Following her overall review of June’s Workhouse Party in Llanfyllin, which we published on Tuesday, the second part of Julia Deli’s megafeature on the weekend focuses on head festival programmer Sioned Camlin and one of her bands, folky types Twmffat.
Sioned Camlin and the Workhouse Festival in Llanfyllin go way back – in fact, she’s someone who remembers the original one-day festival in 1994 that started it all.
“There was a youth stage, cake stalls, the W.I. and a brass band,” she tells me. “Very simple and homely! But our band got to play. We were all young then, and we played every year. It’s the reason I got into this way of life. Everyone smiles all the time, and booking bands has been a real pleasure. People seem to really love the blend of music.”
Camlin is a versatile musician on top of everything else, and having already drummed in mid-Walian psychedelic rockers Mascot Moth this weekend, she’s about to play her second gig of the weekend with Twmffat – after which our conversation about border life can resume.
In the Workhouse’s sunny courtyard, we join myriad sprites jigging with glee to Twmffat’s feelgood folk, which carries a strong political stance. Who can resist the Resistance of the jolly Corona Ceroma, or the sly, ironic tango of Mae Gan Brydain Dalent? Not this crowd.
“I used to go to parties in north Wales,” Camlin continues once she and her Twmffat bandmates are packed away, “and the people I met there became a family – a tribe of fantastic friends! And I started to play with Twmffat. It’s our first gig in about a year, so we’ve stripped back the band and played acoustic. We’ve always been about building cultural bridges between languages; there are English gigs and Welsh gigs, and there’s a place for that, but this is a culturally mixed event.
“It’s been lovely seeing friends from north Wales finding the space so beautiful, and friends I grew up with in school who learnt Welsh there but never used it … and they’re here together on this site, siarad Cymraeg for the first time in years. They’re not speaking it in a classroom, but at a festival with interesting people who are passionate about the same things.
“The border dynamic is really interesting – it’s a separate place, a hinterland, a wild place – and there’s a transient nature to it. But there’s a tension and confusion to being border people: you can be ignored by both sides, like there’s a black hole of otherness, no-one quite sure where they fit. Parties are the best way of healing those wounds: not a lesson, or a campaign, but people meeting in a field and doing things with love and positivity.”
Mentioning learning about Hen Ogledd at a recent Mari Mathias gig, Camlin adds: “A friend and I randomly decided to study cynghanedd – the old Welsh strict-metre poetry with internal rhyme, used by Aneurin and Taliesin in the time of Hen Ogledd. I’ve won a scholarship for a year’s supported study, and the next Mascot Moth album is going to use the metre. I’m really excited at the prospect!”
At this point, fellow Twmffat member Phil Jones and his cousin, artist and musician Erin, join us in the deep shade. Jones has been working with Erin on a new song, the wistful Don Yn Ol At Fy Nghoed (‘Back To My Roots’). “My proper job, the one that pays the bills, is as a tour guide in the deep mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog, but I’ve been playing music since I was in school. At the moment, we’re in the middle of creating a new album – we’re doing it from my house, all very grassroots and acoustic.”
Phil is wearing a t-shirt with an illustration of corporate sweeties and a dandelion going through a funnel, about which he elucidates: “I had a tune, and the first words that came to Ceri [Cunnington, Twmffat singer] were ‘Curly Wurlies, Mars bars, Marathons and dant y llew…’; I filmed him singing and put it on Facebook. The next day, I had messages from Ceri saying ‘I’ve just been to the shops, and everywhere I go it’s ‘Curly Wurlies, Mars bars…’ I checked my phone and Facebook was going up – 10,000, 50,000 hits! Our first thought was, ‘we’d better finish that song…’
“It’s very positive – a celebration of flowers – and there’s the line ‘Life will come from the fountain of love’. It’s caught the mood, somehow. When did we first start as Twmffat, Sions?”
The percussionist thinks for a while; they remember jamming together at a gig, when she had a washboard to hand. “That’s it. I said to Ceri, ‘Sioned plays the washboard. Let’s get her over to the studio!’”
“I got a call while I was in the plant nursery where I worked,” Camlin recalls. “I’d been pruning rows and rows of trees, my arms were sore, and the batteries for my music had run out. There’s a phone call from Gwyn saying, ‘I’ve got some mates down from north Wales. Do you want to come to the studio tonight?’ I’m like, yes please! I think I turned up with the secateurs still in my hip pocket like a pistol…”
Find Twmffat on Facebook here.
words JULIA DELI
