root salad f18 Georgia Ruth
All of a sudden fine Welsh artists seem to be popping up everywhere. Steve Hunt flags another good’un down.
G H
er debut albumA Week Of Pines bagged the 2013 Welsh Music Prize, garnered her nominations in two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards categories and has seen broadcasters as disparate as Mark Radcliffe, Cerys Matthews, Steve Lamacq and Sir Terry Wogan queuing up to declare it entirely their kind of thing. I met up with Georgia Ruth in Glasgow during Celtic Connections where she performed both with her own group and as part of an astonishing concert featuring Hannah James, Dan Walsh and Patsy Reid, Suhail Yusuf Khan and Saurav Moni. How, I wonder, does a Welsh folk album come to occupy a place alongside Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on the ‘records that absolutely everybody seems to like’ list?
While cheerfully dismissing the Mac comparison, she admits that “it’s really strange, because when we made it we didn’t know who the hell was going to lis- ten to it. It’s not really clear what kind of album it is because it’s my debut album and I just poured everything, all this stuff into it. It’s been lovely seeing all these
unexpected people liking it, a real sur- prise! It’s not just me of course, it’s very much a band album which I made with the brilliant Hughes brothers – Iwan, Dafydd and Aled [from Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog] and [producer] David Wrench.”
I suggest that Welsh music currently seems to be enjoying something of a resur- gence, with stalwarts Gruff Rhys and the aforementioned Cerys joined by Cate Le Bon, Sweet Baboo, this issue’s cover stars 9Bach, and hip young gwn-slingers Plu in attracting attention far beyond the Severn.
“It’s hard to say why,” Georgia consid-
ers. “It’s as if we’ve become kind of chic and niche in recent years but there’s always been great music. I think that social media has helped to bring the Welsh lan- guage folk tradition to a new audience, which is great.”
From the opening line of the title
song it’s evident that Georgia has a very distinctive way with words. A product, I wonder, of her bi-lingualism?
“I was never going to make an album that was completely in English because it
would have been weird for me to do that, and I was never going to do one complete- ly in Welsh because I’ve always grown up completely bilingual. When I write in English I’m always aware that the Welsh sensibility is there, and maybe sometimes phrases that are not English. I studied English literature at uni and became obsessed with Conrad and Nabokov. What was similar about the two of them was that both wrote in English but it was nei- ther one’s native language, so the way they wrote in English was completely idiosyncratic to themselves and they had their own idioms which came from their own heritage but, translated into English, becomes this whole new way of writing. I like writing simply – I can be a bit florid at times and have to rein that in. I do also love writers who can cram loads of words into a sentence and do it brilliantly [a brief bout of Alasdair Roberts appreciation ensues] but it doesn’t work for me.”
eorgia initially learned her harp chops through formal classical training. “They teach you by starting you off on the folk harp
because it’s small and then, at the age of twelve it’s suddenly revealed to you that your rite of passage is to go and buy this massive £1000 harp, and your parents are going: ‘What?! We didn’t sign up for this! Why have you done this to us?!’ I actually stopped playing when I was sixteen. I rebelled a bit – just a very teenage response, really. Then I started writing songs and everything I was listening to and loving was in a fingerpicked guitar style – Bert Jansch, Meic Stevens, Townes Van Zandt. Most of my classical technique had gone so I had to build something else. My technique is now a kind of pretending to play guitar on a harp style! I don’t tend to play orchestral chords or glissandos, it’s all just picking patterns, really.”
When I ask if she’s similarly inspired by any current performers, she answers unhesitatingly.
“I remember going to see Eliza Carthy in Aberystwyth and just thinking ‘Wow! Someone gets to do that for a job, and sound and deliver like that and be a won- derfully funny, normal person.’ That was really inspiring to me, so to be accepted into the folk world, which is all very new to me, is lovely. Eliza is one of the biggest inspirations to me, there’s something very special about the way she sings – there’s an honesty there.”
It’s a quality that Georgia Ruth also has in abundance, along with an immense talent and a great deal of charm. Catch her on tour if you can.
www.georgiaruthmusic.co.uk F
Photo: Eric van Nieuwland/Womex
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