For the latest podcast, Bill Cummings and Jim Auton are joined by author Neil Collins. Neil is known for hosting the Welsh Music Podcast, his new book ‘International Velvet: How Wales Conquered the 90s Charts’ is out now via Calon / University of Wales Press, you can buy the book here.
It revisits the Cool Cymru era, but with an intro spanning the 60s to the end of the 80s and an outro covering the 21st century, it’s pretty much a history of Welsh music in 90,000 words.
They discuss the five tracks by Catatonia, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Manic Street Preachers, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Neil has picked out below to represent the era. Plus they chat Cool Cymru, Britpop, Welsh identity, other Welsh bands like Sixty Foot Dolls, Derrero, Ether, Datblygu and much more.
Here are the five tracks that represent Welsh music in the 1990s by Neil Collins, in his own words here:
Tracklist
Catatonia – International Velvet
I delve into this song in the Preface and it’s a prominent motif throughout the book. Ironic the lyric may have been, but it’s inconceivable that such a song could’ve been written at the start of the decade. By the end of the 90s, it was everywhere from soundtracking sporting montages and the Rugby World Cup to being belted out by 30,000 fans at Margam Park.
Stereophonics – Local Boy in the Photograph
As the confidence of Wales grew across the 90s in terms of music, culture, sports, politics and language, now here was a band weaving tales of a tiny Welsh coal mining village (something that Kelly Jones couldn’t really do any more once he had become a star). The band were fiercely loyal to their roots and were so parochial – putting Cwmaman on the map by insisting they were from there rather than the larger and more well known town of Aberdare 3 miles up the road!
Super Furry Animals – The International language of Screaming
A song that nailed their internationalist colours to the mast. It came about following criticism the band receiving due to singing in English, and at the Eisteddfod where they whistled English lyrics and encouraged fans to sing along in whatever language they liked. As it turned out, screaming was a universal language!
Manics – If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
This was a quintessentially Welsh single on their most quintessentially Welsh album This is My Truth… (both were chart-toppers).
Gorky Zygotic Mynci – Patio Song
The natural progression in the language debate was for a band to release a bilingual single and Gorky’s Trojan horsed Patio Song to the very brink of the UK Top 40; receiving BBC Radio 1 airplay and being awarded Mark & Lard’s Single of the Week.
