Show #2606: Saturday 10th August 2024 - Carl Bevan tribute / Campfire Social / EyiTemi
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales, 10th August 2024: tribute to Carl Bevan / interview with Campfire Social about their debut LP / The Long Song: EyiTemi
You can hear this week’s celebration of new Welsh music now here: https://bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021vtt
This week's programme details are below.
This week's programme pays tribute to Carl Bevan - polymathic and charismatic drummer with 60ft Dolls, acclaimed landscape painter, loving father and partner - who died suddenly at the age of 51 last week.
There has been a deluge of love, shock and grief for Carl. He was a friend to many of us. I paid longer tribute in a piece I wrote just after hearing the news here. Can I also recommend you check out Huw Stephens' BBC Radio Wales show from Monday just gone, to hear his bandmate and friend, Richard Parfitt, pay deep and affectionate tribute to Carl through music Carl loved and memories and anecdotes?
You can hear that programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021vgt
Elsewhere on this week's show, Tom and Carrie from Campfire Social are in to talk about their long-awaited debut album 'They Sound The Same Underwater' (out now on Popty-Ping, you can find the vinyl copies here.) They tell us why the album took so long to make and why it was all the better for that; we talk Scooby Doo; about grief; and about the bristling punk energy that drives the heart of the album.
If folk music is the music of the people then 'They Sound The Same...' is a folk album, but with heart on sleeve spirit and sophisticated pop designs. These songs are carved from the face of life as millennials in 2024... founded on the broken promises of previous generations: little affordable housing, hard-earned degrees and subsequent debts that have only guaranteed zero hour jobs and gig economy insecurity.
Campfire Social aren't moaning about this. They have great strength - creatively and as an entity - in their multi-limbed whole: Tom, Carrie, Chris, Depo, Rhys and Ben all bringing their own musical and life DNA to the tapestry.
This isn't an album made by people who fetishise the same two Joy Division albums and a copy of 'This Nation's Saving Grace'.
Despite the themes often being ones of disenfranchisement, heartache and anxiety, these emotional truths are strung through the songs like uncut jewels, and don't diminish the transcendent surge of their sound, quite the opposite.
Throughout Los Campesinos-evoking ribbons of interchanging overdriven guitars are woven and pulled tight, studded with glockenspiels and gilded by the most soul-elevating harmonies this side of prime Beach Boys.
On 'George is a Marine Biologist' barbershop harmonies, high life guitars, and off kilter - almost post-hardcore stops-and-starts - are a framework that holds aloft a most luminous melody. And then the whole affair goes feral, bares teeth, floors you with its intensity before a soothing final whisper. It's a scrapbook of all of the emotional switcheroos served up by life in 2024... peaks, troughs, bliss, despair, anger... all in 2 minutes and 57 seconds.
'Living' - the album's jaw-dropping centrepiece - is post rock with poetry. It could be Slint or Sigur Ros buoying Tom's heartfelt lyric along... and it's this sense of playing keepy uppy with the most precious parts of our souls, despite the rigmaroles and bullshit trying to puncture the balloon, that pervades each and every song on the album.
'Living' transfixes, circles, and then builds builds builds to a choir of harmonies and humanity. The larynxes of the band, their on point instrumentation and Sebastien Allemand's excellent production, are the most obvious and impressive facets of these songs as they draw you along from one to the next, building a deep and empathetic listening experience.
The songs are ferociously tuney and tunefully ferocious.
'Breathe Out Slowly' is one of the classic pop songs of our times, so brilliantly arranged in this incarnation... it'd be foolish to resist its pull.
The album title suggests water, but it's not just the band's name that gives the impression of flickering flames, friendly faces being glimpsed between tight, clawing branches of the forest, a sanctuary ahead.
Outstanding.
Please do send new music excellence to me via the BBC Introducing Uploader or as a download link to my BBC email address. You'll work it out. It has a dot between my first name and my last name.
Keep on trucking x
Please subscribe to the programme via the BBC Sounds app, and then the programme will automatically download so that you can listen at your convenience, wherever you like (via Smartphone / portable devices etc).
Feel free to share the link below:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021vtt
And if you have a chance, you can check out other recent editions of the programme:
03.08.24 Dylan from Ynys shares the Fossil Records of their new album 'Dosbarth Nos'; Phil Bradley from The Modernaires goes Behind The Track with 'Land of My Fathers'; The Long Song from Mari Mathias https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021msp
27.07.24 Stuart Moxham interview about 'Fabstract'; Aleighcia Scott goes Behind The Track of 'In My Shoes'; The Long Song is from Ffion Campbell-Davies; Reem Muhammed selects... Benny Flowz https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021g26
20.07.24 Johanna Warren interview; Stuart Moxham from Young Marble Giants goes Behind The Track with 'N.I.T.A'; The Long Song comes courtesy of Szwé; Hard Drive Deep Dive from Solutions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00217bk
If you would like information about any of the featured artists, please don’t hesitate to reply.
More information about BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds
THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST
TRIBUTE TO CARL BEVAN
60ft Dolls - 'Piss Funk'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
60ft Dolls - 'Stay ft. Pastor Ray Bevan'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
60ft Dolls - 'New Loafers (reissue)'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
Skindred - 'Gimme That Boom'
Newport
http://skindred.net
Benji Wild - 'Cardiff Bus'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/iambenjiwild
Eadyth - 'Amser'
Merthyr Tydfil
http://facebook.com/eadythofficial
SageTodz - 'Deg i Deg'
Penygroes
http://instagram.com/Manliketodz
Kelly Lee Owens - 'Sunshine'
Bagillt
The Music Of Sound - 'First Light ft. Sherin'
London / Wales
http://linktr.ee/musicofsounduk
Rio 18 - 'Casa Loca ft. Baldo Verdú'
Benllech / Cardiff
Anthony Reynolds - 'I Know You Know (Adam Walton Session 2008)'
Cardiff
http://anthonyreynolds.net
THE LONG SONG #048
EyiTemi - 'Groundhog'
Montgomery
http://facebook.com/EyitemiSinger
Islet - 'Hat Person'
Radnorshire / Cardiff
Baby Queens - 'Red Light'
Cardiff
http://soundcloud.com/strangetown-records
Adjua - 'Hiraeth'
Cardiff
http://instagram.com/adjuasings_
Manlikevision - 'Backstage ft. Benny Flowz'
Newport
http://facebook.com/ManLikeVision
60ft Dolls - 'Loser'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
CAMPFIRE SOCIAL INTERVIEW
Campfire Social - 'Swim Swam Swum (album)'
Chester / Newbridge
'We Need To Talk About Peter'
'Living'
'Breathe Out Slowly'
60ft Dolls - 'Ponyride'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
Jay Chakravorty - 'Grid Cells'
Cardiff
Sam Nayar - 'Refugee'
Llandudno
Deyah - 'Wild Behaviour'
Newport
http://instagram.com/iamdeyah
Aisha Kigs - 'Unattainable'
Cardiff
http://www.facebook.com/aisha.kigs
Elkka - 'I Just Want To Love You'
Cardiff
Siula - 'Lucid Love'
Cardiff
http://instagram.com/siula_x
Mari Mathias - 'Dawns yr Hâf ft. MWSOG'
Wales
http://facebook.com/marimathiasmusic
The Royston Club - 'The Patch Where Nothing Grows'
Wrexham
http://facebook.com/theroystonclub
The Bug Club - 'A Bit Like James Bond (Clean Edit)'
Caldicot
Lash, The - 'Stick It To Me'
Newport
http://soundcloud.com/thelashofficial
60ft Dolls - 'Summer's Gone'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
Murder Club - 'Pictures of Myself'
Newport
http://facebook.com/Murderclubuk
Afro Cluster - 'Young Shall Grow Ft. Magugu and Asha-Jane [album]'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/AfroCluster
Ify Iwobi - 'Thinking About You ft. Jinmi Abduls'
Swansea
http://ifyiwobimusic.co.uk
N'famady Kouyatè - 'Aros I Fi Yna ft. Lisa Jên Brown'
Wales
http://facebook.com/nfamadybalatigui.kouyate
Knomad Spock - 'Egypt'
Cardiff
http://knomadspock.com
60ft Dolls - 'Streamlined'
Newport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60ft_Dolls
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SHOW STATS
1078 diff songs/ 1212 Total. 670 Artists in 32 shows since 1st, Jan '24 (~Songs per:38, Unique artists per:21) Welsh:98% Cymraeg:12% (feat. lyrics in Welsh); Source: Uploader:37%, Direct:17%, Bought:19%, Plugger:22%, Commission:4%
Comprehensive Session / Interview List: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w-rIPj0l0QhUcbEm08PUPLUWh-416mwlteG_8wpNWtQ/edit?usp=sharing
Subscribe to my Substack: https://adamwalton.substack.com
Diolch o galon,
Adam Walton