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The Heritage of failure: marginal Welsh Pop in the capital city

Hill, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6738-8818 2013. The Heritage of failure: marginal Welsh Pop in the capital city. Presented at: Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Challenging Orthodoxies: 17th IASPM International Conference, Oviedo, Spain, 24-28 June 2013.

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Abstract

In Spring 2012 an exhibition celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Welsh band Datblygu opened in a small coffee shop in Cardiff. Formed in Cardigan, west Wales, by poet David R. Edwards, Datblygu cultivated throughout their career a willfully contrary relationship with the Welsh-language establishment, while commenting from the margins of Wales on the reality of life in the Thatcher era. Stylistically more aligned with The Fall than with any of their Welsh contemporaries, Datblygu were intellectually concerned with nothing less than an honest commentary on Welsh life: abrasive, splenetic and in some ways prophetic. Datblygu were championed by BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, but it was only in the past decade that their influence has been properly charted, with many younger bands and musicians registering the effect of Datblygu’s dark insights. In this paper I consider the importance of a reassessment of Datblygu’s output from this temporal remove – what Karl Mannheim called ‘the sociological problem of generations’ – and the phenomenon of the Datblygu anniversary celebration itself – a shift from the radical margins to a central geographical place.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status: Unpublished
Schools: Music
Related URLs:
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2023 02:32
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/58445

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