Mercury rising! Two Welsh supernovas collide for one-off concert

The Cardiff Music City Festival series: interviews celebrating the pioneering Welsh artists performing at our capital’s fortnight-long extravaganza of music, happening now across the city

Jude Rogers

Wales’ beloved most recent Mercury Music Prize nominees come to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama this week, excited to play the instrument that shaped them.

One is better known as an ambitious, experimental pop star who explores her native languages in adventurous albums and stage shows. The other is a rising jazz star who has played with some of the genre’s greatest artists, and whose latest album is named after the town where he was born and brought up.

Gwenno and Joe Webb have been brought together for a special one-off event at the college’s gorgeous Dora Stoutzker Hall by BBC Radio producer and presenter Bethan Elfyn. She was inspired after her first gig at the venue last year – Cardiff Music City Festival’s 2025 opening-night performance by the retro-pop band CVC.

“I’ve been a Cardiff gig-goer all my life. I’d never been to the concert hall before, and the sound was something else – a concert hall engineered for optimal acoustics.” She also found the setting “sublime”, and the band “flawless… hearing music that transcends the world and all its noise – I was so enthusiastic.”

Elfyn hit on the idea of bringing together Gwenno and Webb on the piano because “they are an unusual mix, but boundaries and genres blur all the time in my line of work…and I really hope fans of both artists might discover something new on the
night”.

Gwenno is excited too, especially as she’s never played at the Royal Welsh College before. “And I don’t get enough opportunity to play with people from really different genres, so I can’t wait to hear and meet Joe.”

Piano is her first instrument, she explains, Zooming from home in Cardiff. She learned from the age of five, taught by her uncle Theo, a church organist who once taught at the cathedral school in Llandaff. He had broad tastes, loving Bach, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and also atonal music. Gwenno did all her grade exams at the Royal Welsh College, she adds, “so it’s especially nice to be returning for this!”

Pianos have been central to her life ever since. At school, she’d play at break times and lunchtimes (“to try and fail to impress boys!”), and when she was a touring dancer in Las Vegas at seventeen, she hired a piano to “mess around with” in her
hotel room (“I was obviously thinking, well, I need to have a piano in the house – I’ve always have had one”).

A school piano featured on her breakthrough album, Le Kov, and her most recent is a Hellas model – she points to it off-camera – bought as a second-hand investment in her music in Manchester. She wrote most of her recent album, 2025’s Utopia, on the instrument, which also opened her musically. “I was three records in, and I’d reached a point where I wanted to go beyond electronic music. I wanted to sit with my instrument, where theres no electronics involved at all, and try to explore it as much
as I can.”

This led to a series of piano gigs, where she’s had to speak more between songs. “My weird cabaret act!” she laughs; in the last month, she’s also performed this way in two support slots on the final tour of British indie veterans, Saint Etienne.

“When I come back to the piano, I always feel like it’s pure music,” she explains. “I also feel my uncle’s influence on me, but it also feels almost like I’m enjoying a solitary pursuit, and that’s a lovely feeling when I get to play it live. I feel there’s no barrier, because I’m meshed with the piano as a sort of unit. It really feels like a sanctuary.”

Joe Webb also started learning to play piano at five. Speaking to me from his home in London, he’s had a busy few years. He played and co-wrote two songs on Raye’s latest album, This Music May Contain Hope, performed with Wynton Marsalis (“one of my heroes”) and released his critically acclaimed second solo album, Neath Beat, this May. At the concert, he’ll be playing with his trio, featuring bassist Will Sach and drummer Sam Jesson.

Growing up in Neath, his first inspiration was hearing his grandfather perform. “He used to play these pub classics – I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, When The Saints Go Marching In – all these feel-good things.”

His mum recently found a photograph of him with his first tiny little Casio keyboard, he adds, and she was a huge supporter of his passion. She took on a second job to pay for lessons, and Webb’s father also “worked hard”, he says, to get him to university. He ultimately secured a place on the B.Mus jazz degree course at the Royal Welsh College.

Webb’s first teacher, Penny Davies, understood quickly that little Joe was more into jazz than classical repertoire, he explains.

“She used to write chord symbols on my Bach and Beethoven pieces,” he smiles. “But I also loved rock and roll and Oasis. Then someone gave me a Jools Holland CD, showing me how piano could do rock and roll and then came Oscar Peterson and Fats Waller, and then I was properly on the jazz train!”

At the Royal Welsh College, he was taught by “the amazing” Huw Warren (who still teaches at the college today) as well as Paul Jones, Nick Weldon and Dick Roberts. Webb never played the Dora Stoutzker Hall because it was being built when he was a student – it opened just as he graduated.

“The college offered all this immersiveness,” he beams. “I have such fond memories of being surrounded by like-minded people for the first time, and learning jazz was a bit like learning a new language, with all the best teachers!”

His latest album, Neath Beat, draws on many things that bring rhythm and joy to his life. This includes the football he watches on TV when he’s practising: he “likes to respond musically to what he sees”, which is why there are tracks called Goalmouth Scramble and KDB (named after former Manchester City player Kevin De Bruyne).

“KDB is a genius on the football pitch who does the unthinkable all the time, even though what he’s doing basically is passing the ball to an opponent. I’m trying to get that across through music!”

The album also includes covers of Mercury Music Prize winner Ms Dynamite’s Dy-Na-Mi-Tee, and a slow version of Myfanwy. “I’ve always got to have a Welsh song on there next up, I’m working on Calon Lan.”

He’s “chuffed” to be coming back to Wales for the gig (“I do miss it, you know”),  to meet Gwenno (“she’s amazing!”), and to explore just how far the piano can take them as performers on the night. For two musicians who have travelled very different paths
with their instruments since childhood, the Dora Stoutzker Hall feels like a perfect place to come together and discover where those paths might lead next.

Bethan Elfyn presents Gwenno and the Joe Webb Trio at the Dora Stoutzker Hall at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama on Thursday 8th October at 7.30pm.

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