Rural Vibrance, Millennial Vibe:
Exploring Welsh-Speaking Youth Culture
Daryl Leeworthy | 21.04.23
Imagine, if you will, the Welsh countryside, with its small villages and mountains and the unmistakable noises of the natural world. Imagine growing up here. Imagine being a teenager: cadging lifts, navigating mobile signal blackspots and slow internet speeds, the two-hour wait between trains, that longing for a chance to escape never to come back, except for funerals and Christmas Day. Right? Rural adolescence, like that of faded and jaded seaside towns anywhere or the post-industrial milieu of the South Wales Valleys, has its own rhythm, detectable in Meirionnydd, Cumbria, or Dumfries and Galloway. The context doesn’t matter. But what marks the Welsh countryside out as different is language. For this is the heartland of another language, of Cymraeg, and so of a unique but often ignored form of diwylliant ieuenctid (youth culture).
In the late 1950s, the post-war generation, then entering adolescence, turned to skiffle as a means of expressing themselves, a contemporary style cast opposite a prevailing tradition of folk dancing, choral singing, and the Noson Lawen. Skiffle bands such as The Saints from Llanrwst and The Moonshiners from Penmaenmawr sprang up to entertain crowds in scout huts, community halls, and chapel vestries, and even, in the latter case, earned auditions on independent television. Still others, particularly the Llandegai Skiffle Group, which would later morph into the prominent close-harmony folk band, Hogia Llandegai, appeared on the BBC Home Service’s Welsh language music programme, Ser y Siroedd. As the headline in the North Wales Weekly News had it in February 1961, ‘Skiffle Booms’. But soon skiffle was joined by a folk music revival, with Dafydd Iwan (b.1943) as the leading figure, and tradition regained its lost momentum.
Fast forward to the 1980s and new ideas emerged, ideas which rejected tradition outright. “Growing up in Wales”, suggested Dave Edwards, the Aberteifi-born lead vocalist of the iconic Welsh alt-rock band, Datblygu, “is like watching paint dry”. Too much of life, he felt, was weighed down by outmoded cliché. A Tafod y Draig sticker on the bumper of the family Volvo, bilingual plates for the teenage learner driver—a red D, not an L, Dysgwr not Learner—and a good degree in Welsh from the University of Wales. Play your cards right, ran the lyrics of Edwards’ satirical song, Can i Gymru, and you too could get a lifetime ticket for the gravy train. His audience? Well, as the comedian, radio presenter, and Carmarthenshire native, Elis James, tells me, that was key to the message. For Dave Datblygu took all that was regarded as sacrosanct by the generation of campaigners that had come of age in the 1960s and 1970s, those whose symbol really was the Tafod y Draig, the dragon’s tongue, and held it up to the scrutiny of a new generation, one caught up in the maelstrom of Thatcherism. He was saying: is this it for Welsh language culture, is this what you really want? To grow up and live the same lives as your parents or grandparents? To sing in close harmony when your English-speaking counterparts have punk or new wave?
Can i Gymru was released on Datblygu’s final studio album, Libertino, in 1993. It came, perhaps ironically, just as Welsh language youth culture was about to undergo a major transformation, one driven by music, film and television but with a literary spinoff. Datblygu had been formed in 1982, the same year as S4C and gained early broadcast opportunities on Fideo 9, a late-evening music show broadcast between 1988 and 1992. Fideo 9 was fronted by Eddie Ladd and produced by Geraint Jarman, the latter a leading figure of Welsh language pop music, so had status and the freedom to be different. As an all-Welsh medium television channel, S4C offered new possibilities: for the first time there was space in the schedules to provide young people with a voice of their own and meaningful representation on screen. No longer did Welsh language content have to compete for airtime on the BBC or ITV. There were early triumphs with the cult children’s cartoons Superted and Fireman Sam, but teenage content took longer to create. In fact, as the translator Emyr Gruffydd reminds me, S4C’s youth programming did not come into its own until the mid-1990s when the Big Breakfast-style magazine show Uned 5 (1994-2010), the Anglesey-set soap opera Rownd a Rownd (1995-Present) and the comedy-drama Pam Fi, Duw? (1997-2002) arrived, the latter to critical acclaim.
Pam Fi, Duw was a major hit, so much so that it cut right across the linguistic boundaries that still separated teenagers, especially in the rapidly deindustrialising South Wales Valleys, where the programme was set, into those who went to the ‘comp’ (i.e. who studied in English) and those who went to the ‘Welsh school’. This was a rare achievement, especially in those days, and it was realized because the characters—Rhys, Ifs, Cwcw, Sara, Sharon, Spikey, Spans, and their friends—all spoke a living, almost hybrid language; a code-switching fusion of English and Welsh rather than the formality associated with the pre-war generation and their post-war children, with chapel, or with the fusty literature studied for GCSE or A Level. In the words of one of the Pam Fi, Duw characters, this was “proper Cymraeg, miss”. The programme tackled the twin dilemmas of growing up and growing up in a Welsh-language universe all within the confines of a secondary school, the fictional Glynrhedyn. It was Grange Hill with a difference and, like Phil Redmond’s BBC series, took on contemporary teenage concerns like coming out, drug addiction, exams, getting a job, going off to university, and having sex.
You will not find much mention of this Welsh-medium alternative in the magazines targeted at British teenagers of the period, however. Readers of Smash Hits, for instance, can be forgiven for thinking that this universe did not exist. But it did. In fact, it was part of the social and cultural life of many who grew up in Wales in the 1980s and 1990s and who were part of the Millennial generation. Folks like me. But I confess that I did not grow up in a Welsh-speaking household, so have only a partial, outsider’s memory to rely upon. To help fill the many gaps, I have turned to some of those of this generation whose adolescence was shaped by the Welsh language inside and outside of the home, who were inside this culture. I mention my research to Dr Sarah Morse, who grew up on a farm in West Wales, not far from Dylan Thomas’s writing-cum-drinking hut at Laugharne. “Young Farmers”, she says swiftly, “a potted hanes [history] of YFC is what you need”. There’s that hybridity of language at work.
Soon we’re exploring the online archives. Up comes a black and white photograph of a pram race in Llanwenog, a village about six miles west of the university town of Lampeter, deep in the heart of rural West Wales. Taken in the 1970s, this image affords a clear glimpse at the activities encouraged by the YFC movement in its heyday: a large crowd has gathered near a stream as “mam”, “dad”, and “babi” (all young men in various forms of drag) ferociously push an old-style, big-wheeled perambulator through the water and towards a finish line hidden from view. It is carnival, of course, where normatives are deliberately cast aside, but no less compelling for all that. The Wales Federation of Young Farmers Clubs, Sarah tells me, was founded in 1936, with the oldest member clubs dating to 1929, and was designed to support young people as they set out on an agricultural career. To keep the countryside young. Clubs and counties host judging competitions, rural skills sessions, sports days, entertainment festivals (think variety and light entertainment, or lots of pantomime), and so on, all in a bilingual, but in practice primarily Welsh-medium, environment. It was and is an essential part of the rural way of life. In fact, it was at YFC gatherings that skiffle groups often got started in the 1950s.
The YFC has a parallel in the Urdd Gobaith Cymru, the Welsh Youth Movement, founded in 1922. Since then, it has become something of a right of passage for Welsh-speaking young people to perform at the Urdd National Eisteddfod (founded 1929) or to go on a residential course at the outdoor centres in Llangrannog (opened 1932) or Glan-Llyn (opened 1950). The latter, set on the banks of Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake), typically catered for teenagers and undergraduate students so became a place where contemporary youth culture could be fashioned. It was in contexts like this young musicians discovered an alternative to the English-language culture then available to them in record shops or on the radio and television. Numerous pop bands started out following chance meetings in the dormitories and communal spaces of Glan-Llyn and were sustained at university (usually Aberystwyth); still others, including one of the icons of 1990s Cwl Cymru, Catatonia, gained members through the connections that were made there.
"You will not find much mention of this Welsh-medium alternative in the magazines targeted at British teenagers of the period, however. Readers of Smash Hits, for instance, can be forgiven for thinking that this universe did not exist. But it did. In fact, it was part of the social and cultural life of many who grew up in Wales in the 1980s and 1990s and who were part of the Millennial generation. Folks like me."
The irony, which Dave Edwards picked up on in the 1980s, and point out with uncompromising humour, was that this new youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s already felt (and certainly sounded) old fashioned when it was compared with what was available in English. Glam rock was nowhere to be found. There was no Dai Bowie. Instead, there was folk rock and even throwbacks to 1950s-style rock and roll. Punk, which broke through in the late 1970s, finally reduced the sonic gap between the two cultures. Y Trwynau Coch (The Red Noses), formed by schoolfriends from Ystalyfera in 1977, were an important step forward, adopting a full punk sound and edge-pushing lyrics to songs such as “Mynd i’r capel mewn Levis” (Going to chapel in Levis). Controversially banned from Swansea Sound, the local radio station, over a misunderstanding of the lyrics to their single Merched Dan 15 (Girls under 15), a misunderstanding which nevertheless afforded just the right sort of publicity to build a youth audience, the band enjoyed the important support of BBC DJ, John Peel. In fact, they were one of the first Welsh-language groups to make it onto Peel’s show, appearing in late August 1978, just a week or two after the Llanelli-based, and altogether angrier, Llygod Ffyrnig (Ferocious Mice).
Angrier still were Dr Hywel Ffiaidd. Their record releases included songs about Princess Diana and the Northern Ireland political campaigner and hunger striker, Bobby Sands. More playful tracks included one, penned by playwright and crowned Eisteddfod bard, Sion Eirian (1954-2020), which translated into English as Rubber Doll. It told the story of a lonely middle-aged man who took a rubber sex doll to bed each night for company. The lead singer, Dyfed Thomas, explained to the Sunday tabloid, The People, in August 1978 that the band’s music was ‘a sort of protest at the state of Welsh culture’. Eirian, then twenty-four, would go on to write pioneering novels like Bob yn y Ddinas (1979; Bob in the City), about Cardiff’s underbelly, with drag queens, dive bars, and chip shops aplenty, and (with director Endaf Emlyn) the screenplay to the (in my view) essential film Gadael Lenin. This was released in 1993 at the start of the Welsh cinematic new wave. Set in post-Soviet St Petersburg, Gadael Lenin focused on a fateful school trip, one featuring a wayward group of teenagers and their teachers. The lead, Spike, sensitively played by Steffan Trevor, finds love and acceptance when he meets, and falls for, aspiring artist Sasha.
There is much less angst around these days. In the 1980s, alternative artists had to push against the dominance of older generations and their tastes over BBC Radio Cymru, the only Welsh-language radio station, as well as over the principal Welsh language record label, Sain. As such, the opportunities given by Peel, or by very small indie productions like Recordiau Coch, were vital, offering a novel outlet for an otherwise dually marginalised youth culture. Diversity was to be the ironic legacy of the Thatcher years, leading to new record labels, most notably Ankst, and a wider spectrum of artists. In the 1990s, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals took up the momentum. The former’s 1994 track, ‘Merched yn Neud Gwallt eu Gilydd’ (Girls Do Each Other’s Hair), released when the band were still in Sixth Form, earned rave reviews in the New Musical Express and airtime via John Peel’s radio show. The band also appeared on the front cover of Melody Maker. ‘I was absolutely captivated’, says Elis James of the soundtrack of his teenage years, ‘and Gorky’s had achieved their success by singing in Welsh’.
Put together, the breakthroughs of the 1980s and the wider popular acclaim of the 1990s were to provide the foundation for the rich music scene of the early twenty-first century. This was especially apparent amongst Millennial bands like Yr Ods (formed in Aberystwyth) and Swnami (formed in Dolgellau), where freedom from that earlier tussle between tradition and modernity has allowed for sonic and lyric experimentation, and an exploration of what it means to be young and Welsh-speaking in a society now mostly shorn of its nineteenth and twentieth century hang-ups. But if you listen very carefully, there are all sorts of in-jokes and references which hint at the respect paid to pioneers like Dave Datblygu.
When I was growing up in the 1990s, to close on a personal note, the main Welsh bands and singers I knew were the Manic Street Preachers, the Stereophonics, and, being from Pontypridd, Tom Jones. They all sang in English, with noticeable Valleys accents, and tended, in the case of the Phonics and Sir Tom, towards an American idiom. In fact, I had never heard of Datblygu until I got to know Elis James, who kept prodding me to listen and then to listen. For years, I had rolled my eyes at the corny, conservative ways I saw on S4C: dressing up in Bardic attire, singing hymns, and dancing a twmpath (a kind of barn dance). These had been the same aspects of so-called traditional culture that had put me off Welsh lessons in school, they felt alien to me. Of course, this was itself a habit, the habit of the English-speaking monoglot, a tradition of disdain into which I had fallen. But Datblygu belatedly taught me that I had been wrong, that there were others rolling their eyes, too, but with a purpose not just because that’s how it always was, a Welsh skit on CP Snow’s long-entrenched two cultures.
Armed with this new insight, I ask those friends who have guided me through this alternative world one final question. What was it like growing up a Welsh speaker in an English-speaking milieu, living lives akin to those portrayed in Pam Fi, Duw? They are all agreed. “To grow up Welsh speaking”, Sarah replies, “is to have the sense that you are part of another world, that there is another culture you can feel proud of, and yet you can be excluded from it at any one time”. Emyr nods, adding that “You always have the impression of being minoritized”.
Music, that essence of youth culture, provides common understanding. The most teen-like song in Datblygu’s repertoire, Elis tells me, is the aching, ‘Y Teimlad’ (1984). It was later covered by the Super Furry Animals for their best-selling album Mwng released in 2000. In whichever recording you choose – but I tend to choose the original – the song feels like slamming the bedroom door, slumping down on the bed, and crying over a lost beau. What’s the feeling, Edwards sang, the feeling called love. The feeling of heartbreak and breakup, the feeling of anxious desire. No matter the language, what can be more universal than that?
Dr Daryl Leeworthy is a historian and biographer based in Wales. He was previously the Rhys Davies Trust Research Fellow at Swansea University.
This article was published as part of Amplified Voices: Turning Up the Volume on Regional Youth Culture. With thanks to National Lottery Players and the ongoing support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.