Bangor-born, Cardiff-based writer Euron Griffith, whose previously published fiction has appeared in both Welsh and English, has parlayed a largely unknown ‘career’ as a rock musician into his debut memoir. The story outlined across A Casual Life In Six T-shirts serves as a motif for a north Wales upbringing that made his teenage music fandom a challenge even before he took the stage himself.

Laced with wit and long-winded yet mostly intriguing events, A Casual Life In Six T-Shirts demonstrates Griffith’s natural affinity for storytelling. Whilst the cacophony of complex words and extended sentences filled with metaphors and analogies is often something akin to word vomit (Griffith tends to go off on a tangent to the extent that a reader may lose sight of the original point), what is clear is the intelligence and integrity of the narrator. 

Having had success with the publication of Welsh-language novels such as Dyn Pob Un, Euron Griffith reflects humorously and honestly on his not-so-successful attempts at stardom. The six T-shirts of the title anchor the memoir in a mostly linear fashion with odes to musicians aplenty: this book is not only a telling of the author’s life but also a nostalgic tale of British music and culture through the decades.