Though her upcoming Antipodean tour will represent the first time Australia gets to witness Gwenno in full flight, it’s far from the Welsh singer’s first visit.

She has performed here a number of times, both as a member of The Pipettes (a band that also included her younger sister Ani), and stranger still, as a cast member from Michael Flatley’s all singin’, all tap-dancin’ musical Lord Of The Dance.

She returns now with a very different goal in mind: to showcase her latest album Y Dydd Olaf, a record performed almost entirely in Welsh that is nevertheless currently resonating deeply with people who couldn’t utter a word in the language if you paid them. Gwenno has, in short, followed quite a colourful path.

“My parents had taken quite a specific interest in Celtic culture, which I really rebelled against, because I found it…” Gwenno pauses and laughs. “Well, you rebel against anything your parents do anyway, but we didn’t have any English music in the house. I didn’t know anything about Anglo-American pop culture until I went to high school. There might be snatches in the background of like, Madonna, but I didn’t really have an engagement with it. There wasn’t anything like that there in my parents’ record collection.

“Instead I had this weird world of contemporary Celtic, Welsh and Irish. We weren’t allowed to watch ordinary television, though there was a Welsh TV channel which people had fought very long and hard for, and so of course we had to watch it. But it’s interesting now, I think. At the time I thought, ‘God, why do I have to have such weird parents?’ But everyone feels like that at the start, and as you get older you start realising it’s actually quite interesting that your parents are so odd. You can use it to your creative advantage.”

Y Dydd Olaf found its genesis in the Welsh science fiction novel by Owain Owain of the same name. (Sidebar: Owain? Y Dydd Olaf? Gwenno? The Welsh sure know how to make a language just sing.) Though the novel is now 40 years old, its themes of rebellion, globalisation and cultural decline are the bedrock of Gwenno’s project.

In a way too, it is a record born of absence, a case of Gwenno recognising there were gaps in Wales’ cultural representation that deserved to be explored in her native tongue, even if a wider audience may not necessarily understand what’s going on.

“You know, honestly – and I hope to hold on to this – I wasn’t thinking of an audience at all. I needed to express something as directly as I could, feeling that creatively I was being very straightforward, and the languages I use the most are Welsh and Cornish. I wasn’t thinking about who would hear it. That’s the beauty of coming from a smaller culture as well. There is less stuff there, so you have to make it yourself. That really is a motivation.

“You think, ‘Gosh, we really need an experimental art scene here. Well, I guess we’d better make it.’ It’s a very DIY culture. It’s something my dad used to do in Cornish. ‘We really need stories and music for our kids. OK, I’ll make them.’ And so when we were little he’d make up these stories. I think that kind of motivation is still there. We really need an album that’s like this. It doesn’t exist, so we’d better make it ourselves.”

The album dropped just over a year ago, but quickly found itself a darling of the press and began amassing Gwenno a whole new culture of fans. As we spoke, I was reminded of the Indigenous Australian singer Gina Williams, who has found recent success performing in Noongar, a highly endangered Aboriginal language. Like Gwenno, Williams was uncertain how mainstream audiences would respond to lyrics they couldn’t understand, but both artists have found a common, reassuring truth: there is a magic to music, something that stirs us beyond literal sense and something that connects us regardless of the sound of our words.

“I was conscious that if I made some record in my own language, I wasn’t even trying to aspire in any way to fit into any commercial realm. Music is this fascinating thing that has been sold back to us for so long; it’s hard to remember what it is to us. But it’s something very communal. The first time I toured outside Wales, that was nerve-racking since I was playing in front of people who wouldn’t understand what I was saying.

“And then you become used to it. It’s a strange thing, but oddly it somehow doesn’t matter. There is no barrier, but I did know that. I’ve seen a few artists over the years singing in their mother tongues, and it’s had a huge impact on me. I’ve seen a few Welsh artists singing, and there’s always this response of, ‘Wow, what’s this!’

“People are quite used to hearing the familiar, and there’s something so fascinating about music in other tongues. And with the full band, which I’ll have in Australia, you get to appreciate the full musicality of the songs. It’s also nice because I get to tell people onstage what the songs are about, which I quite enjoy doing. When you go to see music or listen to it, you want to be challenged.

“We have enough familiar music in our canon that we really don’t need to keep hearing something that sounds like everything else. At least, not any more.”

Gwenno performs at Newtown Social Club on Thursday October 13.Y Dydd Olaf is outnow through Heavenly Recordings.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine