m quite naturally a morning person, so I was just romping all over the hills and finding all these new animals and insects to write about. It’s great. Now I’m talking. I’m a-reminiscing here. That’s ten years ago now though, almost…”
Cockahoop was released in 2003. A mix of self-written songs, covers and traditional numbers, it has a strong American flavour, but still makes room for the French La Bague and, tellingly, the Welsh hymn, Arglwydd Dyma Fi (otherwise known as Gwahoddi- ad), with some gorgeous pedal steel from Nashville sessioneer Lloyd Green. It is a wonderful album and remains the highlight of her solo career.
Skip forward seven years and three broadly indie albums, and Cerys finally made Tir (see fR331-332), the album of old and tradi- tional Welsh songs that she had intended to launch her solo career. “Tir means land,” Cerys explains to me. “It doesn’t mean your country, as in your place of residence, it means land: the earth you live on.”
Cerys is a fluent Welsh speaker and performs the majority of
the songs on Tir in her native language (although she also speaks English, Spanish, French and “a smidgeon of Catalan and Italian”). Much of the album is made up of the old chestnuts of the Welsh tradition like Calon Lân and Bread Of Heaven, more often found in the repertoires of male voice choirs or light opera singers. Rarely though are they heard with such sparse and simple arrangements.
Cerys expands on her concept: “Tir really represents my ideal from when I was growing up, so far as that’s what fascinat- ed me. That was my little cultural sphere at the time. Those songs are so much part of my childhood and what has brought me to here and then what pushed me out to the rest of the world. That was me – Tir.”
More than just a collection of downloadable songs, Tir comes in a handsome card package with an in-depth booklet full of antique photos of Welsh people from the late 1800s to the 1940s. “It’s a beautiful album,” she agrees. “The photographs on it are just local people at work or at play. The first one we selected was from 1933; the guy is a poet from Trefin who won the Eisteddfod chair, and the kids are all with a flag on top of the rock, and it real- ly looks quite scary ’cos they’re doing [Nazi-esque] salutes. It was between the two wars you see, and there’s a guy without a leg… Anyway, I love old stories and it makes the songs just come alive.”
She also worked closely on the notes and lyrics with Roy Saer, an expert from the Welsh Folk Song Society and St Fagans Nation- al History Museum. “Roy Saer helped me with the more factual side of things,” she tells me. “These stories, there’s a reason why they’ve survived two, three hundred years. It’s because they’ve touched people and there’s a story to ’em so it’s well worth saying where it’s from, where was it collected, why was it collected, do you know who wrote it, why was it written, what area…?”
By 2010, Cerys has settled into her regular Sunday morning slot on 6Music, having started as a stand-in two years before. If, like me, you sometimes feel frustrated with formulaic, genre- bound and conservative radio programming, you may find her show hugely refreshing. “It’s just my taste, it has to be stuff I love ’cos that’s why I’m there as a DJ. It’s not for my DJ skills!” Unlike most places where there’s roots music on the digital frequencies, in Cerys’s show you’ll find Christy Moore happily snuggled next to some krautrock, or David Bowie followed by the Owiny Sigoma
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