First published as Guest Blog for link2wales http://link2wales.co.uk/2013/crudblog/blog-rhys-mwyn-welsh-royalties-row/#more-13768
Some of you may know, most of you reading this probably
won’t, I write a weekly column in Welsh for Herald Gymraeg, which is an insert
in Wednesday’s Daily Post every week. When I first started to contribute for Yr
Herald Gymraeg I was writing about Pop
Culture, that is Welsh Pop Culture with references to Pop Culture in general.
What I found from feedback was that my audience at the
Herald were not really interested in Pop Culture and gradually I shifted the
emphasis to writing about Welsh History and Archaeology and suggesting places
the readers could visit. So it may have been a walk up Tre’r Ceiri or it could
have been a thumbs up for Ty Mawr café in Rhyd Ddu. The response was universal
- keep writing about the history and ditch the Pop Culture.
Now I was (and am) more than happy to do this because I
consider my job to be a communicator. Gone are the days of deriving pleasure
from writing columns purely to wind up the conservative Welsh Establishment as
I used to do in the 80’s for Y Faner under the editorship of the brilliant
visionary Emyr Price. In my Faner days I was just doing Julie Burchill in
Welsh, writing about drugs, sex, being gay, anything to wind them up. Price
never once edited. As I said a great great man, one to whom I owe a huge debt
for allowing / encouraging me to start my writing career.
Another great visionary, the writer Jon Savage, originally
an inspiration and now a close friend, always reminds me that our job is to
communicate. I keep this in mind every time I write.
(By the end of this article it’s definitely gone
Savage/Morley/Parsons/Burchill all over again – that’s the problem, writing
about Welsh Pop Culture – it make you want to rant).
Now then, to get back to the Herald Gymraeg, Tudur the
editor was discussing with me recently that the Pop Columns are important, and
although I agree with him, I remain un-convinced that the readership actually
want them. But maybe now and again, if I have the energy, I can do the odd
Welsh Pop Culture column for them, in the hope that someone somewhere get’s
something from it ……
So on 23 January 2013 this came out, and here I will attempt
a translation, not literal, but to capture the essence of the piece. Google Translate
creates a cut-up, mash-up, hip hop style piece of text. It would probably be
great set to music, but it makes no sense. So I have to translate ……….
The piece sought to lob cultural handgrenades, throw
arguments at the wall, the Welsh Media Wall, the Welsh Speaking Wall, the Welsh
Pop Culture Wall. Whether anything sticks, well that’s not my initial concern.
The challenge is to write the damned thing. I opened the piece with an explanation as to
how difficult this is to write. One, it’s hard to even care. Two, it sucks the
energy out of any functioning human being. Here we are in 2013 and we still
have to fight and argue for Welsh Culture. We are not allowed (the peace) just
to create. Having said this I think we now have to just go and create, we have
to create in order to destroy as it were.
The gist of this concerns the setting up of the Welsh
Collection Agency, EOS and the so called “dispute” involving BBC, PRS and EOS.
Now my initial argument is from a DIY point of view. Those of us who grew up in
that period 1979-1983 so wonderfully captured by Simon Reynolds in “Rip It Up
and Start Again” should get this.
The whole idea in 1979, indeed the whole point was to write
your own fanzine, start up your own Label, form your own bands using the
diagram of the 3 chords in Sniffin Glue. In 1979 DIY for me was about living in
Mid Wales and being able to form a Welsh Language band without being a
musician, without having ever being to the Eisteddfod, without owning an Edward
H record and without living in a Welsh University Hall of Residence (make that
a Welsh Language Hall of Residence – only two of them, Pant y Celyn and JMJ).
Technically this is Post-Punk, but with a Punk attitude.
This was our catalyst and our way in to (destroy/challenge/change) a Welsh
Culture that seemed at the time to be a combination of redundant, elitist,
irrelevant, un-sexy, and so on and on and on ……….
So full circle to 2013, having had the Welsh Underground
(Datblygu, Cyrff et all) and Cool Cymru, all revolutions in their time, it’s
seems totally appropriate given the technical revolution that we have had, and
that we are in, that we should now be considering the possibility of a Welsh
Collection Agency rather than the PRS “monopoly” as part of the whole new
business model. Back to DIY if you like.
I think most music managers would be immediately attracted
to looking at new business models, see if we can make these things work, have
more control. We also remind some people here that Devolution has happened and
surely the whole concept of Welsh Copyright having to be registered in London
would have hit somebody’s radar sooner or later. (Not the Welsh politicians
apparently).
So that’s the starting block.
Now then the issue about royalty payments for Welsh Language
repertoire get’s a bit tricky at this point. Sure it has value. Without Welsh
Language repertoire both S4C and BBC Radio Cymru could not function as well,
would not reflect Welsh Culture and would basically be doing a poor job of it
…..
The difficulty for many of us in
the left-field sector is that the bulk of the payments have always gone to bad
MOR Welsh acts, half-hearted Country songs with more than a dodgy guitar solo,
the bad ones even have a sax solo included. Like Boy Gorge said “Like Punk
Never happened”, like the Henry Priestman song “Did I Fight in the Punk wars
For This ?” So the argument goes like this – sure I support the principle of
EOS 100% but not to reinstate the status quo.
To quote Strummer “let’s phone up
Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution”. In order to sustain
creativity and the recording process, the whole Welsh Language Music Scene has
to benefit from all this – not a dozen or so MOR acts.
There was a piece recently in
Golwg about Ifan Dafydd having over 60,000 hits on Soundcloud for a Welsh dance
track – cool, but none of this is sales, so if the records no longer sell, can
somebody like Dafydd make a living from live gigs ? The argument comes back to
this – the PRS payment help us all, and maybe for bedroom boys doing dance
tracks it’s one way of getting a few $$$$ back into the pot.
I am reminded of Datblygu lyrics
here, a song about the last Communist in Europe, it’s all very cinematic and
David R Edwards, but it feels like we really have reached a point where we need
wealth distribution. Sure we can go underground (again) but very few get to
hear / listen. I don’t want to be elitist and part of a mutual appreciation
society – I want to communicate. Sometimes underground is good, other times it
needs to be on S4C or the BBC – why not ?
The other bits of the piece were
about “Popeth yn Gymraeg” – we need the whole range of Welsh Pop Culture to be
given a chance, a level playing field. We also need high quality and high
standards – not always – but certainly it needs to be there.
Maybe it’s something to do with
turning 50. I want Andrew Marr and Jeremy Vine in Welsh. I want a reformed Adam Ant in Welsh and I
want Yr Ods, Colorama and Gwenno on daytime Radio Cymru. Play some pop music.
Enter the C21st. I’m not right. I’m not wrong. I just feel short changed. We’ve
been sold a lot of bad guitar solos for a long long time and we now have an
opportunity to raise more questions, throw more mud at walls – before the
status quo comes back with a vengeance. EOS will fail if that’s all it achieves
– because the most creative will be forced to give up, sing in English, go
underground or just do what most Welsh Language acts do – form a mutual
appreciation society.
My argument – take any school in
Wales – let’s go to Syr Thomas Jones in Amlwch and see how many pupils have
even heard of Yr Ods ? They’d probably quite like them if they got to see them
live but let’s not kid ourselves that the time is right for a magazine that
hardly anybody can even find can hold a “Noson Wobrwyo” which has any real
meaning. The time is right for changes and a huge surge of creativity not
complecancy.
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