Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
hyrwyddo a dathlu cerddoriaeth Cymru
promoting and celebrating the music of Wales
+44 (0)29 2063 5640
1. WOMEX in the 2000s – Where were the Welsh?
What was notable back in the early noughties was that the Welsh were a rare breed when it came to WOMEX. Just a handful of Welsh delegates would attend on a regular basis and they included Danny KilBride from Trac Cymru, whose first WOMEX was in 2003, Mwldan’s Dilwyn Davies (2004) and Ar Log’s harpist and Sain CEO Dafydd Roberts (2005). KilBride is the director of Trac Cymru, the national development organisation for the traditional music, song and dance of Wales. He was part of a collective who’d set up the folk, roots and traditional music section in the Musicians’ Union, “because we were all folk musicians and it was a very un-unionised section of the music business. Also we thought there’s a lot of guys who should be engaging with markets like WOMEX but don’t have professional representation or access to grant support to get there and so we went out to represent the interests of UK musicians at WOMEX.”
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On his first WOMEX trip in 2003, KilBride attended with Ian Smith, then head of music at Creative Scotland, who drove all the way from Edinburgh to Seville with a Volvo Estate full of CDs. “We gave away something like 1,500 CDs,” recalls KilBride. “We realised after about 18 months that the radio plays started changing. People kept telling us that they were starting to get royalties, starting to get gigs and so we knew there was something really important about WOMEX.” Gradually the Welsh presence at WOMEX became less of a rarity.
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Dilwyn Davies, who is CEO of Mwldan, a multi-arts centre in Cardigan, mid Wales, first attended WOMEX in Essen in 2004, “back in the grim, industrial mid-noughties,” as he recalls. The main reason he attended was due to the fact that Mwldan was getting more into live music productions and tours with artists such as Billy Cobham and Asere and the Colombian group Cimarrón: “It wasn’t so much going to see stuff to buy, it was actually more of a selling exercise,” he explains.
Dafydd Roberts, harpist and flautist with the group Ar Log, was also then director of Sain Records, Wales’s leading record company (first formed in 1969 by Dafydd Iwan). As Roberts admits, he didn’t really know about WOMEX until 2005 when the event took place for the first time on British soil, in Gateshead, and Sain took a stand. “We were next to the Putumayo stand, which was quite good because we did some deals straight away,” recalls Roberts. “We sold some Welsh music for their compilations so we thought, hey, this is good!”
We thought, crikey, we could do this in Wales.
Why don’t we do this in Wales?
Roberts remembers being struck by the offWOMEX stage at the Baltic Centre where there was a ‘Best of British’ programme of artists, but notably nothing Welsh. “We thought, crikey, we could do this in Wales. Why don’t we do this in Wales?”
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Some years later Roberts became a board member of the (now defunct) Welsh Music Foundation, and another crucial turn of events took place in 2007 when Eluned Hâf joined Wales Arts International. Hâf’s appointment proved to be a catalyst – partly because she had “more interest in music than the previous people”, as Roberts points out, but also because it was Hâf, alongside Lisa Matthews-Jones, then at Welsh Music Foundation, who became the main protagonists in Wales’s successful WOMEX bid.
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