A celebration of 25 years of Mwng – the biggest-selling Welsh language album ever

Neil Collins

From chart-topping albums to huge gigs, the ’90s was the decade when Cymru officially became Cool. As Cerys Matthews once famously sang, ‘Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m Welsh.’

Manic Street Preachers may have played to a capacity crowd at the Millennium Stadium on Millennium Eve of all nights, but perhaps Mwng was the crowning glory of the whole era?

Only a few years before, musicians Mark Roberts and Gruff Rhys called time on their bands, Ffa Coffi Pawb and Y Cyrff. Frustrated that they were playing to the same people at the same festivals singing in their mother tongue, they later shifted into the English language with Catatonia and Super Furry Animals.

Both justified the switch. Catatonia topped the UK album charts twice by the end of the ’90s, while the Furries issued three classic records of madcap guitar-pop. Then with their critical and commercial acclaim at its peak, they returned to their roots.

Released across the UK and overseas on 15 May 2000, Mwng became the biggest-selling Welsh-language album ever.

‘This album is a celebration of Welsh culture embracing the new wave of confidence in the Welsh nation…’

So stated Plaid Cymru parliamentary leader Elfyn Llwyd MP of Super Furry Animals’ fourth album, Mwng.

When frontman Gruff Rhys told Melody Maker in January 2000, ‘I like the idea of creating cultural havoc,’ few would have guessed what he had up his sleeve: every word on the new record would be in Welsh.

It was a complete transformation from a decade before. Just months into the new millennium, politicians were glowing with praise about the feel-good factor this talented crop of Welsh musicians had created.

Llwyd continued: ‘This album proves that the Welsh language is being used as a central part of Welsh popular youth culture. The confidence that Super Furry Animals have shown in releasing a Welsh album and making it so successful outside of Wales is simply amazing.’

Mwng became the biggest-selling Welsh-language album of all time, and the first ever in the UK Top 20. It reached No. 11 where it rubbed shoulders with Britney Spears, Eminem and David Gray (who, incidentally, was raised in Solva, Pembrokeshire).

An early day motion is a spontaneous procedure allowing politicians to mention something of interest in the House of Commons without waiting weeks. No debate or legislation follows. It’s simply noted in the official parliamentary record, Hansard, and the Furries were now in it – the same band who drove a tank into the Eisteddfod just four years earlier!

The anarchic band didn’t necessarily crave this attention. As Gruff said: ‘Ultimately, we’re a band of musicians touring nightclubs. Maybe we didn’t want that kind of responsibility.’

This from a band who had faced cultural exile and were haunted by the ghosts of Welsh music’s past. As Ric Rawlins explained: ‘There’s an ancient Welsh belief that anybody who makes music in the native language will be possessed by demons. Not just any old demons, however – specifically the type that make you competitive with, and jealous of, other musicians – hence the phrase ‘cythraul canu’, which means ‘devil singer’.

The idiom ended up inspiring Ymaelodi a’r Ymylon (meaning Banished to the Periphery) – a harmonium-infused, sea-shanty mish-mash of The Beach Boys, Ennio Morricone and Love.

Not fearing folklore, the Furries were ready to subvert their audience in Welsh. For Mwng, the group emphasised simple songwriting. Out were elaborate effects pedals and sophisticated software, and in were stark, stripped-back, lo-fi pastoral folk tunes. Where (their last album) Guerrilla took three months to record at a cost of ￡100,000 followed by a further month of mixing, the price of Mwng was just ￡6,000 across two weeks. Laid down on tape with a more instinctive, live-session feel, Mwng was shorn of studio techniques and the Furries’ quality as a band became far more prominent as a result.

Returning to Bethesda following his father’s death, Gruff dusted off a box of records in the attic from his formative years including Datblygu and Meic Stevens. Brainstorming whether he could combine the two, he began demoing Welsh-language songs with themes of love, loss, war, and identity crisis amid globalisation.

Introducing the album to BBC Wales, Gruff said: ‘“Mwng” means ‘mane’- I suppose it’s an extension of a Super Furry Animal, something that keeps you warm. It’s a winter album, but we’re releasing it in May, and we’ve been billing this album as a dark album, [but] the single’s going to be Ysbeidiau Heulog, which means “sunny intervals”.

‘(The song) is a complete contrast, and our concession to ELO. Jeff Lynne was very concerned about the weather, and he made a lot of money out of it. It’s sort of throwaway pop…You’ve got to imagine the saxophonist from 1972 Roxy Music in a spangly red jumpsuit!’

Aside from that anomaly, the other songs generally held a similar, rustic tone. Gruff recalled: ‘My four-track recorder had been stolen, so I started going up to Gorwel’s. I’d throw down twenty songs. It was really basic stuff, sometimes to a drum machine, just a case of getting the song down.

‘The album is sung in the Welsh language, but the music is a filter of everything we ever listened to – from the American underground and the Brazilian underground and the Welsh underground, and some overground influences.

‘There was nothing to stop Mwng from resonating internationally. We were bringing a bit of our own selves through in it as well, but it wasn’t completely alien to people’s ears.

‘The songs existed anyway and Welsh is the language we speak with each other, so in that sense it wasn’t a big deal, but in reality, it was…We’d gone through quite a turbulent time of hype and TV documentaries where people followed us around the country with a stopwatch measuring the percentage of songs we sang in English.’

With melodies this infectious, Mwng was never going to take long to register. ‘If I listen to a Nirvana record, I don’t understand most of their lyrics cos he’s just screaming away,’ continued Gruff to BBC Wales. ‘But I understand the frustration and the passion in his voice. I think equally people can get off on this record by connecting to the mood of the song.

‘If you listen to bands like Kraftwerk, if you were singing, “Motorway” [instead of “Autobahn”], it would sound crap, but that Germanic pronunciation makes the sound.’

Ysbeidiau Heulog, Gwreiddiau Dwfn and Y Gwyneb Iau were all recorded over one weekend in summer 1999 at Famous Studios in Cardiff. The rest was completed at Gorwel’s bungalow studio between the band’s festival slots. None of their previous English-language singles had landed in the Top 10, so the band jokingly put themselves on ‘pop strike’. If the radio wasn’t playing their English tunes, they may as well release songs in Welsh.

On Creation, the band found that their Welsh-language repertoire was tucked away on B-sides. Only Torra Fy Ngwallt yn Hir made it onto an album. Drummer, Dafydd Ieuan told Drowned in Sound: ‘We had tried putting one Welsh song on Radiator, but I wasn’t a fan of mixing languages. You get into the sound of a song regardless of the lyrics, but you also get into the sound of a language, and you can tell if something’s changed.’

Many of the new Welsh songs were of a similar ilk, so rather than releasing them sporadically as token offerings, they would form a coherent album. One of the demos, Nythod Cacwn (Beehives) – featuring Gruff on drums and with lyrics made up on the spot – sounded so good, it made it onto the album intact. Only one thing stood in their way: the unlikely demise of Creation Records.

Tired and disillusioned, Alan McGee called time on the label. On his way out, he paid tribute to the Furries: ‘They were the last great Creation band…There are only a few bands you could make a film out of, and the Furries are one because their story is so fucking bonkers.’

Equally cursed and blessed, the Furries may not have had the financial backing, but they were now free to release a Welsh-language album on their own label, Placid Casual. Named after the Radiator track, it had been set up in 1998 to release a single by Psycho VII (featuring their mates Dic Ben and Rhodri Puw). Self-releasing Mwng also eliminated the risk of a potential label (who didn’t understand this internationalist band) doing something ‘horrific’ like putting a Welsh flag on the cover.

After selling the Furries as a Britpop band, Creation got it wrong again by perceiving Mwng as a specialist jazz album. Therefore, it was fitting that the Furries controlled its destiny. Given their history, this wasn’t going to be conventional.

‘We used all the worst quotes we could find from the bad reviews for the advert,’ said Gruff. ‘It got great reviews, but we managed to find some bad ones. Stuff like “career suicide” from the Jewish Chronicle. We put the advert up in the NME.’

Mwng’s desolate vibe was reflected in its austere artwork. Renowned for his bizarre beasts and lurid landscapes, Pete Fowler took a different approach here. The music had an isolated beauty, so a monochrome and minimalist palette was befitting.

After a Surf ’s Up-inspired initial concept of a woman riding a horse was abandoned, a less obvious flowing-maned animal was chosen – a goat. The idea was multifaceted. Mirroring the rural sparseness of the recording location in Anglesey, the band loved the devilish aspect of the creature, as well as its symbolism in phrases like ‘she’s a tough old goat’.

Fowler, who collaborated with Cardiff artist Mark James, said to the Welsh Music Podcast: ‘Mwng’s artwork was quite a departure. The idea for the goat was to go with something less monstrous, but also with the twist of it smoking a pipe, which gives it a human quality and a mythological edge. Almost like it was an ancient god perhaps, or a creature that has always been there throughout time in the mountains.’

The sleeve’s simplicity was reflected in the impulsive nature of the songs, starting with the minute-and-a-half glam-rock stomp of Drygioni. Its verses alternated between Good and Evil (while emphasising the listener’s need for both), and demonstrated Gruff’s love of wordplay harking back to Ffa Coffi Pawb. ‘Drygioni’ translates as ‘Badness’, but is phonetically close to the English word ‘drug’.

That wasn’t Gruff’s only revisit to his old band. Dacw Hi (There She Is) was an unreleased Ffa Coffi Pawb song written in 1987: ‘It’s about a teacher I used to have when I was five, who claimed she had eyes in the back of her head, and I took it literally…I nicked an egg, and I was going to break it on her desk when she wasn’t facing me, and she caught me.’

The band’s trademark humour was also evident on Y Gwyneb Iau, which translates into the obscure insult of ‘Liverface’ and juxtaposes themes of war with tranquil trumpets – or as Gruff put it: ‘The Velvet Underground conducting an unlikely threesome with Gladys Knight and Nick Drake.’

Although Mwng is internationalist, it often casts its gaze inwards with Welsh social history permeating throughout. Sarn Helen revolves around the Roman road linking the two ends of Wales, while Pan Ddaw’r Wawr (When Dawn Breaks) deals with the decimation of rural communities as a result of advanced capitalism. Gruff said: ‘Real estate prices are out of reach of most people, and often people have to move away and resettle, so there’s a lot of displacement. It happens to a lot of rural Wales, and it does affect the language base.’

Surprisingly, the Furries didn’t tour Mwng in their homeland. It’s understandable that they didn’t want it to turn into a patriotic rally, nor did they, in Gruff’s words, ‘want to create a Hollywood, sentimental homecoming gig’. All UK fans saw of Mwng live was at festivals, a couple of isolated gigs and an appearance on Jools Holland.

Having headlined Cardiff International Arena a few months earlier, the band didn’t feel the need to return so soon. ‘It would’ve been too emotional,’ Gruff told The Observer. ‘For us, but also because people could’ve turned out like at rugby matches – dressed up as red dragons and leeks.’

Instead, they took Mwng to the USA and Japan. In the latter, crowds sung back phonetically, while in America, it became the band’s bestselling album accompanied by a well-attended tour. The idea was to finish in New York and begin recording the next album. That was if they hadn’t been abandoned in the middle of nowhere.

Gruff recalled: ‘Our bus was driven by a husband-and-wife team, who were very religious from the Deep South. They were supposed to drop us at the studio, but we had fallen out with them.

‘We ended up being dumped on the side of the road. They threw out a lot of equipment and bags; Bunf (guitarist, Huw Bunford) only had one shoe! We were miles from the studio by a forest and there were bears around, so that was the end of the Mwng tour!’

Still widely regarded as the greatest Welsh-language album ever, Mwng’s legacy remains undiminished. In 2015, Band Pres Llareggub covered it in its entirety. The north Walian brass band’s leader, Owain Gruffudd Roberts, said:

‘You can’t ignore Mwng in terms of the repertoire of Welsh-language pop music. Growing up, it had a big impact on me musically, and also people outside of Wales know it. It’s not quite the same as covering Dafydd Iwan or Caryl Parry Jones. When you play (Lake District music festival) Kendal Calling or a gig in London, people will generally know a few tunes off Mwng.’

In a reflection of the band’s socialist values, it was also reissued on International Workers’ Day in 2015. Meticulously remastered by band archivist Kliph Scurlock and engineer Donal Whelan, the process almost ended in disaster at the storage facility: ‘The fire didn’t affect us, it stopped at the letter “M”…M People survived,’ laughed Bunf.

With studio wizardry constantly evolving, Mwng has aged remarkably well thanks to its bare-boned production. Released to universal praise, Mojo described the album as a ‘sensuous, sonic journey’ with an ‘organic, woody, mystical atmosphere’. Select said: ‘Rather than snickering behind a barrier of linguistic exclusivity, the Furries have made their warmest record yet.’ Wales Arts Review added: ‘It’s perhaps evidence of the normalisation of the language to the point that it’s no longer seen as a weird or novelty thing – it’s now something to be treasured.’

The Furries certainly attained what they set out to achieve musically on Mwng, but Gruff’s beautiful lyrics shouldn’t be underappreciated. Welsh poet and playwright, Menna Elfyn told The Observer: ‘There’s a lyric intensity to the songs on Mwng. You could almost look at them in a postcolonial way. There’s so much about being on the periphery and banishment and leaving heritage, connecting with those who have been displaced.’

One of the most touching tributes came from the band’s long-term producer, Gorwel Owen. He referenced how the band had written jokingly about the fragility of the Welsh language on their early B-side (Nid) Hon Yw’r Gan Sy’n Mynd i Achub yr Iaith – This Is (Not) the Song That Will Save the Language: ‘In the song, Gruff refers to “dim ond carreg mewn wal barhaus”, which describes the music as being a stone in a continuous wall. I think what the band created on Mwng was quite a significant stone in any wall.’

If there was any more evidence needed that Welsh music had completed a 180-degree turn across the ’90s, it was proven by Mwng’s most emotive track – one not even written by the band themselves.

Y Teimlad (The Feeling) is the most beautiful and unlikely love song of all time. An iconic Datblygu song, it had been tucked away on Cam o’r Tywyllwch – Rhys Mwyn’s compilation that ignited the Welsh-language music revolution in the ’80s.

The endorsement of Datblygu from the likes of the Furries and Gorky’s helped usher in a new generation of fandom. It was therefore apt that Ankst released the Datblygu 1985–1995 collection at the height of Cool Cymru and recognised them as a huge inspiration for the ’90s boom. No longer a rarity and now deservedly reaching a bigger audience than ever before, Y Teimlad was the compilation’s opening, focal track.

Originally a synth-infused heartbreaker, the Furries’ straightforward acoustic rendition was the easiest thing they ever recorded, and it was no less stunning in its simplicity. Y Teimlad possessed a humanity that many of Datblygu’s contemporaries lacked. Gruff acknowledged the song’s unique warmth and versatility: ‘It’s a song about love, or it’s a song about not knowing what love is or what love means. The original is a really raw, kind of an electro, dissonant song, but it could be made in a Sinatra style.’

Speaking to the Welsh Music Podcast, Patricia Morgan recalled the first time she heard the Furries’ cover: ‘I was listening to John Peel and Y Teimlad came on, and I thought, “Hang on, this isn’t us!” Their rendition is beautiful. It’s such a compliment.’

Y Teimlad was all the more poignant following David R. Edwards’s death at the age of 56 in June 2021. Two months later, Gruff Rhys concluded his show at Clwb Ifor Bach with a special tribute.

As his bandmates exited the stage, Gruff was left alone to strum those familiar chords from four decades previously. At a time when it hadn’t long felt like live music may never return, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotions of sadness and relief ensured there wasn’t a dry eye in the house:

‘Y teimlad, beth yw y teimlad? / Y teimlad, sy’n cael ei alw’n gariad.’
‘The feeling, what is the feeling? / The feeling that is called love.’

Described by Gruff Rhys as ‘the Welsh gospel’, David R. Edwards’ words resonate now more than ever – crossing cultures, languages and borders.

International Velvet: How Wales Conquered the ’90s Charts is available now via Calon in bookshops and online here: linktr.ee/neilcollins123
Listen to the Welsh Music Podcast’s 20th anniversary special on Mwng from 2020 here: https://t.co/tNL6fPaSYY