Sŵn Festival review: Three days of musical discovery

Simon Thomas

It was the lead singer of one of the bands that performed on the opening night of this three-day event who perhaps summed it up best.

“This festival is all about discovery,” declared Matthew Board of the Sheffield-based Pale Blue Eyes and he was spot on.

Now a firm fixture in the Cardiff musical calendar, Swn is very much a voyage into the unknown where you never quite know what lies around the corner – or across the road given the proximity of some of the venues.

There were 11 of them in all this year, spread across the city centre.

You had the old regulars like Clwb Ifor Bach – upstairs and down – Tiny Rebel, Fuel, Porter’s, Jacob’s Basement and the larger capacity Tramshed.

But there were also some new additions. You had The Canopi, a recently opened grassroots music venue on Tudor Street which also doubled as the ticket collection point. For readers of my generation, it’s located at the site of the old Cardiff Transport Club.

There was also Boho on St Mary’s Street and then there was St John’s Church which took the award for the most stunning setting.

It served as the ideal backdrop for a performance by Gruff Rhys, lead singer of the legendary Super Furry Animals, whose pastoral solo work had found its perfect home.

Rhys was arguably the most familiar name on the bill, which brings us back to the point about this being a chance to discover new acts.

Each year, you come away with bands you hadn’t heard of before installed as new firm favourites and fresh fixtures on your playlists.

With around 150 artists performing, there’s something for everyone and the challenge is to see just how many you can take in over the three days from Thursday to Saturday.

Having four venues within a few steps of each other on

Womanby Street – the epicentre of the festival – certainly helps on that front.

You can walk across the road from Clwb Ifor Bach to the Fuel Rock Club and experience two totally different musical genres in the space of a few minutes.

Alternatively, you can just stand in the middle of the street and listen to the strains of bands on either side, which makes for an intriguing mash-up!

There’s such an electric mix on offer from guitar bands, to electronica, to singer-songwriters, to hip hop, to folk, to shoegazing dream pop and everything in between.

What also sets this festival apart for me is the accompanying Connect conference, which is held at Cornerstone, a converted neo-Gothic church on Charles Street.

Connect features panels made up of various speakers talking about the music industry in Wales. It’s a nice change of pace from the live acts and something very different, hearing artists, promoters and venue bosses explain the challenges they face and just why they do the job, with BBC DJs Huw Stephens and Bethan Elfyn among the people to chair sessions.

I sat in on one about ‘Putting the fans first’ which featured former MP Lord Kevin Brennan, a big music lover who revealed the first gig he saw in Cardiff was Kiki Dee back in 1972, while the best ever was Bob Marley and the Wailers at Ninian Park in 1976. To bring things full circle, the next show he was planning to attend was Kiki Dee at the Acapela Studio in Pentyrch!

As I say, there’s something for everyone at Swn and huge credit goes to the organisers for putting on such a myriad mix of musical offerings and for how smoothly everything runs, with the 90 or so volunteers also playing a huge part in that.

When it comes to my personal favourites from the weekend, three bands I had seen before really stood out.

There was the aforementioned Pale Blue Eyes, with Board’s falsetto vocals shimmering over an insistently mesmeric synth and guitar-laden soundscape.

You had indie band Lime Garden from Brighton whose new material bodes well for the follow up to their excellent debut album One More Thing.

Then there was Prima Queen, fronted by Bristol’s Louise Macphail and Chicago’s Kristin McFadden, whose songs of love and loss feature more hooks than your average fishing supplies shop.

But, to reiterate the point, this festival is very much about discovery and, for me, that meant finding new delights in the shape of Cambridge’s Ugly, Bristol’s New Cut, Exeter’s Pushbike, Monmouth’s Morn and Birmingham’s Graywave.

Morn make a fantastic racket and are clearly going places given the one-in, one-out clamour to see their set at Clwb, while choral collective Ugly – who boast no fewer than four vocalists – took the prize for earworm of the weekend, as I can’t get their Next To Die out of my head.

So, from far and wide they descend on Cardiff to make Swn such a special event and one of the finest multi-venue festivals in the UK. Swn is Welsh for sound or noise and this was another wonderful weekend of noise around the streets of the capital.

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