[originally published yn Cymraeg (in Welsh) in Soundnation zine March 2005]
I was reminded again this week of the state of our music scene. I was chatting to a friend who grew up in Wales about the creative situation. He said that he enjoys listening to different or new bands, but that he feels it’s too often the same possibilities over and over again.
This reminded me of one question that keeps popping up – why does the Welsh scene keep recycling the same names? Are Super Furry Animals really the only Welsh-language band, in the same way that Coldplay or Green Day are seen as the only English-language bands that ever get played on the radio?
Maybe it’s because of the “debut album” idea – well, there’s a rather unhealthy path of opinion in our culture that gives priority to Welsh-language albums. We’re still too obsessed with an album as a statement, instead of recognising an acoustic / electronic mix as a valid creative expression. It’s taken a long time for DJs on HWFM to let go of old habits – we still remember that!
The second album has to prove it’s been created organically / honestly, and it has to be Welsh in the “proper” way according to Tecwyn Ifan. It has to be from Y Dyl Mei or Sain to be taken seriously / to be supported. It’s taken a long time for this “hen steil” (old style) mentality to let go – the idea that an album must be recorded “properly”.
Now that Noson Lawen shite has moved forward with Sain. I wonder about the albums being released today: do they really reflect the society we live in, or are they just repeating the same old ideas because no one dares to believe the public might be ready for something new?
There are 11 tracks on the record, but I don’t care how many tracks have been recorded – how cool is that? – it’s a pity that more emphasis is still placed on the number of songs on a disc than on whether the songs actually belong on the album.
Final point – when will we see an album here that truly has style?
This article taken from Sound Nation magazine #16 (November 2004) written by James McLaren. (Both zine and James are sadly no longer with us)
In North West Wales there are two main outlets for Welsh product: Cob Records in Bangor and Porthmadog. James McLaren talks to their managers about their unique selling points
Two record shops, linked by name and history, one in Bangor, one in Porthmadog, will be familiar to anyone who lives in North West Wales and anyone who has ever visited the area on holiday or business. The Porthmadog shop, especially, has developed an international reputation as one of the most comprehensive dealers of secondhand records in the UK, mostly through the history of its mail order service.
PORTHMADOG
Set up in 1967, this flagship store began by simply selling ex-jukebox singles, but quickly developed into a purveyor of secondhand, deleted, and new stock. They then hit on a novel idea: selling off dead stock from major labels, and purchasing back boxes of dead stock from other small shops. They hit on a novel idea, selling off dead stock from major labels and purchasing back boxes of dead stock from other small shops, and buying in huge quantities of deleted vinyl from around the world. Their reputation for rare and unusual items grew, and the mail order side of the business exploded.
One year after opening, they had enough secondhand stock to enter the world of mail-orders. In those days, a simple advert in the New Musical Express or Melody Maker could generate a lot more sales and a lot more international trade than a lot of markets international-ly, and Cob were able to capitalize on this.
Within four years of starting, they were mailing 7500 records a week to 25,000 customers from all over the world, and employing 20 staff to manage the demand.
The mail order service saw a peak in its existence where turning over £60,000 per annum, through that mail order service, about $420,000 was export sales.
“I remember we sent three orders of thousands of pound value each to a seaside souvenir shop in Port Stanley for the troops during the Falklands War,” says the store’s manager, Tony Hughes. “Although the Soviets saw a boom for the area in business, the internationalisation of releases and various other factors have meant that the mail order business, although still a substantial part of Cob Bangor’s operation, at Cob Porthmadog over the years.”
“We also suffered the effects of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia where we had some 5,000 regular buyers and export market was severely affected by the UK joining the EC with us having to abide by new customs regulations also the strength of the pound against other world currencies did us no favours. Consequently, our sales and have diminished substantially, but we still have a strong mail-order business within the UK shipping about 80,000 CDs annual-ly.”
So there’s been a necessary shift into in-shop stock, but Cob Porthmadog is ideally placed to capitalize on its strong customer loyalty and its position in one of Wales’s best hotspots.
“We are fortunate to have built up a huge and invaluable range of customers,” says Tony. “We advertise materials for the mail order for peoples’ unwanted CDs, LPs, DVDs, and videos, and we always have in stock around 200 second hand CDs, 3,000 LPs, 4,500 cassettes, 10,000 videos and a few hundred DVDs.
“Porthmadog, not being a large town, doesn’t allow us the luxury of being able to stock a vast amount of brand new stock, but we do carry some 2,000 new CDs, LPs, few 7”s, cassettes, DVDs, and videos; but whatever we don’t have can be ordered and obtained within a day or two.”
On a local level, Cob Porthmadog stocks records from Welsh bands and labels, “only on a sale or return basis. We do as much as possible to help local bands because if either Cob or not give them support they have virtually no other outlets in Gwynedd to introduce their material.”
BANGOR
Owen Hughes, manager of Cob Bangor, was in the late-seventies, a religious customer of the Porthmadog shop, while working for local government in the fire service up to September 1979. He opened the second shop in partnership with the Porthmadog firm, with a different remit and emphasis, dictated by the social make-up of the university town.
“We opened in the same week as This World by Pink Floyd was No.1,” says Owen. “Our mail-order was a different kettle of fish altogether – so we had two good sellers in the first six months, then two years of down. Bangor is, we’ve always done it on that basis, a small town, so local people here demand more new stock and we emphasize new releases and the current side of things. The Porthmadog store does mostly secondhand.”
Starting on three storeys and moving to a two-storey format since the Bangor store has averaged a far lower turnover since its founding. “All in all it’s about the money as far as selling goes,” says Hughes, “but just a different shape.”
“In the last 25 years, Hughes has noticed a lot of changes in the music scene and its impact on the stock that his shop carries. “The way we used to keep all the CD taking over from what was almost exclusively vinyl, with a lot of second hand DVDs now coming in on a pace too, which is a recent development. The era of the importance of the single too, as far as we’re concerned, those things have never been that big on singles, it’s definitely taken a dive in recent years.”
Has Hughes been affected by the media hype about illegal downloads on new music sales? “Yes, but it’s hard to put them exactly. It’s inevitably going to have some impact, but it’s maybe not as bad as a lot of people think. Some people as we’re never really concentrated on sales and all that, but do fill in things which fit in with the back-catalogue stock we’re doing anyway.”
“Owen’s own interests dictate a lot of the shop’s general stock. We stock a wide, but it’s unusual in being able to cater for lots of different kinds of things, because that’s where my real interest is I suppose. We have a lot of classical, blues, jazz, country, gospel and a lot of world music.
“We do a lot of back-catalogue rock and indie - it’s a university town so that’s very important to us. And the Welsh stuff as well.
“Bangor is a good print, because although it has students, the Welsh population is a transient student one, as the Welsh-speaking population is more of an established, local community. We know there are others doing quite well for themselves in the area, and the wider Welsh-language music scene does well. We have made an effort to stock the Welsh titles, and it’s something we’re happy to stock. It’s still proving important to the older customers, to a supposed golden age in the eighties, but we deal with Sain, Ankst and so on, plus the stuff which comes through other smaller distributors. We do sale or return for local bands and that’s fine. We support it, and it’s been there's a fair bit which doesn’t do well, but a lot of it which do well too.
“It’s important for us to support the local scene to make sure they can access us through sale or return, so the bands that can get their stock on the shelves. We have a free noticeboard in the shop where people can put items for sale or advertise for free. We’ve found drivers for whoever it is they're looking for. We encourage that for sure. The area is a good mix of community, and the different part of the community that we’re trying to be incredibly cool or anything.”
{Adam Walton wrote his "Ear Buzz" column for the Daily Post starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the 2000s. The column was a weekly feature that primarily covered local music topics and the underground scene in Wales.}
An emergency of almost cataclysmic proportions rocked the world of underground Welsh err rock this week: Neil Crud, one-time sporter of Rhyl’s finest Mohican; errant gob and snot for 4Q, North Wales’ Crass Pistols; 'editor' of the most obscene publication that ever littered its way out of the locale (Crud fanzine – ask your parents), an ex-Son of Selina, former manager of Pocket Venus, and currently a worm farmer who almost accidentally deleted half of his website, link2wales.co.uk; an internet encyclopedia of whoever has been who, and whatever has been what, in the Welsh music scene.
I’ve always wondered what Crud meant – now I know it’s an acronym for Computer Retard Undoes Database!
Computers might be a panacea for people, like me, who have no real friends, and find it much easier to strike up a relationship with coloured pixels jumbled up in provocative poses; but for those doing mission critical work, the computer’s still-too-frequent predilection for vacating your to forget to back up your hard work, and then giving you the blue screen of death, is a cause of great stress and sleeplessness.
Whaddya mean, “big deal”? For many hundreds of rabid musicians who had the misfortune to be creating music in Wales before the lifting of the Leek Curtain in the mid-90s, link2wales is the only way we will be preserved for posterity; especially if my home lab experiments into cryogenic suspension continue to be such an unmitigated failure.
Failure is this way because many of the bands were original and excellent, just naive in the way that they tried to attract attention; and 2) the stories of failure should prove to be excellent inspiration and educational material for the current crop of excellent bands visible up the area.
There’s no excuse for making the same mistakes we did, when those mistakes are so excellently chronicled online.
But link2wales.co.uk is most important as a place where these sore heads can meet and – hopefully – begin to tell their own, more positive and friendly stories.
Such is the communal genius of link2wales that the site actively encourages those with any pertinent information about Welsh bands to contribute.
Were you, for example, the bass player in Smiley Headstock, Mold’s short-lived answer to the Happy Mondays, playing Shamans tunes through cheap, Casio keyboards?
Do you have any amusing anecdotes about the time you saw Mike Peters' first band, The Toilets, in some rubbish pub on the coast, and turned to your mates and said, “You know, one day this lot’ll end up touring America with Bob Dylan,” to the general amusement of anyone within earshot.
Then, do not delay, but dust keyboard, get your memories preserved in ASCII before they rest into oblivion, and e-mail neilcrud@gmail.com, thus enriching what is already the richest and most irreverent resource on our beautiful musical pasts, presents and futures.
Let’s just hope his pun-addled brain remembers to back the bloody thing up this time!
"The North South Divine" was a compilation album released by FF Vinyl (although not on vinyl, only CD) and served as a sonic battleground and a bridge, capturing the energetic diversity of the UK's underground music at the time of its 2004 release. True to its title, the compilation aimed to highlight a musical and cultural dialogue, showcasing bands that were often divided by the media's focus on London-centric scenes versus the potent output from north of the Watford Gap.
With 12 tracks, this collection is genre-fluid journey, blending the raw post-punk edge and earnest indie-pop hooks characteristic of the era. These are not the chart-toppers, but the hard-working acts generating genuine buzz on the club and festival circuit. It functions today as an authentic time capsule, a valuable document that illustrates the geographic spread and stylistic depth of British alternative music before the internet fully flattened local music economies. For anyone interested in the bands that were on the cusp of breaking through in the mid-2000s, The North South Divine is an essential, if rare, listen.
There's no online copy available so I've linked some of the tracks I've found on YouTube.
