The New Cue #509 July 14: Gwenno
"It feels a little bit like Japanese knotweed but that's life, isn't it?"
Wotcha,
Don’t think I’ve ever used that as a greeting before. I’ve possibly never said it out loud. Just tried it, pretty groovy, not very me, might not do it again. It’s Niall, by the way, no idea where Ted stands on the whole wotcha debate, I’ll ask him later. [In favour of “wotcha”, use it from time to time, especially when speaking with fellow old timers - Ted] Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue. Today we’ve got a cracking – another word I say out loud but use too often when I’m writing – Life & Times chat with the excellent Gwenno.
The Welsh-Cornish singer-songwriter released her brilliant new album Utopia on Friday, the same day that Niall Doherty of The New Cue said this:
“Utopia is the Welsh singer-songwriter’s most expansive record yet, a richly textured journey through psychedelic folk, 70s French pop, smoky atmospherics and dreamy orchestral balladry. Great for a heatwave slump on the sofa.”
Sounds great, no need for me to rumble through my ill-stocked adjective cupboard again. Have a listen here:
Her first collection of songs sung predominantly in English, it’s a record that draws a line under her first trio of albums, one that has a feeling of a clean slate about it both sonically and thematically. It was time to delve in to different moments in her past, she explained. “I think your whole life is just a box of tools,” she said over Zoom last week. “If you've got other languages, other instruments, it's all there to be used. It struck me that I hadn't explored lots of things that had happened or places that I'd lived in, particularly outside of being a child at home. My first three records are really about childhood and trying to make sense of that and celebrate it in a really positive way, because it's quite chaotic, and I'd exhausted that.”
It's one of the reasons, she said, behind her decision to sing in English after three albums of songs performed in a mixture of Welsh and Cornish. “My home life has been in Welsh and Cornish, but the life I've had outside of the house, or the flat, I should say, has been in English and a lot of my formative experiences have been in English. As a writer, it just felt practical to use the English language in trying to make sense of those moments and places.
“I like the idea of exploring cities as well, because I felt I'd evoked a more pastoral rural landscape, which is internal rather than reality. I grew up in an inner-city area of Cardiff that is not pastoral at all. I've been raised on concrete, so I wanted to address that balance for myself. I'm obsessed with exploring a full picture of your life as a human on Earth.”
Which seems like a good moment to stroll on through to Gwenno’s very good Life & Times interview, which is what is going to happen right now.
This edition is free for all to enjoy, but if you would like to become a paying subscriber to The New Cue for £5 a month then you can do so here. We would be very thankful because it means we can keep up this nonsense.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Gwenno
What was the first record you loved?
The first record I went and bought was by Randy Crawford and it's called Almaz. My Irish dancing teacher Gordon used to take me everywhere because my parents couldn't afford to take me and he was really kind and he loved middle of the road American pop. He listened to a lot of things like Burt Bacharach and Lionel Richie. I loved Almaz because it was just so sad. I learned after that it was a song that she'd written for a refugee couple that lived in the flat next to her and I thought, ‘Oh wow’. It was one of the only songs she wrote on that record herself and she was adamant that they released it as a single and it did really well. It says a lot about me but I really disliked Stock, Aitken and Waterman as a kid and that was the big thing. I love Kylie, I really do, but I remember feeling the cynicism of it and thinking, ‘Don't try and sell me shit, because I know what you're doing, I'm not interested’.
And the last?
I'm so sentimental, it's unbelievable, and I've really been listening to a lot of things like Patsy Cline. I've gone back to classic songwriting, which I wasn't bought up on. It's funny because I was talking to my mum, because my mum never played any English music in the house even though she was raised on it, and I said, ‘I'm loving Patsy Cline at the moment because I love her voice’ and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I knew all those country records’. I was like, ‘Fuck’s sake, why deny me all this shit?!’.
What's your earliest memory?
Me, my mum and my dad lived in a flat in Riverside in Cardiff opposite a pub. It was rough as hell. It was like a Victorian house, flat upstairs, flat downstairs, but our flat only had locks on each door, so it wasn't separated from upstairs. One night, this guy stamped the door down looking for the guy upstairs and went round our flat and my dad had to lock all the doors. It was horrendous, blood everywhere. I remember my mum saying she’s got to do a cleaning job and she was washing blood off the banisters, she's just like, ‘What is my life? What are we doing here?’, so that’s the sort of place it was. And then my earliest memory, because there was a bathroom extension and it eventually collapsed, I remember vividly as a child sitting in the bath and poking my finger through this wall because there was loads of holes in it, this was just before it collapsed. After that, we used to have a bath in front of the fire. I sound like the Four Yorkshireman, but it really was hilarious. We laugh about it because it was so ridiculous. That's my earliest memory, sticking my fingers through a hole in a bathroom wall that was about to collapse.
What's your daily domestic routine?
It's hideously boring. Waking the children, having breakfast, everyone gets out of the house. I play the piano every day. It's really a therapeutic thing to do. Then probably a bit of admin, because there’s so much admin in music these days, it's insane. Then probably stick a wash on and have lunch, do some writing and reading and get the kids from school. It's always about that fine balance. We make our records in the house as well, so everything is so intertwined. It feels a little bit like Japanese knotweed but that's life, isn't it?
What's your worst habit?
Biting my nails. It's just so silly. I'm such a busy person and I can't sit still. I've tried to stop doing it so many times.
When were you most creatively satisfied?
I'm always most creatively satisfied when I've written a song. I went to New York recently and I did a week of songwriting. Because of my domestic life, I tend to go off for a week and write the record, that's how I do it. I'm hoping to have a few more weeks this time because generally I do it in a whole week and it's a bit silly, but I'm so focused because I know that's my time. That would be the moment because there's nothing better, when you initially write something, that initial idea and you've no idea where it's going to go and you know that you've been able to tap into something and it's really exciting and you've no idea what that journey is, creating something out of nothing. It's just brilliant. It’s so life affirming to do that.
What was your first job?
It was quite glamorous. It was with Lord Of The Dance as an Irish dancer touring with Michael Flatley. It went all downhill from there because after that I did a bit of music, then I went on the dole and then I went and worked in a pub and then I joined a band. I thought that's how it was going to be, I will always be paid lots of money for being on stage and dancing around. That was a difficult thing because if your first job is at the bottom, you work your way up, but it's a bit harder when you've had this job for something that you do that's really easy, that you've always done, and it's really not naturally transferable to any other environment, even creatively. I was playing arenas, it was a lot to work out in a few years, what the reality was.
Has anyone you've ever met made you feel starstruck?
You know what happens whenever I meet someone, especially musicians, I just sing their song in my head when I see them. It's really annoying. You're just like, ‘Oh my god, this is really weird, I can only hear your song when I'm looking at you!’. I was starstuck by Karl Lagerfeld. That was a moment. In The Pipettes, towards the end of it, we got invited to Princess Caroline of Monaco’s Rose Ball, this insane party that she put on that had a charity edge to it. It was old school famous people you'd never, ever meet and Karl Lagerfeld was there and he took a picture of my face. He liked my face, I was really chuffed about that. That's probably the most starstruck I've been and to have that engagement as well was a moment, cos it's ridiculous.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
I don't know if I'd go for a who, because of the way I was raised. I wasn't raised on pop stars, so I don't have that idol thing. It’s something that in later years I’ve understood and been inspired by, but it's not formative. I think the what would be a curiosity. Maybe that's my biggest influence.
What's your pet peeve?
I think it’s people presenting themselves not as they are. I think we all do it to a certain extent but I'm really attuned to it. Maybe that's mean because people do it for different reasons, that's too judgmental… Dishonesty, perhaps. I think I'm really sensitive to dishonesty in intentions. That's my pet peeve. I'm really sensitive to it and in myself as well. I think just to be honest in your behaviour makes life a bit easier for everybody.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
It's funny for me, because I've been very aware of who I am from quite a young age. I think what's really difficult as a woman is that you're constantly questioned in that and you're not particularly respected, you're battling to be just allowed to exist. I think I'd tell my 18-year-old self that she was right and stick to your guns, because if you can see something, you're probably right about it and you've just got to navigate how you communicate that. I don't feel like I've changed that much. Hopefully I've become more mature and kinder, but I feel like that person still is with me.
What one book would you recommend our readers read?
This Must Be The Place by Jesse Rifkin. It's an overview of music venues and their journeys in New York from the 60s onwards and how they happened in a really practical way. I mean, it starts it off with telling you what $10 was in 1960 and what it is now, things like that, so you're sort of getting a really much deeper understanding of why venues happen. All the famous people that have come out of those scenes are mentioned in passing but they're not seen as the core reason why those things have existed or have value. It's really useful and it's really hopeful, because it shows you how much cities evolve and that it's about focusing on which venue is going to come next, rather than being too stuck on the loss of things. I think it's just always finding a balance for us as human beings anyway. With music venues closing down all the time, we can feel so hopeless that they're shutting down but actually, this book tells you, ‘Well, people really adapt’, we're really adaptable to environments and there are other ways of making things happen. He's not romanticising it at all, it’s really practical. It’s really interesting because New York epitomises what a music venue is in a city, in a way, it’s a template for other places.
What was the home you grew up in like?
It was a little flat, a very, very damp, dark flat in the ground floor of a Victorian house in Riverside in Cardiff, which is a transient, multicultural area next to the city centre and by the river. It was full of books from the floor to the ceiling, you couldn't see the walls. My sister and I shared a room with a rotting door on the back of it, and there was a bookshelf covering it. I remember coming back from being in the park one day and the ceiling fell down because the woman upstairs had left the washing machine on. They were drug dealers upstairs. That was the vibe. My parents were academics that weren't as practical as they were intelligent. It was quite a challenge. We didn't have a sofa. My husband's always saying, ‘You can't relax!’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I've have never had a sofa until I had my own house, I don't know what relaxing means!’. There was a little black and white TV in the corner and a gas fire, it was like photos you see from people living in squalor in the 60s. My dad's a walking encyclopedia, so there was this weirdly contradictory thing. If we’d run out of toothpaste, my mum make us brush our teeth with soap. Like, what is that all about? It was just mental. But then you’d have all these languages in the house, people coming over to hang out with my dad from different countries. We had this guy come over from the DDR. I don't know how he managed to get out of the DDR in the 80s but he did and he came to talk to my dad about the Cornish language. You’d have these really fascinating people coming in to the flat and having chats with my parent, so it’s really rich culturally and quite poor economically. It's always been difficult to work out where I fit in because even though my mum's working class, they both had a higher education - not that they got good jobs with it. It's a weird sort of contrast.
How do you spark creativity?
Going to a place really makes a difference. I've written some songs in New York, I’ve found Cornwall so brilliant creatively. I know that being in a particular place impacts deeply what I make, so I'm really considering where I go and write next. It's always a place. I'm all about places.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
My mum's always says, ‘Just focus on the music’. I think that's a really good thing to do. There can be a lot of upheavals in life and I think if you just focus on your creativity as your tool to work that out, there's so much positive in that.
Do you have a temper? How does it manifest?
I'm really quite good, I am quite reasonable and balanced. I don't tend to lose my temper. It's very, very rare. I don't lose my temper with my children. I think losing your temper is to do with panic and generally, I don't panic, because I can see things coming.
What talent would you most like to have?
Being a linguist would be good. My parents are linguists and I've seen the way that they've just been able to really have a deep understanding of the people who speak that language that they've taken an interest in. It's so useful in a world where there are nuances in different cultures. I'm not a linguist at all, I'm not sure if I could ever learn a language. I probably could if I had to and it was a matter of life or death, but it's not something that that's easy for me to do.
How many languages do you speak?
I speak three.
You’re already two up on most people!
I know, but I never made the effort! They were just given to me, I don't feel like I've earned them. I was just given them as a little gift.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
How do you avoid the ego in this answer? What's the greatest achievement a human being can have? I dunno... staying curious probably.