10 Great love songs from Wales: A St Dwynwen’s Day playlist

Leon Barton

Ahh, January 25th, St Dwynwen’s Day; The Welsh St Valentine.

So, while it’s Burns night in Scotland it’s carpet burns night in Wales, amiright??

Here are a few of my favourite love songs from Welsh artists for you and your cariad to enjoy as a little soundtrack to whatever you fancy getting up to tonight…

1.  John Cale ‘I keep a close watch’

When Cale’s daughter Eden got married in 2017, her father sat next to her at the piano and played this song, something she described as ‘a special moment for both me and my dad’.

Taking lyrical inspiration from Johnny Cash’s first hit ‘I walk the line’, ‘I keep a close watch’ first appeared on Cale’s 1975 album ‘Helen of Troy’.

The version he re-recorded for the ‘Music for a New Society’ album in 1982 was described by music journalist David Bennun as ‘very nearly more beautiful than the human heart can bear’.

Beautiful music

As Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield once declared ‘I find it intriguing that he writes songs like ‘Gun’ or ‘Fear is a man’s best friend’ which have an undercurrent of terrifying anger, and then he can counter them with some of the most beautiful music anyone has ever written. Things like ‘I keep a close watch’…sometimes he manages to still the rage within him and navigate himself to calmer waters’.

The gorgeous version he recorded with Catatonia for ‘Beautiful Mistake’ (‘Camgymeriad Gwych’, director Marc Evans’ 2000 film for S4C in which Cale collaborated with young Welsh musicians) is my favourite.

Talking of which…

2. Catatonia ‘You’ve got a lot to answer for’

Long, long ago, when Radio 6 Music was but twinkle in the BBC’s eye, Cerys Matthews sang in a band called Catatonia, a band who released two albums of sparkling guitar pop (1996’s Way Beyond Blue, 1998’s International Velvet) and two much less sparkly ones (1999’s Equally Cursed and Blessed, 2001’s Paper Scissors Stone) once the spark had gone.

‘You’ve got a lot to answer for’ became the band’s first top 40 hit back in September 1996, and has always struck me as somewhat stealthily profound in its meeting of the romantic and the realistic. Let’s face it guys, we’ve all got a lot to answer for…

3. Badfinger – ‘No Matter What’

Son of Swansea Pete Ham is one of the greatest songwriters Wales has ever produced and it saddens me greatly that we only have a limited selection of his songs to listen to (beset by financial troubles, Ham took his own life three days before his 28th birthday)

‘No Matter What’ was the band’s first self-penned hit. Previous release ‘Come and get it’ was written by mentor Paul McCartney, bass player in some band called The Beatles or something (no, never heard of ’em either…)

Lyrically it’s a pretty standard declaration of eternal love but with that crunchy guitar, those sweet melodies and a fantastic false ending for good measure, the overall package is wonderful; the sound of a band hitting their stride and fully realising their sound.

There’s not many songs that can lay claim to inventing (or at least to some degree codifying) an entire genre, but when it comes to ‘power pop’, ‘No Matter What’ is arguably one of them.

4. Georgia Ruth – ‘Bones’

One of those artists that should be placed in the ‘Should be much bigger than they are’ section of the record shop, Llantwit Major-born, Aberystwyth-raised singer/songwriter/harpist Georgia Ruth Williams, has been one of the brightest lights of the Welsh music scene over the past 15 years or so.

‘Bones’ was one of the highlights of her debut release, the EP ‘In Luna’, from 2011. ‘I want you to break me, break me to my bones’, might not, on the surface, seem a particularly romantic concept for a chorus, but it’s the opening lines – ‘It takes a certain kind of cold to get inside your bones, it takes a certain kind of love to do the same’ – which open the song up, as it were.

I’ll just add that it takes a certain kind of song to give me goosebumps pretty much every time I listen to it and this is one of them.

5. Super Furry Animals – Fire in my heart

It’s perhaps testament to what the Super Furries mean to people who grew up in around Wales in the Nineties (I was born in Wrexham in 1978, but from age 4 lived just over the border in Shropshire) that I’ve attended more than one wedding where this song accompanied the first dance.

Often wilfully obtuse – whilst still totally charming – ‘Fire in my heart’ is SFA at their most straightforward, and was one of the highlights of the band’s third album Guerilla, released in 1998.

The kind of commercial success that the band had in mind when recording the album continued to elude them, so they made a conscious decision to strip back and record follow up Mwng entirely in Welsh.

6. Datblygu – Y Teimlad

Talking of which, it’s to my shame that I didn’t know for years that SFA’s version (which appeared on Mwng) was a cover.

When I decided to write this article, I asked my friend Elis James for suggestions and this one was his immediate response; ‘it has an absolutely beautiful lyric’.

‘Y Teimlad’ translates as ‘The feeling’, and despite not being a Welsh speaker its the feeling it imparts which moves me even if I don’t understand the intracacies of the words.

(Elis’ tribute to the late David R Edwards of Datblygu for the Guardian is absolutely brilliant – check it out)

7. Adwaith – Lipstick Coch

Taking the baton from the likes of Datblygu, Carmarthen trio Adwaith are one of Welsh language music’s current leading lights.

‘Fi’n gwisgo lipstick coch

Mae’r marciau ar dy foch

Ti’n gwisgo lipstick coch

Mae dy hyder canu fel cloch’

goes the chorus of this track from their debut album ‘Melyn’, which roughly translates as ‘I wear red lipstick, the marks are on your cheek, you wear red lipstick, your confidence sounds like a bell’.

If I’ve understood it right, the song is a description of the early part of a romantic relationship, that thrilling time when you’re just getting to know someone who makes your heart flutter and you always want to look your best for.

(Adwaith- if you’re reading this and think I’ve got it wrong, please get in touch and set me right!)

8. Donna Lewis – I love you always forever

If you’re old enough to remember the summer of 96, then you’ll remember this song.  It was ubiquitous back then, reaching number 5 in the UK charts but spending nine weeks at number 2 in the USA, thanks to a huge number of plays on US radio. It was only that summer’s massive novelty smash ‘Macarena’ which kept it from getting to number 1.

Truth be told, at first I assumed Lewis was American (perhaps because the production gave the song a Wilson Phillips/Sophie B Hawkins feel) but she actually hails from the Welsh capital and once you hear that Cardiff accent in the chorus, you can’t actually unhear it…

Follow up single ‘Without love’ was a decent song but it it didn’t get the radio support that ‘I love you..’ got, stalling in the charts and leaving Lewis stranded as something of a one hit wonder.

But if you’re going to only have one hit, you might as well make it MASSIVE. Go hard or go home and all that.

Lewis is still a busy and in-demand musician, living on the east coast of the USA, is a breast cancer survivor, and, from the recent interviews I’ve heard with her, seems like a genuinely lovely person.

9. 60ft dolls – Hair

‘I love your air and everything below it. I don’t care if you cut it or you grow it’

Isn’t that a lovely line? Reminds me of Smokey Robinson. If Smokey had been born thirty years later and in Newport rather than Detroit.

Written by bassist Mike Cole about his then-girlfriend Donna Matthews (guitarist for Elastica) it was placed at Number 7 in Mojo magazines list of the ‘100 Most Miserable Indie Songs of All Time’, which seems really odd as I find the song both beautiful and funny (‘It’s yellow and it’s brown. Everywhere it follows you around’)

The third of my selections from 1996 – obviously the golden year of the Welsh love song. Or am I just being nostalgiac for my teenage years?

Marina – I love you but I love me more

Bit of a curveball but this song is about the huge importance of self love. Or, as the Staple Singers so poetically put it, ‘If you don’t respect yourself, aint nobody gonna give a good cahoot na na na na’.

Brynmawr-born Marina Diamandis grew up in a bungalow in Pandy with her mum and sister following her parents’ seperation and father’s subsequent return to his native Greece.

In my opinion, she’s one of modern pop’s best lyricists – witty, honest and incisive.

Musically, this track is what I imagine ABBA might have sounded like had they been a 21st century electro-pop act.

And importantly, it’s a reminder that, even if you don’t have a partner, we’ve all got someone who could always do with a bit more love.

xxx