No. 43: Gwenno

Clarity in chaos from Cardiff Bay to the world.

Even when we were entirely focused on bass music with Bass, Mids, Tops, the book, it was really vital to us that the voices and faces that would tell the stories would be those of people who had crossed the standard boundaries of genre, scene, generations and the other categories used to file music and subculture. As we broadened the scope for this online series, that became even more important. Our whole idea of overlaying stories over one another to reveal the contours of the history and culture that they all traversed relies on their paths being as diverse as possible and taking as many unorthodox routes as possible to ensure that the territory was covered as thoroughly as possible.

And you don’t get routes through culture much more unorthodox than Gwenno Saunders’s. I almost don’t want to give any spoilers at all, but this one takes you from trying to see past knees in smoke-filled Socialist folk clubs to James Brown in an out of town shopping outlet, from Lord of the Dance to sitting in rooms full of people who are probably now in the Epstein files with a head full of Amy Winehouse and Joan Didion – and that’s before Saunders’s career as a musician had even started. In fact we didn’t even get past her time with 00s arch indie band The Pipettes on to her solo career, really – despite that solo career being five albums deep in lavish, take-you-away songs in Welsh, Cornish and latterly English¹. Or we kind of did, but by that point it had got quite meta.

But when it did get meta, that just meant it got past anecdotes and into the creative process and all the questions of technique and materiality and why we even do all this that make the nuts and bolts of culture and subculture. So absolutely of a part with what we’re trying to do here - thankfully! Anyway, all of that is a long winded way of saying this is a hell of a read. Saunders is precisely as cool as she looks in Brian’s pics, and both insightful and an absolute hoot. Our video chat was already five minutes in with discussion about parenting and kids’ autodidactisim online, when I realised it was probably best to get to the task in hand...

...anyway, let’s talk about you.

OK!

Let’s start where we were though. What were you obsessed with when you were at your son’s age?

Ohhh, I’m trying to think now... at the age of ten, gosh, do you know what? What’s interesting is I started dancing when I was five – hours and hours dancing from when I was five – and actually that really gradually, really, really took over all of my time, because I’d go and I’d dance on a, Thursday and Friday and Saturday every week, in Bristol and Gloucester and Cardiff, and then I would be in a competition on Sunday. So it took up quite a lot of space and obsession... and it was quite a good one because I had a lot of physical energy and we lived in a tiny flat in Cardiff and we didn’t really have a garden. So it was good that there was an outlet for all of that energy and focus, and it was a very all consuming thing because even though there was no career options in it at that point, people are really obsessed with it. You know, it’s intense, it’s like anything that is a sport, basically – gymnastics or whatever. So, It was very all consuming and the music part came into that as well for me because it was always about like, what’s the best reel to dance to? What’s the best hornpipe? What set dance are you going to do, which is like a whole other part of it...

So the obsession was down to the fact the world was there, perhaps when I was my son’s age – and then thinking about your son at 16 – well at 16, music had come into the fore, but in a more... Now I’m from South Cardiff, So everyone around me was listening to R&B and hip hop and jungle and… um… earlier sort of acid house things from older siblings and gangster rap – like, that was what was around me. And I liked it, but I wasn’t raised on any English language music, so I was hearing a lot of this sort of 90s slow jam R&B and whatever else, and it was kind of the first time I was hearing anything remotely out of that African-American culture. I was only getting like the 90s version of it, not the... original version of it. But then my mum would be like, “Oh, this sounds like Tamla Motown.”| And I was like, “I don’t know what that is.” Like, why is that? Well it’s because you could do that – you know, in the 80s and 90s, you could cut off the whole world. Like you could… well, basically I grew up in a house where America didn’t exist. It just didn’t exist because it was the capitalist west and, you know, my mum in particular was looking east and idealising communism, basically. So that was my rebellion because everyone around me was like, no, we really like African-American culture and we like all of this stuff, because it’s the sort of multicultural area that it was.

And your parents were speaking Cornish and Welsh to the house...

Yeah, so everyone spoke Cornish because my dad spoke Cornish², and then my mum would speak Welsh to us and, you know, we weren’t allowed to watch any English telly. There’s no English radio, nothing – like it was complete bubble of “Anglo-American culture does not exist.” And obviously I went into Irish Dancing³. So everything was sort of looking... It was like the Celtic fringe was the centre. Even though, you know, both of my parents were born in England [laughs]. So it’s not... it’s just ridicu- it’s kind of insanity, and it’s something that I’ve had to process. And I think that’s what, made me conscious of how I don’t have a sort of a pure... purity of pedigree, if you, uh, want to be fascist about it. I’m conscious of how much of a different mixture we all are, even when we look alike, do you know what I mean? Like everybody is a mixture of all kinds of things and I think I’ve always been interested in that because I’ve seen my parents’ journey, and… a change in cultures, basically. And I think that’s important to bear in mind if, say, you move to a new place and are trying to work out the validity of having different perspectives. I think it is a valid thing and I think that having different perspectives whether small or large, it does contribute something interesting – and actually particularly in the arts, just as another point of view, rather than a tick box, you know?

100%.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, you know what I mean? And I think there’s a lot of that. For me with art and expression, I… I’m less interested in representation. That doesn’t really interest me in the arts, and I think that it can, it stumbles us a bit. Because I don’t know how much to do with art representation is. I think art in itself is the revelation rather than the representation of a voice.

Definitely. But art is also the shared experience, though, and that’s where I am a lot at the moment – I’ve been thinking back to my early clubbing days and suchlike, and also I came up with this thing about “Little Rooms”⁴, how like people interacting in little rooms is where it all happens...

Nice. Yeah.

And looking back to those early experiences of understanding why diversity and mixing was important, it was to do with being in a little room, a basement club or whatever, with people who you wouldn’t have mixed with otherwise. Not from some ideological standpoint or even necessariliy being conscious of it, it was just like... the experience was better, the more it was like that.

I totally agree with you on that!

So when you started listening to stuff with your schoolmates, did you get the sense of socialising through the music or the music?

Well, I did, yes – but well, schoolmates was something different, because… well, Welsh language education up until – oof, I mean, way after I left school – wasn’t particularly diverse, and the main reason for that, I would argue, is because when Welsh language education was initially set up in Cardiff, which is the most multicultural area of Wales, the rule that the council, the Labour Council, made, was that unless both your parents spoke Welsh, you couldn’t go to Welsh language school. That was their rules because basically they didn’t want Welsh language education in Cardiff. But what that meant was that the only people that went to Welsh language school initially were people that had families from other parts of Wales, or this very small local Welsh language community – and it excluded a lot of people. Gradually over time, more and more people were like, “Well, actually, this is our language as well, and we’ll all get involved,” but yeah that was later.

But in the 90s it was like that, so I was in an incredibly multicultural area of Cardiff – it’s the most multicultural area of Wales full stop⁵ – but I was going to a school three and a half miles away that was a Welsh language school, which wasn’t diverse at all. Well, it was in demographic, in terms of class and background, but not in terms of culture. And so it was a real disparity between me and my friend in Riverside listening to rap, to hip hop, to jungle, to R&B, to all of that stuff that was coming out of Cardiff Bay and really what Cardiff was in the 90s... and in comparison to what was happening in school, well that wasn’t anybody else’s experience. I had two very separate lives in a way, and the music that I liked and the friends that I hang out with outside of school were not a reflection of what was going on in school.

And actually, for a long time, it put me off a lot of indie music and all of that Britpop stuff, because everyone in my school that liked Britpop came from the suburbs, like the north part of Cardiff, where it was affluent, and I was like, “Well, that’s kind of boring.” Like, I’m in a city. I want to be right in the middle of the city where the most diversity is, and if that’s the music you’re listening to in the suburbs, then it must be really boring. It must be because the suburbs is really monotonous. And actually that’s not true, because the monotony of the suburbs is what makes great music too. Like, obviously, the luxury of having a roof over your head and not having to worry about it and having a garage to practice in is what has created a lot of music. But that was my attitude, certainly as a teenager.

But so often you don’t understand the context until you’ve seen it, until you’ve actually seen it in action, and you realise where it comes from, whether it’s people dancing to salsa, suddenly you understand salsa, or whether it’s seeing nerds in their garage playing their guitars and grasping their alienation or whatever.

Exactly. So that that Britpop thing came in and the only band I liked was Pulp. You know, it was the only band that sort of made sense to me, because of how sharp the social observations were. And I was like, “Well, exactly guys.” You know, it was all this observation about all of this nonsense going, “Yeah, but look, this is like this,” so I really liked that. And then you sort of get through your teens, and I went to North America and that was weird because there, I started getting into the Welsh bands then, and two-step garage.

Two-step was like the both worlds came together because when I got to North America is when it was sort of peak underground and more mainstream club culture that was only just coming over there, really, post what everything that had happened in in the UK. So it still felt quite underground and exciting and all of that stuff. And actually I remember coming back, coming clubbing, say around ‘99, 2000 in Cardiff. I remember being in a club in town, and I remember thinking, fuck, these people have been taking pills for a decade and they’re fucking exhausted. That’s how it felt because actually North America people had only just started doing it. So they were like, “Woohoo this is great. We can do this like three times a week and it’s fine,” but at home I could, I could really feel the tiredness... it was a real feeling, you know, it was like by the end of the 90s, people were knackered, you know? And it was sort of kind of over, but people were still turning up, you know, but it wasn’t very busy and it was, it just felt really sad.

But then this two-step thing happened. And I was really excited about that because I was like, “Oh my god, this is like all R&B stuff I liked when I was like 13 but it’s sped up and it’s rave. This is awesome.” So again, it sort of suggested diversity – even more diversity – within club culture and electronic music. So that’s why I got excited because it felt like two worlds colliding... and then obviously all of the Welsh bands, particularly Equally Cursed and Blessed by Catatonia – I used to listen to on my comedown every Sunday because I just love that record. You know, you just get attached to records in that scenario – like before it’d be a lot of, you know, Air and bands like that, and then, that sort of drew me back to Wales then. So I was like, Oh my god I’m buying these records in Virgin Megastore in Las Vegas, and they’ve got their section! This is mad that they’ve they’ve reached me. This is talking to me and I need to go back...” and I’m just being very curious and thinking, you know, I’ve been dancing since I was like five. I’ve been professional dancer. I just got I was just really bored and it was a bubble.

So you were dancing in what sort of things at that point?

So it was just the only thing I knew. At 16, I was an absolute... I did not get on with school at all. I was bright enough, but it was just just crap. And then I went for an audition. I was an Irish dancer, so I went for an edition for Lord of the Dance⁶ in Dublin when I was 15. I went to sixth form college for two weeks, I thought, “Oh my god, what am I doing here?” And then I got a call back and I just went to the show then. I was in Pineapple Studios in Covent Garden for six weeks and then toured Europe and Australia, and then I got sent shipped to Las Vegas to do the lead part. And then that was it then. So just like, 40 teenagers in Las Vegas, no one looking after them... mental. Mostly Irish. And bonkers. A lot of kids from Belfast who had been taking drugs forever. They’re like, “Let’s find the drugs!” We’re like, “Oh my god, this is awesome.” So it was, yeah, it was great. But I was also like, “This is boring. Also, this is really boring. Like the wage is really good, but this is really boring.”

And I was curious about the music that was happening in the UK. Because first up, it was like, finally I was seeing things that were my culture, that was so marginalised. Like, the only thing, before all those bands came through from Wales, the only thing that you’d see was every Saturday night, there would be just a joke, jokes about Welsh people on telly. I remember, like, they’ve just been constant, constant, like, butt of jokes. Or there’d be like Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. So it was like, even though there’s like all this underground stuff happening in Wales, it just wasn’t seen at all. And then obviously those bands breaking through, all of a sudden people are like, “Oh, right. Oh, there’s stuff going on here,” which they just didn’t know about. So that exact moment, that gave me, like, “Ooh, maybe I am part of the world outside of my tiny world.” Like I maybe I could be part of the world. That’s why you feel.

I’m pretty sure the only place I ever heard Welsh music was on John Peel, basically.

Absolutely, and actually, he was integral to the bands that came in all of the Welsh bands as well, and like, my first manager was Rhys Mwyn, who was in the band Anhrefn⁷, and put out all of like Gruff’s first band⁸ and like, Datblygu⁹ and all those amazing bands that John Peel loved and was part of that, you know? So yeah, it was sort of getting a lesson in where the root of that had come from, but the trigger was the fact that Wales was finally seen for being the vibrant youth culture, diverse, interesting, creative place – that made me feel confident about coming from somewhere that had been so marginalised. So that’s what triggered me, then I just went, “Right, fuck, I’m going to leave the show.” I was like, 18, and I was like, “Oh, I had enough. I’ve got a bit of pocket money. I’ll just go to London, see what happens...” and I just sort of followed my nose because that’s what I do. And then, So I’ve milled about, and then I started work with Rhys and put some sort of Welsh electronic music… oh, and then Jamie Reid¹⁰ did the first my first cover as well because um, Rhys was good friends with Jamie, and Jamie became a good friend to me as well.