OK, here’s my story. I once gave this as a presentation to a Welsh learners’ festival as an example of how learning Welsh can take on a life of its own and change your world in unexpected ways.
Just after I started learning Welsh I was made redundant from my job as a software development team leader. Now, rural mid Wales is not really a hotbed of technical employment vacancies, so I found it quite difficult to find another job, eventually getting a position in a web development company in Ludlow, Shropshire, England, forty miles and an hour’s drive away. I soon discovered that the company was utterly dysfunctional and a terrible place to work. I hated it, and what’s more, every morning as I crossed the border from Wales into England this horrible feeling of hiraeth came down upon me. In order to shut out the desperate workplace atmosphere and stave off the feeling that I should have been back in Wales, I started to listen to Radio Cymru through headphones while I was working.
Of course, I understood very little of what was being said, and I soon discovered that the daytime shows were playing a majority of soul-destroying, middle-of-the-road dross. However, the forerunner to the BBC radio iPlayer, Listen Again, suggested that if I liked more alternative music, I should listen to Huw Stephens and Lisa Gwilym. So I got into the habit of listening to the previous evening’s C2 shows through the working day day - in those days the youth-orientated C2 strand would broadcast from 8pm to 1am, and Saturday mornings, too.
Little did I realise that I’d stumbled into something of a golden age of Welsh language music. I think the first bands I was really impressed with were Poppies and Radio Luxemburg (ironically both then recently descended from an Aberystwyth school sixth-form band called Mozz). Sam from Poppies played a Rickenbacker which had a trebley, abrasive sound that could slice through granite, but used it sparsely to create a superb full-empty sound. Sam Rhys is now a sound engineer for S4C, I believe and his younger brother is the singer in Mellt.
Radio Lux (they later morphed into Race Horses when it became apparent that the name was legally problematic) had a much more psychedelic, whimsical feel and often found it quite difficult to steer a line away from the dangers of prog. Unlike those of Poppies, who seem to have been largely forgotten (there may be political reasons for this that I won’t go into here), Radio Luxemburg/Race Horses songs such as Marged Wedi Blino and Lisa, Magic a Porva are still to be heard on Radio Cymru. After they split, Meilyr Jones from the group won the Welsh Music Prize for his solo album 2013. Also on the shortlist that year was Alun Gaffey, also ex-Radio Lux.
