111 for 30 #003 - The Joy Formidable 'The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade'

"I crave this sound like no other and ration it out to preserve its power."

What’s in a sound? The distorted three note riff in this song, a strange alien sonar, shifts cogs and colours inside me like nothing else I’ve ever heard. It’s the resonant frequencies for my slapdash soul, a mantra that opens me up like a sea anemone in the first glorious returning wave after low tide.

I crave this sound like no other and ration it out to preserve its power.

The imaginations that dreamed it up see and hear the world in similar shades to me.

I hear its antecedent in ‘Frozen’ by Curve and its echo in Adwaith’s ‘Eto’. I pay scant tribute to it in The Immediate’s ‘Not Shabby’.

It was an embellishment, not the driving force of the song. Something one of them added to a sketchbook recording in their bedsit studio while the other was out in the pub.

I didn’t grow up in a city. I grew up in a village on the side of some hills. The soundtrack was wind, curlew calls, a low haunting exhalation rushing leaves, high cloisters of sky, white noise waterfalls. Fractal expansiveness. God breathing in and breathing out, whether you believed in Him or not.

I wanted music that filled those spaces. The rhythm of the Clwydians isn’t some industrial machine punching holes in rolling sheets of glowing steel, it’s the seasons, footfalls on a lane, leaves tumbling come October.

We met for the first time at the Glasfryn, a pub on the outskirts above Mold. I liked them. They weren’t putting on a front. They were funny, serious, smart and fascinating. And at odds with the storm of noise that they conjured, disarmingly so. On the basis of what I’d been listening to, I thought they might force me to take powerful hallucinogens and then indoctrinate me into their pagan sex cult.

That didn’t happen. Instead we talked about Aubrey Beardsley, big music with whispered poetry, a prodigiously gifted new drummer and their DIY philosophy.

This was some months before Atlantic Records and Canvasback sucked them into their collective maw. At that point, it felt like they were about to become one of the biggest bands in the world, but the landscape was changing and they didn’t sit comfortably in the aisles at the supermarket: not indie enough / too rock / not rock enough / too indie.

And they were a decade ahead of their time: reappraising and expanding 90’s alt rock influences well before Wolf Alice, Haim, War On Drugs and Billie Eilish, Beabadoobee et al.

We were from the same hometown and that did matter. Northeast Wales is always overlooked, always written out of Welsh cultural history. When Jonny Buckland’s band played the Superbowl halftime show, it didn’t merit a single mention in the Daily Post or the Evening Leader, let alone the Western Mail or on BBC Radio Wales. Jonny grew up in Pantymwyn and was shaped by music lessons at the Alun School, Mold.

He’s the guitarist in one of the biggest bands in the world. But he is also an English-born immigrant, and we can’t go celebrating them unless they pull on a red jersey.

I’ve just watched an otherwise excellent documentary on the history of black music in Wales that doesn’t mention Connah’s Quay’s Howard King Jnr. History’s most often told by the people with the readiest access to the mouthpiece, and here in Wales the mouthpiece is invariably situated in Cardiff.

It’s 2011 and I’m walking the rain-soaked streets of the capital having just ballsed up presenting the first Welsh Music Prize. Hard to walk and kick yourself in the shins at the same time but I manage it.

I walk past Clwb Ifor Bach and Rhydian Dafydd is lurking outside in the drizzle having a ciggie. It’s a serendipitous meeting. At this point we’re barely acquaintances.

“What are you doing down here, la’?”

I tell him and I’m the first to inform him that Gruff Rhys won the prize, for which his band The Joy Formidable were also nominated. Now, I know that Rhydian has huge respect for Gruff and his music, but he can’t hide his disappointment in the heat of the moment.

“What the fuck do we have to do?”

He has a point. Joy Formidable are forging an international name for themselves. While the other shortlisted artists are scrabbling around the same five venues in Cardiff, Joy Formidable are filling 1-2000 seater venues across the States with a noise that very much echoes their homeland: all vaulted Clwydian skies and anvils of Moel Famau atmospherics.

The following year I’m in New York at their invitation. I haven’t witnessed anything in my life that wasn’t the birth of my daughter that filled me with so much awe, pride and joy as when The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade warps the air and foundations of Terminal 5. I tried to detail my emotional response in the sleeve notes for the boxed set of their second album ‘Wolf’s Law’. Quick precis of that waffle: ‘L E V I T A T I N G’.

My marriage was falling apart (my fault) at this stage. I clung on to The Big Roar like it was a lifebuoy. Every night I fell asleep on the settee in the eddies and rushes of The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade or The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie. It would be an exaggeration to say that the album saved my life, but only a slight exaggeration.

I’d never felt that lost or alone and their noise and their friendship were a salve for a fucked up heart and a fucked up soul.

A second visit to the States followed, with the musical highlight being a show at the 9:30 Club in Washington. If they still treat artists as well as they did back then, with the best P.A I’ve ever heard in a venue, then it’s no wonder that visiting performers rise to the occasion. Joy Formidable - that night above any of the (many) others I’ve seen them - ascended dizzying new heights. I danced next to two other north Waleans throughout the show… me, Sian and Emma, all from Mold or thereabouts, in Washington DC watching our hometown band slay the U.S. capital. It was a zenith, in so many ways.

Afterwards there was a rare bout of tour bus boozing… pineapple juice and tequila… and I threw up on tour manager Andy Tinsley’s shoes.

Sorry, mate.

Later that year there was Reading Festival and the band playing - somewhat incongruously, but who knows how their cogs whir, least of all me who supposedly represents them - the BBC Introducing Stage. They were there at the behest of Dave Grohl who was - and probably still is - a huge fan of the band.

We met Dave backstage and he was as gracious, friendly, interested are you’d expect. He didn’t remember the first time we met but that’s a whole other story…

I got to watch Foo Fighters headline the main stage from the side of the stage (diolch yn fawr iawn Huw Stephens… “go on Adam, it’s amazing. You should take the chance!” he was not wrong). When bands say they can’t see individual faces from a big stage, they’re not lying. What we could see was a bona fide, non-metaphorical rippling ocean of faces stretching so far back into the darkness, I got vertigo just contemplating their multitudinousness.

Taylor Hawkins’ kids sat behind his drum-riser and he’d turn around and smile at them in between every song, high-fiving tiny hands and laughing. Heart breaking, in retrospect.

I called Andrew Falkous (mclusky and Future of the Left, of course you knew this) from backstage after Foo Fighters to moan about all the shallow, self-serving bullshit merchants from Atlantic UK, who treated me like shit and were pretty dismissive of the band, too. The wheels - those wheels - were clearly coming off.

We walked - me, Ritzy and Rhydian - across the field in front of the stage at the end of the night. It was deserted apart from tens of thousands of crushed cans and plastic beer glasses, enough for a vortex in the Pacific you’d be able to see from space for next to an eternity.

The band were triumphant and positive, whatever had been happening with Atlantic wasn’t going to derail them, and so it proved.

I’m awed by their soul, their restless musical excellence and curiosity. I’m also awed by their commitment to their art and audience. They’re gnarly and tough: like the trees that grow on the side of Moel Famau in defiance of the elements. A nincompoop major record label wasn’t going to kowtow them.

Any wound-licking in Ritzy’s house in the desert in Utah was quickly superseded by a creative urge that manifested itself in a Welsh language record label - Aruthrol - and a series of excellent albums that pushed the envelope of what a limber, powerful, musically eloquent three-piece can do with the form.

‘Aaarth’, especially, is right up there with their finest music (so, very fine indeed). And I think that ‘Share My Heat’ - their most recent single as I write this - is (in its unexpurgated fifteen minute+ glory) the most thrilling and brilliant recording they’ve done since the one I’m including here on my mixtape.

They’re the most played artist on my show over the last thirty years, but they’ve earned every second of that airplay because of their vision and brilliance. No cronyism, here. Probably won’t either forget or forgive the two bob journalist who suggested otherwise.

They went on to soundtrack further important moments in my life and I could, very easily, bang on about them for another few thousand words without touching the sides.

When I saw my partner for the first time, something quietly seismic happened inside me, that made it impossible for me to not be drawn back to wanting to know more about her, to be with her. I felt the same way - in a musical sense - the first time I heard The Joy Formidable. They’re the musical love of my life.

When I die I want the fuzzy clarion of this song to echo around the gathering.

It’s perfect, and it is home.

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of my first programme on BBC Radio Wales (3rd October 1993), I will broadcast two special programmes, on the 7th October 2023 and the 14th October 2023, celebrating one hundred and five pieces of Welsh music I’ve been privileged to play over that period.

The piece below is one in a series covering some of those life-changing recordings and the stories attendant to them.

They’re instinctively written and not supposed to be Google accurate or fodder for AI scraping. Misfiring memories are part of the fun. This isn’t fucking Hansard.