From churches to TV to tours to a country wellness retreat, there’s nowhere Charlotte Church can’t call home – even if ‘home’ is ever-changing. Isabel Thomas calls up the national figure mid-transformation between her final Pop Dungeon shows and the opening of her ambitious build, The Dreaming, and finds no matter how busy, she’s always up for a catch-up. 

As her genre-mashing, high-energy theatrical cover band, Late Night Pop Dungeon, embarks on its final tour this December, Charlotte Church is moving her focus towards wellbeing. The singer, campaigner – and now owner of a wellness retreat – has led a career of unexpected turns, often in the spotlight of an unforgiving media.

“It’s not that I like doing things people don’t expect, it’s that I can do nothing other than that,” she explains. Led by instinct, she believes that forging new things is what she’s here to do. It makes for a busy lifestyle, but she’s buzzing with energy. In our short call – somewhere in London on her end – she races enthusiastically through all her current projects with a hearty “Let’s go!”

With the chaotic energy of Pop Dungeon, Charlotte Church showed that tackling other people’s songs can be an immersive experience rather than predictable and formulaic. Filled with multi-genre remixes from a band of jazz, pop, rock and indie musicians, the shows have been known to whip crowds into a frenzy. It’s not unusual for attendees to claim they had a transcendental time.

She believes this is due to people missing out on experiencing their favourite artists while they were still alive, making for an exhilarating experience intensified by the band’s serious compositional approach. Charlotte is full of admiration for them, and it’s clear that performing together gives her so much joy. In previous interviews, she revealed how past performances would involve retreating into herself until the song was over; in this incarnation, she’s present and full of vibrancy.

Why bring it to an end, then? “It’s so special and powerful right now, and I want to leave it there in that state.” There’s pride in ending a project while it’s still strong, and she’s enthused by new directions: reducing suffering and supporting people to find meaning and purpose in life. In 2019, she founded The Awen Project, a democratic learning community for school-age children, and she’s about to open The Dreaming, a wellbeing retreat at Rhydoldog House in Cwmdauddwr, Powys.

The retreat is based on the idea that our world is complex and fast-paced with overstimulation frying our immune systems. It’s intended as an antithesis to the pressures of yoga and meditation apps that add to our to-do lists. From feeling somewhat shaman-like on stage, Charlotte Church moves to meditative rituals and sound baths. In a sense, she’s providing two extremes of therapy: the ecstasy and collective outpouring of emotions through live music overload, and the quiet contemplation of the retreat. She claims there’s something even “prayer-like” in both gatherings. 

Much of Church’s early career involved religious music and before then, engagements at Llandaff Cathedral. Her trajectory to fame began in 1997, with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu sung over the phone to Richard and Judy, and in 2001, she reached new audiences by joining Josh Groban on {The Prayer}. I ask if there’s any religious meaning to what she does now, but her spiritual references are more esoteric and wellbeing-centred these days. “We’re all complex beings who need both things,” she explains, talking about raucous pop music versus peaceful musical meditation. “If we can traverse that terrain of peaks and troughs, we become better able to deal with the world. We should be focusing not on emotional resilience but on emotional agility.”

An important aim of The Dreaming is to bring together people who might not usually convene. In response to preventative financial barriers, there will be both a sliding scale of payment and pay-as-you-can space on every retreat. Rhydoldog House has a long history of private owners, which prevented the public from enjoying its arts and crafts stylings and stunning views – until now. “I feel like I’ve democratised the use of the land for social good.”

From 1961, the building was the second home of designer Laura Ashley, who allegedly took inspiration from the nearby landscape for her floral prints. As campaigns such as Nid Yw Cymru Ar Werth (Wales Is Not For Sale) are pressuring the Welsh Government and local councils to increase taxes on second homes and holiday accommodation, Charlotte admits to knowing some of the perpetrators of building fires in long-gone waves of property protests. But the reception around Rhydoldog House has apparently been warmer. In response, one of the Pop Dungeon tour dates takes the show to the nearby town of Rhayader: “The local community has been totally lush in welcoming me there, so I wanted to give them a little treat.”

For many inside and outside of Wales, the young Charlotte Church represented a certain ‘Welshness’ (outspoken and great at singing) while the country rode the Cool Cymru wave into the marketing-gold era of Doctor Who, the Senedd and rugby successes. As a teen, her performances emphasised Welsh language hymns, harps and choirs, but she insists that “we tend to sell ourselves short and make Welsh culture a bit trinkety – coal mines, male voice choirs, rugby and daffodils – when actually there’s a huge depth of culture here and it’s really ancient.”

Nowadays, she’s spreading pop culture history around the UK. As supporters of the newly renamed Cymru team at the World Cup surprise international audiences with the ferocity of their voices, I ask her whether {Pop Dungeon} is spreading a potential Welsh tradition: the practice of singing along loudly to anthemic songs in the pubs, chapels and working men’s clubs. She doesn’t see a clear connection between, on the one hand, her childhood of folk tunes and religious music, and, on the other hand, her cover band. But she’s enthusiastic about taking people on a communal euphoric journey through music in the same way she imagines Welsh chapels may have done for huge crowds in the past.

While Church is passionate about the preservation of Welsh heritage, she sees most forms of nationalism as ugly. Heritage, instead, is made up of living traditions that exist outside of a museum and must be open to change. Reacting to the news this month that Snowden would be renamed to Yr Wyddfa, she’s keen on the idea of returning place names to their original, obscured Welsh. But she urges decision-makers to consider how these actions serve those living in or around a place, including multiple language groups. “It’s got to make sense for the people who call that place home,” she insists.

She ruminates that Welsh culture is still very much rooted in the land, avoiding some of the dangers of overdevelopment. As a result, “the magic in Wales is closer to the surface, and we’d all do well to tap into that.” The Dreaming intends to do just this: “I can’t tell you how much I’ve fallen in love with the land. I’ve been on a two-year journey to make it worthy of the land it sits in.”

What’s next for Charlotte Church? She’ll hopefully be making some original music, but she’s also doing her best to be a good mother, wife, daughter and friend, as well as heal. Will the Pop Dungeon ever come back? The idea hasn’t been ruled out, but only for charitable purposes.

This winter, then, might be the last chance to hear Pop Dungeon’s unique transitions between the E.T. theme, King Crimson, Black Sabbath and En Vogue, in a setlist full of sneaky Easter eggs. “There are loooads that make you go ‘ahh my god that riff!’ They exist on the perimeter of our aural perceptions.” I ask for any clues for finding them. She responds with a playful “You’ll have to be there!”

Charlotte Church’s Late Night Pop Dungeon, Depot, Cardiff, Wed 21 Dec. Tickets: £25. Info: here

The Dreaming, Rhydoldog House, Cwmdauddwr, Rhayader. Bookings and prices info here; pay-what-you-can options available upon enquiry.

words ISABEL THOMAS