27 f
“I
never aspired to be a song- writer. I’d never wanted to try. I’d got in a panic going over to Australia. ‘Do they realise I only sing traditional
Welsh songs? Do they know I can’t write songs?’ Mart was like, ‘Just see what hap- pens!’ And it changed everything for me! Being in Australia, being in the desert, being around these incredibly connected, spiritual people, opened something in me. Coming back, I felt connected with Bethes- da, my home, my ground. I was noticing every tiny little thing, every blackbird, every robin, every flower that had opened a little more than yesterday. I was tuned in. I remember as a child I used to be like that. But you kind of lose it, don’t you, with the stress of life? It put me in an amazing place. Being reflective, that’s what happened, that’s what was impor- tant. The problem for me had always been that I wasn’t sure that I’d got anything to write about. But in my writing now it is all about the earth, the rocks, the family, what I breathe. I found myself involuntari- ly vomiting songs. I couldn’t help it almost. It was a physical thing. Like my hands were being placed on the piano.”
“The album was written all over the place – in the back of a 4x4 travelling to the remote community of Papunya, Northern Territory, Australia; in a chapel vestry in Bethesda; on walks with Bobi the dog, and most of all, the bulk was written in Lland- dewi-Brefi, Ceredigion. Mart and I took our- selves there to song-write and demo where there is no mobile phone signal or internet. I would get up, make bread, let it prove, then walk the dog for miles over the hills of Llanddewi and come back with a song idea. Then I’d get on the piano and start writ- ing… stuffing my face with bread!”
Sitting in the draughty vestry of a Bethesda chapel, playing the out-of-tune piano, also provided inspiration for Lisa, creating an appropriate mood for her writing, and a catharsis, with the ghosts of ancestors looking on. The place has a cre- ative pulse. The inspiration for Caradog Pritchard’s famous semi-autobiographical novel Un Nos Ola Leuad, it is a place with many stories to tell.
“I am so obsessed with the past. The days my grandmother used to talk about, the Bethesda in Un Nos Ola Leuad, the Bethesda I crave to live in, when industry here was thriving. This community was full of sparkly, eccentric and unique characters. People we still talk of even today. I have such a romantic perception of Bethesda back in the day, and yet it’s probably dis- torted… but it has fuelled my storytelling.”
“When you know your grandfather, and his father etc, worked in the quarry, it gives you strong roots, almost a permit that you are allowed to be here. It’s where you belong, especially if you believe in ghosts! I do! There is history here. Poets, musicians and artists that have all written about here – there’s something about this rock we stand on. It’s a very creative place to be.”
Lisa draws on these roots for much of her new-found songwriting in Tincian. “I tell a story in each and every one, whether that’s my own autobiographical story or telling someone else’s story on their behalf.” Ten tracks, most from her own pen (except for a couple of poems and Pa Le?, “one sly Old Welsh folk song that demanded its place”), range from “stories of the quarry men, of strong and brave women, of lost children, of foxes feasting near bloodstained streams in areas of nat-
ural beauty, of forgotten derelict houses, of nature, of slate, of red dust, of family and of cariad (love).”
Perhaps one of the most immediate, and potent, songs from the album is Ffar- wel, based on a poem from a book of folk songs by nationally-acclaimed poet and writer Ieuan Wyn. It is the very essence of hiraeth, a wonderful Welsh word with no direct English translation but expressing, similar to Portuguese saudade in fado, the notion of longing, melancholia or pining for home. A quarry man leaves the quarry for the last time, maybe because of the strike, maybe because of old age, and expresses a sadness at leaving the caban, his tools and his comrades. The purity and ache of Lisa’s voice is offset (in a hairs-on- the-back-of-the-neck effect) by the raw, resonant power of the male voices of Cor Penrhyn. The choir in its current form has been around since the 1930s, but a Bethes- da Choral Society, made up mainly of quar- ry men, dates back to 1859. We had a pre- view of it on the free Horizons compilation with our November 2013 issue.
This quarry, which has dominated
Lisa’s field of view throughout her life (one which she describes as “oppressive and beautiful”) and has been the source of closely-held family stories, is like a vein running through her, and throughout Tin- cian. The word ‘tincian’ itself resonates with meaning – an industrial, metallic sound. Lisa explains: “Tincian can mean a lot of things, to move with a tinkling sound, to ring and make a clear sound. Depending on what area of Wales you are from, the meaning varies. It comes to life in dialogue when you use sentences like ‘I gave him such a talking to, he didn’t know what had hit him…he was tincian.’ It’s
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