Cool Cymru (Welsh: Cŵl Cymru), was a Welsh cultural movement in music and independent film from the 1990’s and 2000s. A concurrent and Welsh alternative to the Cool Britannia and Britpop movement.

Penrhos, North Wales. We stayed for three weeks every summer in an old house that had been a hospital for soldiers during the war. There was the ghost of a soldier we talked to and left space for at the breakfast table, one of us pushing the food under the table when no-one was looking to prove that he’d eaten it. Opposite the house was a Polish retirement home, mass in the small bright chapel every Sunday. The old men, stoic in their shabby suits, the old ladies in amber and neat perms, bulbous tinted glasses, always more severe. The tiny shrivelled lady with only one leg, walking on crutches. Some boys said the leg actually came down the middle of her, I wondered how. 

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, a Cool Cymru band fronted by Euros Childs, who in their lifespan recorded Amsermaemaiyndod / Cinema, a song which is actually two different songs playing at once, one in the left ear and another in the right, and Hair Like Monkey Teeth Like Dog, a feverish chant of shrieking mouth organs, thumping floor-toms and demented animal groans. This side of Gorky’s delighted in chaos, but completely lacked irony, like an innocent Shadow Ring. An entire collection of genre experiments, a series of ‘impressionistic sketches.’ Syd Barrett wrote Word Song, but Gorky’s wrote Wordless Song. 

Euros once told an MTV reporter, in a rare flash of onscreen exuberance, that back home in Pembrokeshire Gorky’s passed their time torching English holiday homes and dancing naked around the flames. The reporter giggled nervously.

But then also songs like Faraway Eyes and Spanish Dance Troupe, soft pillowy caramel ballads with Garfunkel choruses, effortless grace, parcelled beauty, vast as the hills, soothing as a painting of the hills. Or Heywood Lane, Euros aged fourteen, eulogising his auntie’s street, exalting her newly-born pups. In reply we wrote Quakers Lane, our world suburban enough to screw up our eyes and pretend we were them. 

Their album Patio, which John Cale called his favourite album ever. Drwys, which I learnt on guitar and realised it was somehow played invisibly between the 12th and 13th fret. Few other British bands unleashed such polar extremes of feeling, storm and sunrise, sun and moon, certainly not Blur.

Patio Song, their most popular song on Spotify, has 3,720,706 plays: 

‘and if you really want to kiss her 
just go right up and tell her
well isn’t it a lovely day
oh my patio’s on fire’ 

Why was their patio on fire? I used to wonder, like I wondered why Eleonor Rigby picked up the rice, or why her face was in a jar by the door. Euros’ sister Megan’s violin purring along, and then an entire verse in Welsh:

Mae'n bwrw glaw
So dal fy llaw  
Ond mae'r gaeaf mor hir
Mae'n cymryd gormod o tir

Is this the most widely heard piece of Welsh lyricism?

Then sometimes rollicking, restless, poodle rockin’, but with commitment, absent the Britpop sneer. A shawm solo appears where you’d expect a guitar to, but Britpop didn’t do guitar solos anyway, so neither did Cool Cymru.

~ 

It’s maybe because of Gorky’s that I love Wales and Welsh so much. A language that sounds like slurping honey backwards. Vaguely Martian, a bit like Finnish. I can’t imagine anyone arguing in Welsh.

A Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci Dictionary 

Welsh-English Edition 

Pen Gwag Glas
Blue Empty Head 

Barafundle
A word that sounds like tumbling down a hill inside a ball of yarn, but is really the name of a tiny hidden beach in Pembrokeshire. Alien words that when imported into English onomatopoeiase, making a new word for a new feeling. Or like complex Chinese characters that contain an entire action: 豗 (hui): ‘a pig digging the ground with its snout.’

Meirion Wyllt
Mad Meirion 
Myrddin Wyllt, the legendary Welsh prophet, bard and madman who inspired the figure of Merlin in Arthurian legend. Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Bro Myrddin, the school Euros attended in Carmarthen.

Merched Yn Neud Gwallt Eu Gilydd
Women Doing Each Other’s Hair 

Methu Aros Tan Haf
Can’t Wait Till Summer…