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Wales

Velvet Underground's Welsh co-founder

John Cale

John Davies Cale grew up in Garnant, Carmarthenshire, and was playing in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales by thirteen. A scholarship took him to London and then, on a Leonard Bernstein recommendation, to Tanglewood to study under Aaron Copland. In New York he co-founded the Velvet Underground, bringing his classical training to a band built on noise and repetition. He left after two albums but never really left music: his production credits include the Stooges' 1969 debut and Patti Smith's Horses, and his solo career has run for five decades since.

Welsh-language psych-folk oddballs

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci formed in Carmarthen in 1991 around childhood friends Euros Childs, his sister Megan on violin, John Lawrence, Richard James, and Euros Rowlands, several of whom had already been playing together since they were schoolkids. They signed to a major label during the mid-1990s Britpop gold rush and then did more or less the opposite of what was expected: loose, whimsical songs built from moog synths, trombone, and pedal steel, plenty of them sung in Welsh rather than English. They disbanded in 2006 after seven albums. Their refusal to translate their music for a wider audience became a template other Welsh bands would follow.

Cool Cymru's tank-driving art-rockers

Super Furry Animals

Super Furry Animals formed in Cardiff in 1993 (Gruff Rhys, Huw Bunford, Guto Pryce, Cian Ciarán, and Dafydd Ieuan) and spent the rest of the decade refusing to settle into one genre, sliding between psychedelia, dance, and straightforward pop from one album to the next. Their 2000 album Mwng, recorded entirely in Welsh, sold well enough to chart in Britain and was commended in Parliament for promoting the language. That's rare for a record with no English on it at all. In the late 1990s they also bought a decommissioned Soviet tank to drive onto festival stages, and eventually sold it on to the Eagles' Don Henley.

From post-punk to stone circles

Julian Cope

Julian Cope was born in Deri, near Bargoed, but made his name in Liverpool, fronting the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes into the UK charts before the group split in 1982. His solo career went toward a stranger, more theatrical psychedelia and peaked commercially in the mid-1980s. He became just as well known for another reinvention, as an obsessive antiquarian: he wrote The Modern Antiquarian, a bestselling guide to Britain's prehistoric stone circles, and founded an archive covering ancient sites and outsider music alike. He kept recording too, self-releasing albums on his own terms well into the 2000s.

The godfather of Welsh-language rock

Meic Stevens

Meic Stevens, born Louis Michael James Stevens in the fishing village of Solva, Pembrokeshire, is often called the Welsh Bob Dylan. The comparison undersells him. He is a folk-blues songwriter who chose from the start to write and sing mostly in Welsh, at a time when that was a genuinely difficult career decision. His 1970 debut album, Outlander, recorded mostly in English for Warner Bros., was the exception. Both Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci have cited him as a direct influence, and those two bands went on to carry Welsh-language music into a 1990s mainstream he had helped make possible.

The Collection