Cultural highlights 2025: Moments of giddying joy – Pedair, Riot Women and Dave Tynan

Aran Jones, SaySomethinIn

When Nation Cymru asked me if I’d done anything cultural this year, I thought no, don’t be silly. I’ve been working.

If culture is the steam rising off the back of the working horse, I’ve mostly been the horse. Or maybe more of a donkey.

Then I skimmed reluctantly through my calendar, and little sparks of memory started coughing fitfully into life.

I thought 2025 had been one long email to the tech department, interwoven with some part-time work as a taxi driver for teenagers. But no, I had some moments of joy.

Here are three of the best for you, so that you can join me in stepping briefly out of the crushing machinery of capitalism.

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol

The first week of August, of course – as inevitably and unavoidably as death or taxes – is the National Eisteddfod.

We were in Wrecsam, where there’s an increasing bounce in their step as the footballers continue playing around with Hollywood. That wasn’t why we were there, though – we were squeezing in at the front of a packed Saith Seren to watch Pedair.

The Saith Seren is a cultural highlight in and of itself – it’s the beating heart of the Welsh language in Wrecsam, kept alive and kicking by a team of passionate volunteers, and visiting always makes me feel optimistic about the future of the language.

Even more so when you’re visiting to watch Pedair.

Pedair means four in Welsh, if you’re referring to women – and while these four women are all remarkable solo performers in their own right, as a supergroup they’re one of our great national treasures.

They’re skilled instrumentalists – guitars, a harp, keyboards – and they’re all solo and harmony singers – but their unusual power comes from the way in which they weave traditional and new material into something that’s playful and fierce and full of joy and knowing honesty all at once.

I don’t see how even the most miserable man could grumble about feminism when it comes in such a forceful wave of rhythm and melody and humour.

My daughter is sixteen and has autism – she deconstructs my personal patriarchy with drama queen energy on a daily basis, but crowded, noisy places are a challenge for her.

There was no way she was going to miss out on watching Pedair, though, and she loved every moment of the evening.

I did too, but as well as watching Pedair I was spending a lot of my time watching my daughter watching them. It felt like seeing role models making her future feel brighter in realtime, and it’s no surprise to me that she’s already so passionate about her own singing.

Run don’t walk to get their album: https://sainwales.com/cy/products/mae-na-olau

Riot Women

When you’re busy and exhausted, of course, a lot of the culture you access is on a screen. In the hope that it would encourage us to watch less television, we set up our living room so that the sofas point at each other, not the screen.

So now we waste a considerable amount of time pulling the sofas round every evening and then pushing them back while the puppy and the kitten fight over who can get themselves trapped more often.

Despite the sofas, it doesn’t feel as though we’re really making that much of an effort, so when we stumble over something genuinely worth watching, I always feel faintly undeserving.

And that was exactly how I felt watching Riot Women, Sally Wainwright’s brutally hard-hitting but funny series about five women putting a punk-rock band together for a local talent contest.

While we were watching it, I felt as though it might just be the best thing I’d ever seen on television. Now we’ve finished, I’m leaning back in the direction of the Peaky Blinders again, but I’m still not entirely sure – which is the highest praise I can offer.

It’s an extraordinary piece of work, tapping into the gritty rage of menopausal women, with thick layers of darkness woven around the moments when you’re laughing and punching the air at the same time.

Every character has moments of heart-breaking vulnerability, and the dangers women face in ordinary day-to-day life are always stressfully close – but every character has her moment of glory as well.

It’s on iPlayer. Go and watch it now (I wouldn’t even bother finishing this article if I were you) and then get in the spirit of the holidays and start up your own local punk-rock band as well. There are enough things to scream about, after all.

We Used to Dance Here

In September, perhaps unwisely, I went over to the Connemara Gaeltacht to spend ten intensive days learning Irish – a crash-test dummy approach to see if our new course was any good.

The jury’s still out – I need to find the courage to try and get a weekly conversation partner set up. But in Dublin airport on the way home, at random in a little bookshop, I picked up Dave Tynan’s collection of short stories ‘We used to dance here’.

Bloody hell. I barely noticed the flight to Cardiff, or the 37 hour bus ride from the airport into the city centre.

There’s something giddying about finding a new voice that is so unexpectedly distinctive.

Tynan writes about the people living in different ways in the margins of Dublin, dark and gritty and sometimes suddenly beautiful stories, but my God when he goes for the high notes he writes as if some bastard had injected him with that thick gold light you get when the sun goes down on a cloudless day.

I would give at least one of my kidneys to be able to write like that, and reading it feels a bit like drowning, if you could drown in a good way.

If you’re a writer, I’d recommend steering clear of Tynan. He’ll just make you despair at your own inadequacies. But if you’re not burdened by those kind of expectations, there’s a fighting chance this will be the best book you’ve read for a few years.

I’m planning less work and more culture for 2026.

But to be honest, if I have three moments that reach the heights as convincingly as those three moments of 2025, it will have been a good year

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