Show #2572 - Saturday 16th December 2023
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales, Sat 16th December 2023: Artist of the Year - Lemfreck / Janice Long - The Long Song / Reem Muhammed selects…
Listen again via BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001tfd8
PLEASE NOTE: This isn’t an official BBC / BBC Wales post. All words / opinions expressed here are my own.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I give myself the bends trying to kick up to the surface in time to breathe on Christmas Day. It’s the same for most of us, no doubt. A pox on the smugly organised with their ticked lists and set square wrapping already done. They’ll never know the relief of unsticking themselves from that last piece of Sellotape and fixing it down at 3am on Christmas morning. Only to realise that they’ve forgotten which present is for whom, precipitating a fun festive game of shaking, feeling, swearing gift-guessing.
It’s a shame that you’re all so busy. Family and festivities are, admittedly, almost as important as great music, so try not to miss this show and its two successors. See, it’s the time of year when I try to concentrate a whole year’s worth of superlative new sounds into a handful of programmes over the festive period. All in the name of Welsh music, of course; definitely not because I want to spend a fortnight getting daytime pissed and eating chocolate for breakfast, dinner and tea.
This week’s programme is the first of these festive specials, and it’s the one where I announce and celebrate my Artist of the Year: Newport, Gwent’s Lemarl Freckleton, a.k.a Lemfreck.
Lem has been involved in a number of outstanding creative and societal endeavours this year, not least the brilliant and essential Black Music Wales documentary on BBC iPlayer (please watch it), and taking up a role as one of Independent Venue Week’s ambassadors for 2024.
But it’s his music that has transfixed me the most. Not a word or a beat is wasted on his album ‘Blood Sweat & Fears’. It’s a musically and lyrically poetic tour de force, a time capsule of defiance, confusion, cutting edge production, masculinity and self expression that says more about these troubling times than any other release I’ve heard this year.
Like Minas’ debut album from last year, it’s often an uncomfortable listen - but it’s also groundbreaking, creative, soulful and thrums with charisma and a leavening humour.
Lemfreck joins me for the last hour of the show to talk about ‘Blood Sweat & Fears’, and I play a (necessarily) edited version of the album.
It’s a fascinating conversation and although you’d be right in thinking ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’, this time I’m not even marginally exaggerating.
We focus mainly on Lemfreck’s music but other wider concerns come into the conversation. Many of Wales’ finest MOBO creators - including Lemfreck himself - have relocated to London or Bristol to seek opportunities and support. And Lem tells us that for him - and some of his peers - streaming platform analytics indicate that music of black origin made by Welsh artists is mostly listened to and supported outside Wales. It’s only one metric (where people are listening to particular pieces of music via their streaming platforms) but it is thought provoking and worthy of investigation.
The A level sociology student in me (a ‘D’ in 1989, so about as useful as a fax machine) would see probable cause in Wales’ demographics vs the demographics of cities like London and Bristol.
We live in a country where being black puts you in a especially small minority (.9% of the population identify as Black, Black Welsh, Black British, Caribbean or African in the 2021 census, source: https://www.gov.wales), vs. London (13.5% identifying as identify as Black, Black Welsh, Black British, Caribbean or African in the 2021 census, source: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk). It’s probably naive of me to want this metric / statistic to not have influence over how closely music of black origin and its makers are embraced in Wales, but the evidence suggests there is a mirrored discrepancy here we could all benefit from working together to bridge.
Of course, music is a spangling wondrousness of subjectivity. It’s also one of the purest ways in which we can connect with and reflect our own identities and cultures.
If a particular piece - or genre - of music doesn’t speak to us, is it evidence of anything more than ‘just’ taste? This is, after all, how art affects us, at a subliminal and instinctive level. And the causes and reasons for that, deeply ingrained in society’s mechanisms and structures, are too deep and complex a subject to be explored in this piece.
Suffice to say, Lemfreck is an artist of quality and stature. This album speaks to everyone in sonics and poetry that shift culture in Wales forwards and outwards: brilliant and worthy of immersion and awe, in my opinion.
Elsewhere in the programme, in honour and tribute to the legendary music broadcaster Janice Long, I rechristen for perpetuity my ‘One Track Find’ feature as ‘The Long Song’. I worked closely with Janice for the last few years of her life and was desolate when she died two years ago, on Christmas Day.
I could write a book on what I learnt from Janice and about the gratitude, respect, goodwill and esteem in which many of the foremost music-makers of the last forty years held her. She wasn’t a bullshitter. She had a genuine passion and love for music and a rare skill to communicate that passion lightly, without the kind of hyperbole or histrionics I’m guilty of, to an audience as diverse as her tastes.
After decades of breaking down barriers for female broadcasters, she came to BBC Radio Wales because our editor offered her a freedom to explore and celebrate musical loves that had been restricted for her at other networks, where playlists rule over personal authorship and one of two spot plays an hour were the tiny hole through which she was supposed to try to squeeze her broad spectrum passion for music.
I learnt early on working with Janice that she wouldn’t play anything unless she genuinely liked or loved it. It would have been easier to persuade a cat into a box filled with cucumbers than it would to make Janice enthuse about something to which she was indifferent.
Initially Janice was ambivalent of the dozen or so Welsh recordings that I would forward to her each week, believing - correctly - that airplay should be predicated on musical quality not geography. Other philosophies are available. They just aren’t mine or Janice’s.
So I learnt to send her just the one or two finest recordings I had received in any given weeks, chosen very carefully. And this worked. Typically, within a couple of weeks of us working together, Janice was forwarding me new Welsh artists who she had discovered and she was - of course - right on every count.
The Long Song, then, represents the one recording each week that I would have been most excited to forward to Janice. Not - necessarily - the best song, just the one I most want Janice to listen to and consider for her show.
I hope she nods and sings along to them, somewhere up there, with a limitless supply of excellent gin and tonic, in her tarry, slightly out-of-tune baritone!
The first Long Song goes to Man Up A Tree for an excellently produced piece of drum n bass that Janice would definitely have approved of.
Reem Muhammed also comes aboard to select a piece of music from an artist who she’s particularly excited about for 2024. Step forward Malika Blu.
Next Saturday night’s show - 23rd December 2023 - is ‘Peace Transmission Module’. I’ve never put this much work into a single radio broadcast. It’s not festive, but it is calming and beautiful and Welsh to the core.
Please make space for it in your crazy Christmas, it might just prove to be the solace you’re looking for!
Thanks for reading and listening / diolch yn fawr iawn am ddarllen a wrando.
If you’ve heard anything new that you love - and that’s Welsh - that hasn’t figured in the show, please let me know in the comments below.
THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST
DAS KOOLIES - 'KATAL (GABE GURNSEY EXTENDED DUB)'
Cardiff
http://daskoolies.bandcamp.com
SWANSEA SOUND - 'SANTA BAIL ME OUT'
Swansea
CVC - 'THE REMORTGAGE ANTHEM'
Cardiff
http://cvcband.com
BUG CLUB, THE - 'MISTER DO YOU HAVE THE TIME FOR SITTIN'
Caldicot
AFRO CLUSTER - 'ON THE UP'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/AfroCluster
TWST - 'UPGRADE'
Barry
http://instagram.com/twstwstwstwst
PARCS - 'JUST LIKE CHRISTMAS'
Newport
http://parcs.bandcamp.com
FFENEST - 'RHYWBETH ARALL'
Aberconwy / Gwynedd
http://recordiaucaegwyn.com
SHELL - 'DIAD'
Dinas Powys
No website details.
CATRIN FINCH & AOIFE NÍ BHRÍAIN - 'WANDERING'
Llanon, Ceredigion
http://catrinfinch.com
DON LEISURE WITH AMANDA WHITING - 'PEACE OF MIND FT. DEBORAH JORDAN'
Cardiff
JOE BLOW - 'NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOE FT. MR SUBSTANCE'
Barry
http://facebook.com/Joeblowsquidninjaz
MUDMOWTH - 'WATASHI FT SAKURA MUROBI'
Cardiff
GEMMA ROSE - 'TEMPTED'
Bridgend
http://linktr.ee/gemmarosemusic
THE LONG SONG #01
MAN UP A TREE - 'LIGHTNING FT. NICK RICHARDS'
Llanddarog
http://instagram.com/manupatreednb
PATRICK JONES - 'YOU (FOR MY FATHER)'
Tredegar / Blackwood
http://patrick-jones.info
NO CHOICE - 'NUCLEAR DISASTER'
Cardiff / Bridgend
http://facebook.com/nochoiceuk
MONET - 'ALBASORE'
Swansea
http://linktr.ee/monetbanduk
PEANESS - 'SAD SEASON'
Chester
FFATRI JAM - 'GELYN'
Caernarfon / Ynys Môn
http://facebook.com/ffatrijamband
THE NOW - 'LIVE AND DIE'
Aberdare / Merthyr Tydfil / Swansea
http://facebook.com/TheNowOfficialBand
REEM MUHAMMED SELECTS…
MALIKA BLU - 'MISUNDERSTOOD'
Cardiff
http://instagram.com/Mblue333
ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2023 - LEMFRECK
Usk / Newport
http://facebook.com/Lemfreck
LEMFRECK ‘BLOOD SWEAT & FEARS’ LP PLAY
‘KNIVES IN // AN INTRO’
‘INTO THE STORM FT. JEANNEL’
‘PLAY WITH SILVER’
‘DEATH BY NYASH FT. MANGA SAINT HILARE’
‘PSG FLOW FT. LUKE RV & MARINO’
‘RED HOT FT. MACOSARE’
‘A DARK TAPE’
‘FOREIGN’
‘THAT GUY’
‘HENNESSY X ENEMIES’
‘CLEARER’
'A VOICE NOTE: SAD BOYS CLUB’
‘AFTER'
‘SEE ME NOW'
'BLOOD SWEAT FEARS'
Nicki Wells - 'A Little Christmas Of My Own'
Monmouth
http://nickiwells.com
SHOW STATS
1555 diff songs/ 2001 Total. 753 Artists in 50 shows since 1st, Jan '23 (~Songs per:40, Unique artists per:15) Welsh:97% Cymraeg:13% (feat. lyrics in Welsh); Source: Uploader:30%, Direct:16%, Bought:14%, Plugger:29%, Commission:9%
Comprehensive Session / Interview List: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w-rIPj0l0QhUcbEm08PUPLUWh-416mwlteG_8wpNWtQ/edit?usp=sharing
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Diolch o galon,
Adam Walton