Hey, hey, they re the Myncis! A year or so ago they were just an obscure Welsh band with a funny name. One (re-released) Patio Song and major label deal later, and they re a very popular Welsh band with a funny name. But how in the name of Ian Rush did they arrive at their wacky moniker?
It was supposed to be gawky , as in tall and gangly and gormless but we mis-spelled it, confesses the gramatically challenged Euros Childs, fresh-faced lead singer with Gorky s Zygotic Mynci. It was named after a character on a train. We used to call him gawky git .
The band are celebrating the much-deserved critical garlands heaped upon their new Barafundle LP by eating lunch in the reception area of Blooms Hotel. Or maybe not.
Barafundle, astonishingly their fourth album, is a sun-dappled pop gem that, for all its breezy West Coast musical inflections (Gorky s are avowed Brian Wilson and Byrds fans), owes as much to Holyhead as it does to Hollywood, with Childs always likely to slip in(to) the native tongue just when you least expect it.
I ve a strong sense of being Welsh, but it s not part of a great crusade or anything, he explains. I think the most positive thing you can do is to make the language popular without stuffing it down people s throats. All we can do is use the Welsh language in a constructive way, by singing in it. It s up to the politicians to take up the issue on another level.
Unlike fellow leek-poppers the Manic Street Preachers, Gorky s don t display their national flag upon their bass amps on stage.
I tend to wince a bit when I see that because I don t like flag-waving, opines drummer Euros Rowlands.
Nor are they comfortable with the current vogue for highlighting the Britishness of bands, bassist Richard James explains. The Union Jack is such a confused symbol that you can t really trace it back to any one cause or one idea.
Indeed, it s now so hip to be Welsh that even the quintessential East End wide boy, Vinny Jones, through the wonders of modern genealogy, has become a Welsh patriot.
. . . Or Welsh pig farmer, laughs Rowlands. When he s lined up in the Welsh team during the anthem, you can see him there mumbling and the camera goes by him and he s like Fuck off! .
wilfully anarchic
Barafundle is, by and large, a bundle of laughs, give or take the odd burning patio. Are the Myncis generally cheery blokes or do they secretly carry Albert Camus books in their coat pockets, hiding a profound sense of existential despair?
Well, it s not like a rock n roll album, answers Childs. We re not singing about shagging models while taking cocaine in some tropical island. We re singing about John s great-aunt. But it raises the question: what is an interesting thing to write about? It was written in a pretty optimistic frame of mind but there are a couple of downers on there.
With the success of bands like Gorky s, the Manics, Super Furry Animals, Catatonia and so on, there seems to be a genuine buzz about Welsh rock now, unlike, say, when The Alarm and Aled Jones were all the rage.
There was probably more of a scene as such about ten years ago when a lot of bands did gigs together, says Rowlands. That sort of died down about six or seven years ago. There were gigs organised by the Welsh Language Society. But in relation to what s happening now, it s not a scene as such cos we re all different and from different parts of the country.
Despite having a healthy respect for all musical fads bright and beautiful they namecheck everyone from Jonathan Richman to the Electric Prunes to The Clash and Buzzcocks Gorky s also have a wilfully anarchic approach to this writing we call song.
It s year zero, pipes Richard playfully. Let s all go back up into the trees and shake our heads and wave bananas and bang the drums.
It s a policy that seems to have gone down well abroad, too.
We re bigger in Japan than we are here, declares Childs, with a mixture of pride and disbelief. We sold twice as many copies of Bwyd Time (their last album) as we did here. We ve got a tape of this Japanese girl doing a cover version of one of our songs. She just chucked it on stage and we listened to it. This is a Japanese girl with a guitar singing in Welsh!
The pronunciation wasn t bad either, continues Rowlands. It was better than how most English people get it!
It was only when word filtered through to that the band had taken Tokyo that the burghers of their native Pembrokeshire chased after the bandwagon.
We won the West Wales Music Award for outstanding achievement, smiles Childs. Outstanding achievement . . . we never played in West Wales! Never got offered a gig!
I decline to put it to them that maybe they got the award for not playing! n
Barafundle is out now on Fontana.