CERYS MATTHEWS | INTERVIEW
Musician and broadcaster Cerys Matthews tells John-Paul Davies how her passion for the spoken word has helped her find a new way to express her musical voice.
We Come From The Sun shines a new light on poetry, music and, as all brave leaps forward in art do, on humanity itself. Cerys Matthews, now far removed from her bar-room belter days with Catatonia, has curated a collection of poetry by living British poets, set it to music by Hidden Orchestra, aka solo musician Joe Acheson, and released it as an album on the Decca label.
Speaking to me over the phone, with a brief break to discuss the weekly shopping list, the hardest answer for Cerys to pin down was how it all began: “I suppose with my love affair with sound, with the power you can have if you’re really good at putting words in a certain order. You can imbue them with such massive emotion, or meaning, or power – as you can see now with the whole bloody political affair: slogans, chants, promises and lies. It’s all to do with words, and the meaning behind those words.”
After years of broadcasting and promoting the spoken word, We Come From The Sun is the natural next step in Cerys’ recording career. “I love the sounds of voices, I love literature, I love music and I like mixing all three – and the sounds of nature as well. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with a lot of literary awards – with the Hay Festival as vice-president, and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Young Foyles Writers Competition – and there’s just so much great work coming out at the minute, I thought it would be great to record these great writers.”
But then, with access to so many great writers, how do you choose whom to include?
“Well, it’s a pretty lofty ambition, this project. You couldn’t start without any parameters. There are so many great poems being added – especially, it seems, at the minute, with climate change and wildfires, and Brexit and Trump. The lofty ambition is a series of albums recording the voices of writers with music and sounds, and this is the first.”
Here the theme of identity, commonality and ancestry runs through the selected poems, and Cerys sees this first release as the genesis for further explorations into what it means to live together on this one earth, with other writers in the future.
“The one thing I hope is apparent is that when something new is born it doesn’t come out of a vacuum – we come to the planet on the back of our forefathers. Which is why the first track Flame Lilly is perfect. It’s by an artist called MA.MOYO and it works musically without anything else, apart from her voice, just because the rhythms are so strident and so powerful.
“She talks about where she comes from, her foremothers specifically, and it’s such a great beginning. She came into the booth in Abbey Road and it was a moment – you know, one of those moments when you’re like, ‘flippin’ ‘eck!’ – and we all heard it and we all felt it. That’s [the origin of] the album title. I thought it was a great, wide title with a lot of power, but you could read into it whichever way you want it.”
For those who follow Cerys’ career as a radio presenter, author and patron of the written word, this synthesis of her great loves will be no great surprise. Many may find the absence of Cerys’ own distinctive Celtic burr odd, though – all the poems are read by their authors.
“Well I’m hoping my voice is in the whole – it’s my baby, you know? I mean, I could read their work, but I felt it was better for the poets to read their own work. You can hear my voice in the whole project, in the ethos of it, the aims of it, the compositions and ideas and the sound journey that you make.”
Taken individually, the readings range from truly engaging to merely endearing – not all great poets make compelling readers. But the collective effect of hearing the varied accents and deliveries is the simple, yet disarming step which makes WCFTS relevant and successful.
“Liz Berry, when you hear her accent, it’s so just full of melody – and god, she reads her stuff so well. She is able to consistently do what I look for in an artist, which is to say so much so effortlessly with so little. There’s lines in Connemara, a poem about a young woman who finds herself pregnant for the first time, where she writes: “I stepped out of my skin at dusk in Connemara, where bush crickets hummed like pylons and the lanes smell of tar and clover. What laid beneath was fragile, not yet ready for its season.” Then later on she writes, “I was as attractive to the crows as a butcher’s window.” Oh my word – oof, god – you nailed it on the head there. It’s why I’m such a massive fan of Bob Dylan, you know: there’s line after line after line you wanted to write.”
So along with a Black Country writer reading a poem set in Ireland, Scottish writer Imtiaz Darker reads The Trick, preceded by Kayo Chingonyi reading his Long Loch By Ardgarten, Argyll.
“Globalization has taken place; we travel by air; too many places we have the internet. You cannot assume from looking at somebody’s name, or the title of a piece of work, what geographical reference points you might have, and it was interesting to play with that. Not least in the current climate where we find ourselves in echo chambers, being drawn to tribes.”
The breaking down of barriers may have been more challenging during a global pandemic in which most people’s worlds have become smaller and more enclosed. But collaboration, and using the outdoor sounds that are common to different areas across the country, helped widen the focus.
“I worked alongside Hidden Orchestra – a multi-instrumentalist and composer, who is also a field recorder like myself. I’ve been collecting sounds for forever as well. We have this huge collection of sounds, so on the record you’re going to hear night sounds from Cairo, from Paris; snow sounds from Finland; we’ve got pigeon sheds from Bristol.
“We worked with Jack McNeal on clarinet and bass clarinet and he also did some field recording for us. Where we were specifically looking for something and didn’t have it, we had a network of musicians who were able to go out into their locality – where we weren’t allowed to do it, with lockdown – and record for us.”
So Covid wasn’t a barrier?
“We recorded the poets in Abbey Road, and that was in February – and then it was just lockdown. But both Joe [Acheson] and I were thinking that it probably helped with the fluidity of the project and focus and the element of escape, because if you can’t leave your four walls it’s lovely to put your headphones on and escape into the world of natural sounds.”
And that’s something that can be shared with everyone, regardless of how restricted they are.
“Hopefully it’s a journey in sound, an aural adventure, and we take the hand of the listener and you don’t know where you’re going to go.”
We Come From The Sun is out now on Decca. Info: here
words JOHN-PAUL DAVIES