Radio #006 - '93-'23 Welsh Music Mixtape pt 1

Over the next two Saturdays (7th and 14th October 2023), I’m going to celebrate many of the finest recordings it has been my pleasure and privilege to play over the last 30 years. Now I appreciate that my banging on about this anniversary - using it as a reason to spout forth on many me-related subjects - might be getting a bit tiresome. That won’t stop me, though. For me, this anniversary is a chance to take stock, take a breath and to celebrate some of the finest music to have been made in Wales over that period.

Obviously this is only my opinion. This is - in no way - my attempt to compile a definitive history of Welsh music from ’93 onwards. My only intention is to share a soundtrack to the show, and it will reflect my tastes and doesn’t have airs above that station.

My supernerd powers - forged in the pre-teen home microcomputer boom of the early 80’s - mean that I’m a half-decent coder, and I’ve kept a database of every piece of music played on the show since January 1st 2011. Playlists for programmes before then are only intermittently available.

Since January 1st 2011 I have played 17537 different pieces of music by 5910 different artists. 96% of those artists were either Welsh or based in Wales. Extrapolating from those figures to cover the database-less years from 1993-2011, I imagine I must have, in total, played 30000-ish tracks from 8-9000 artists.

The statistics have been useful - on occasion - helping the station’s editors post-2011 quantify the support that BBC Radio Wales provides to Welsh music-makers; to answer questions in the Welsh Assembly, for example.

In its earliest incarnation - a programme called ‘Revolution’, from October 1993 until June 1998 - we broadcast for 90 minutes, twice weekly. The programme focused on new music from - predominantly - the UK and the USA, with as much new Welsh music as we could find interspersed throughout. There wasn’t a lot of Welsh music, certainly not enough to fill three hours a week, maybe 4-5 tracks per show in the earliest years.

Manic Street Preachers, Dub War, Helen Love, a nascent Catatonia and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci were the artists we celebrated the most in ’93 and ‘94. Then the waters broke, and bands like 60ft Dolls, Super Furry Animals, Stereophonics, Cartoon, Melys, Murry The Hump, Derrero and many others burst through.

There’s a comprehensive list of the guests we featured from the outset here, that gives you a flavour of the evolving shape of the show.

There was a long period, from ’97 - 07’, when I’d just arrive in the studio with a red crate full of CD’s and busk the playlist according to where the spirit carried me. I don’t know who - if anyone - itemised and reported those ad hoc playlists to PRS and the like. These shows were stupidly eclectic: a voracious wheel through all of the genres, flavoured by whatever happened to be in the crate I carted around with me: NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ (unedited) would rub shoulders with A Kind of Blue, Fotheringey and Tangerine Dream, with new Welsh genius from Topper or Ectogram bursting out between the gaps.

Perhaps it wasn’t as great as it looks on paper. It was certainly freewheeling and unpredictable, but also a bit slap dash and amateurish.

Until ’08 I could play - mostly - what I wanted without censure.

In 2001, a new incarnation of the programme started with mclusky in session and we had no issues broadcasting an unedited session version of ‘lightsabre cocksucking blues’ next to Kylie Minogue and Ice Cube.

I have been told on a few occasions that the show was inspirational in the vision that was adopted by 6Music. Or maybe I dreamed those conversations.

My template for this random eclecticism was mostly John Peel but I wasn’t a slavish devotee. I was mostly inspired by my own curiosity and being able to afford - and justify - the purchase of as much music as I could listen to.

Importantly, the programmes were not just shaped by the free music that dropped through the letterbox at the station.

If this all sounds a little smug and self-satisfied, maybe it is. I have been incredibly lucky to have the freedom I’ve been afforded by every editor I’ve worked under. If I’m proud of anything beyond respecting the fact that my role is paid for by the public, it’s that I made full use of this freedom, however ramshackle and random some of those programmes could be.

Anyway, back to these two special programmes (7th and 14th October 2023). Any attempt to distil 30,000-ish tracks by 8,000-ish different artists is doomed to only be a snapshot and short of definitive.

Across the programmes I will share 111 pieces of music that have been key to me and the programme over the period October 1993 - October 2023.

I think they’re all jewels. Luminous bursts of imagination, soul and creativity that have brought joy, empathy, excitement, defiance, beauty and poetry to thousands of others. Sometimes millions.

Each and every piece of music has a story of untold application and determination behind it. Of overcoming frustrations, bleeding fingertips, ragged larynxes, callouses on hands and sore heads. Of wrestling with Digital Audio Workstations and parents / authorities who wanted ‘proper jobs’ rather than idle, pointless diversions.

Of friendships forged and ruined in garages and musty rehearsal rooms. Of deathtrap vans to empty venues on bleak winter nights when non-music-making friends were climbing career ladders, signing up to pension schemes and putting deposits down on flats and / or houses.

At the frequently DIY and independent level of artist that the programme focuses on, music has to be its own end and the majority of these artists cannot live off the proceeds of their ingenuity and their art. I, however, have been able to live comfortably off the back of their ingenuity and their art. It’s terribly the wrong way round. I’ve always been aware of this and I’ve tried to compensate by rarely asking for guest-lists and by spending a good proportion of my income on the music I leech off.

How big of me.

Only a handful of the artists I’ve played over the decades were signed to a major record label. And only a fingerful from that metaphoric hand managed to prosper from those arrangements.

Too often a record contract did little more than incur an insurmountable debt. So little is weighted in favour of the artist. Compared to sportspeople they are exploited and undervalued to a degree that is depressing.

Creative excellence and genius is rarer than its sporting equivalent. Sport is just far better at commercialising its rather obvious and melodramatic narratives. I suspect - for example - that the corporation I work for spends significantly more on sporting rights and sporting coverage than it does on music. This isn’t because sport is more popular than music; it’s because the rights holders are more aware and more protective of their product.

And because of the strength in numbers attendant with belonging to leagues and sporting organisations.

Your average DIY bedroom artist releasing music via Spotify has less power than an ant trying to push a boulder up Siabod. Yet their monthly listener figures might far outstrip attendances at lower league games. They’re not comparable metrics, perhaps, but there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a huge discrepancy in the way we’ve learnt to value music compared to the way that we’ve been forced to value sport.

Music is something we’re indoctrinated into believing should be free and only an end in itself. And music makers are exploited to the point that they’re made to feel as if they should be grateful for airplay or playlist inclusion, on platforms that generate many hundreds of millions of dollars on the basis of their vast catalogues, with scant, insulting remuneration for the content that makes the platforms viable and attractive to subscribers in the first place.

Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon, as the most high profile examples, make a lot of hay trumpeting the boggling size of their catalogues, but the multitude below the top couple of hundred streamed artists would struggle to make UK minimum wage from their streaming income.

Or anywhere near it.

Hey, but at least they might feature in this programme? Stuffed full of its own self importance. Some consolation!

There are a lot of artists I genuinely love who do not feature in these programmes. For a feverish music hound, who’s operated at the rock face for 30 years, 111 tracks is individual grains of sand on a beach of music. There will be no Estrons, The Loves, Flyscreen, Luke RV, Trwbador, Richard James, Campfire Social, Gintis, Ectogram, mohobishopi, Spam Javelin, The Arteries, Personal Best, Cubare (or offspring), Bedford Falls… There’s nothing from Associated Minds, Winger Records or Popty Ping, or a number of other excellent Welsh labels I love.

Suns of Thunder’s awe-inspiring ten minute+ behemoth ‘Under The Control of Time’ could not be folded so that it would fit, and neither does anything by Akira the Don or Chavboy feature.

There is - as is usual with things that depend on subjectivity trying to work in conjunction with chronology - a recency bias. But I genuinely think that music here in Wales is as good now as it has ever been.

Who could argue with the inclusion of Skindred’s ‘Unstoppable’, for example? This year they’ve entered the album charts at no.2. They performed on Later With Jools Holland. Benji blew the charisma bulbs on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Benji was one of the first artists I ever interviewed, back in 1993, and now he’s reached his zenith.

What a story.

I hope you enjoy the programmes. They’ve taken thirty years to research, but I bloody loved every second of it.

If you don’t feature, please don’t take it personally. If I’ve played you at any point in the last 30 years, it’s because I really like(d) what you’re doing and I’m eternally grateful for your vision and your considerable efforts.

Thank you for listening / diolch am wrando.