Un-Faithfull in Swansea

At the Grand Theatre, Swansea, in 1975 the audience waited. They were there to see the opening of a new play The Rainmaker starring Marianne Faithfull. The curtain was due to go up at 7.30pm but there was a delay. Then came the announcement: Faithfull had failed to turn up. The half-capacity crowd was refunded and sent home.

Half an hour after the theatre-goers had departed Faithfull finally showed up. She had caught the wrong train from London. In tears Mick Jagger’s former girlfriend informed reporters that the disaster was entirely her fault. Although she had committed many misdemeanours as a pop star this was the first time anything like this had happened to her during her thespian career.

The rest of the cast in the touring play were a bit miffed. They had been forced to go amongst the audience to sign autographs and apologise for letting everyone down. Theatre administrator John Chilvers went further - he was “disgusted” with the female star and angry that no understudy was around to step into her shoes. It was unprofessional.

Faithfull promised to apologise to the audience the following night but Chilvers vetoed the idea. They were a different set of people so what was the point in apologising to them? Oddly ticket sales had been boosted by her spectacular non-appearance. The crowd were curious to see whether she’d turn up the next night. When she walked on stage a spontaneous round of applause greeted her.

Faithfull had put her late arrival in Swansea down to having to take care of family business in London but basically she was just fed up with touring. When The Rainmaker blew into Cardiff a couple of weeks later she gave her opinion of the capital to a local journalist: “I don’t think I have seen anywhere so awful in my life.”

China Vagina

Over the past couple of years Cardiff artist Ruth McLees has been catching the eye with her stylish artworks featuring images painted onto patterned fabric furnishings. Her figures are usually female and often reference film and fashion.

Recently she has designed an excellent range of ceramics using the female sex organs as a theme. The limited edition China Vagina collection features: The Golden Pussy (see pic); The World is her Oyster; Garden of Eden; Rape of Tibet; Zip it!; and The Orgasm.

Priced at (of course) £69 a plate they are not exactly cheap but worth it just to shock your dinner party guests. Imagine the look on their faces after they’ve polished off their sausage, beans and mashed potato. I for one would be more than happy to lick the plate clean.

Both subversive and a celebration of the female form, they are a fine example of imaginatively designed ceramic art. You can find out more about McLees’ excellent work here.

Cardiff City Superstars - Wembley Mix

Football songs are always terrible except when Helen Love do them. Here they have updated their classic Dickies-influenced Cardiff City Superstars adding new lyrics to celebrate the Bluebirds’ triumphant march to Wembley. Listen out for Gruff Rhys on vocals doing a passable north Walian impersonation of Joey Ramone. Also check out some of the anti-British establishment lyrics, notably:

“Alan Green and the BBC
We’re the team you didn’t want to see”

and

“We’re not going to save the queen”

All sung to the theme tune of late '60s kids TV programme The Banana Splits. Marvellous!

Marching Songs of the Free Wales Army

This is one of the odder musical purchases I've made recently. Marching Songs of the Free Wales Army consists of a selection of tunes played by Welsh nationalist Julian Cayo Evans on his accordian. A cosmopolitan and romantic collection it includes Welsh, Irish, Swedish, Polish and Bretagne favourites. Between tracks Evans talks about the trials (literally) and tribulations of being in the FWA.

My favourite line: "After being found guilty some of us were jailed for love of our country and for standing up for our rights on charges of training our fellow countrymen and possessing firearms... I give you here a selection of polkas."

To be honest I've never been a huge fan of the Free Wales Army - those uniforms just kind of killed it stone dead for me. When it comes to Welsh paramilitary organisations I always preferred the more left leaning MAC. They just seemed a bit more hardcore. But this CD, made from a recording in 1981, is historically interesting and worth getting hold of if you're into musical curiosities.

Expect to hear selections from this being played rather loudly in the coming weeks should Cardiff City win the FA Cup at Wembley on May 17th.

Augustus John and James Joyce

Cool picture alert. Irish Modernist giant James Joyce with Welsh bohemian fop Augustus John in Paris. It was 1930 and John was in the French capital to complete a sketch of the literary legend.

The Welshman was holed up in a studio in the Rue Delambre. It had a bar downstairs and food could be sent up. One problem though - John was disturbed by the bold pattern of his studio wallpaper. How could he eat in such surroundings? He remedied this dire aesthetic situation by locating a ladder and hanging strips of brown paper over the offending decor! Well, it's what we all would have done.

John completed several drawings of Joyce whilst in Paris. In return the Irishman gave him a French translation of Ulysses. Despite their vastly different personalities (Joyce was very austere) the two men got on surprisingly well. When they finally exchanged goodbyes they embraced in the continental manner.

Iggy Pop at Rockfield

I'm a big fan of Iggy Pop so it was disappointing to learn that he made his first ever bad record in Wales. Hitherto his albums - The Stooges; Fun House; Raw Power; The Idiot; Lust For Life; Kill City; New Values - had been pure genius and more or less set the template for punk. But in 1979 when he came to record Soldier at Rockfield studios in the Wye valley it all went horribly wrong.

The legendary American star would spend three tortuous months in rural Wales. For someone who is regarded as the embodiment of rock excess it must have been an odd experience. How was he supposed to conjur his trademark urban/garage sound when he was surrounded by fields? He couldn't even enjoy a proper roll around on broken glass in those verdant parts.

Having come to the studio straight off the back of an exhausting tour the mood in the Pop camp wasn't exactly great to begin with. And the American was now under immense pressure to come up with some new songs that had commercial appeal. The remit of producer (ex-Stooge) James Williamson was to create a record that would finally bring the artist some mainstream success.

Almost immediately there was a power struggle between singer and producer for creative control of the record. Cut off from civilisation as they were, the simmering tension between the two became even more intense. And unfortunately there was just nowhere to go to blow off steam. Into this poisonous atmosphere waltzed David Bowie and his companion of the time Coco Schwab. Apparently Bowie arrived wearing a cape.

Whilst the Thin White Duke entertained the rest of the gathering with showbiz anecdotes Williamson seethed at the recording desk. Things came to a head when Pop and Williamson had a disagreement over some song lyrics. A bitter stand-up row ensued. Bowie and Schwab made their excuses and retired to bed. The following morning Williamson was gone - he had had enough.

Meanwhile the sessions dragged on. And on. Rockfield engineer Pat Moran was now given the responsibility of finishing the recordings. The group though struggled to muster enough creative energy to complete the job. Pop even resorted to singing in the farmyard in a bid to nail the right vocal. The mood was apparently so gloomy that keyboard player Barry Andrews would drive off to the nearest school and stand outside the gates just so that he could see some happy smiling faces.

When Soldier was eventually done and dusted, the result was Iggy Pop's most uninspiring studio album ever. It briefly occupied the number 125 spot in the US chart before disappearing from the radar altogether. Its ultimate destiny would be as a perennial make-weight in one of those 5 crap CDs for £20 offers that you get in HMV.


*You can read a more in-depth account of Iggy Pop's 3 month sojourn in Wales in Paul Trynka's excellent Iggy Pop biography entitled (naturally): Iggy Pop - Open up and Bleed.

Once Upon a Time in Wales

The Valleys have an enduring appeal for photographers. For decades the mining areas of south Wales have been a magnet for social realist snappers keen to capture the 'authentic' or chronicle a disappearing way of life. Robert Frank’s early-fifties sojourn in Caerau being a prime example. Whilst the quality of Frank's work is undeniable, one can’t entirely eradicate the notion that many of these outsiders turned up with the specific intention of transforming poverty into coffee table art.

Such an accusation cannot be levelled at Robert Haines' Once Upon a Time in Wales, a photobook that records life in Heolgerrig and Merthyr in 1971/72. Haines is an insider (or at least he was back then) who during a college vacation when he was just twenty years of age returned home and took these remarkable pictures. Unpublished until now, the collection has the feel of a dug up time capsule.

The aesthetic here is a fusion of the nineteenth century with the questionable tastes of the 1970s. Ancient craggy-faced colliers are pictured alongside younger men who are clad in denim, sport long hair and bum-fluff moustaches. A teenage girl in a mini-skirt poses outside a cramped worker’s cottage. The area is clearly going through the painful process of passing from the industrial to the post-industrial - a process that would be accelerated in the 1980s.

Maybe it’s because Haines was so young when he took these pictures that they seem so free of any kind of cynicism or worse, patronising notions of the nobility of the poor. Often they are very funny. We find a comic-grotesque portrait of a man who came third in a world gurning championship for instance; an enthusiast of westerns done up in cowboy gear posing against what looks like an Arizona backdrop until you read that it is in fact a local quarry; and a generously bequiffed ladies man who wooed women with his rendition of Diana by Paul Anka.

Haines clearly had an impressive cast of characters to choose from. I loved the touching portrait of a young gypsy and his family. Also pictured is a local hard man who we learn was later shot to death. Mad Malcolm, another neighbour, had a fondness for cider and speed. And then there's the Brigadier - a member of the Free Wales Army.

The retrospective captions are perfectly judged. A picture of a fellow asleep on the grass with his face covered in a cloth turns out to be the photographer’s uncle. On a picnic in the Brecon Becons he had fallen asleep and to stop him getting sunburnt his wife had shielded his face. Haines completes the tale of a fretting wife by adding that she once woke up her husband to remind him to take a sleeping pill.

Once Upon a Time in Wales is excellent and should be a strong contender for Welsh book of the year (next year). It is published by Dewi Lewis and is on sale now. You can read a Guardian review of Haines’ work here and an Independent review here.