By Lily Cottrell
St Mary’s Creative Space is transported to Utopia for this sold out Gwenno gig.
I get there just after the doors open and the first few rows are already full and the venue bustling with anticipation and excitement for this very special gig. First on is our support act for the night – Dean Lligwy – a Welsh ambient artist. He explains how his set is pretty much an experiment, and how it’s built from sounds recorded around Anglesey. He creates an incredibly unique soundscape through layering these different sounds and samples, as well as accompanying them with piano. It feels like it could be the soundtrack for a film, and creates a beautiful atmosphere within the venue that sets up the scene for the night of ethereal music ahead of us.
The more intimate nature of this gig – just Gwenno and a piano – in such a small and stunning venue makes for a beautiful night. This allows for Gwenno to perform more stripped-back versions of songs from all four of her solo albums, and tell the stories behind the songs… what inspired them. Gwenno’s music is incredibly unique, as the lyrics for the majority of her songs are written in Cornish and Welsh. Especially on her earlier albums, with songs such as ‘Ti Ha Mor’ which she explains translates to “Land and Sea” and is about Cornish landscape painter Peter Layton. Despite the language barriers, Gwenno is such a charismatic performer and her music is so evocative that as an audience you can’t help but connect with it. Soon enough she has us all learning Cornish to sing the chorus of ‘Es Keus’, a song that she says she’ll probably have to play until she dies, as it’s so popular. It’s based on one of the oldest surviving Cornish phrases and is about cheese. The audience is more than ready to join in, and become, as Gwenno remarks afterwards “the largest congregation of people shouting about cheese in Chester!”
Her latest album Utopia marks a change, as it’s her first album predominantly in English. She explains how the titular ‘Utopia’ is named after a night club that she used to go to when she was a dancer in Vegas during her teenage years and how the original meaning of the word Utopia is a “non-place”.
Throughout, her vocals are ethereal, and the songs from Utopia have a real David Lynch-like dreaminess to them. The backdrop of the stained glass windows of St Marys make it feel as though we really have been transported into a non-place, somewhere that will cease to exist after the last song. At times the songs are playful, such as ‘Kath’ (Cornish for cat), one of the few songs from the album in Cornish for which she puts on a vintage cat mask. Yet at other times Gwenno is provocative and political: ‘Den Hab Taves’ is named after an old Cornish phrase about the loss of languages such as Cornish, how Cornish rebels were punished in the past, and the importance of keeping these languages and cultures alive. ‘War’, another track from Utopia is an adaptation of the poem ‘vingt-et-un’ by Edrica Huws. She then plays ‘Dancing On Volcanoes’, the first single from Utopia and a song which I’ve adored since I first heard it played on the radio, so getting to hear it live is a real treat. She tells us how it’s inspired by seeing Jarvis Cocker dancing on his own. The song is even more wonderful performed live, especially as the audience joins in with the backing vocals as the song ends.
The gig isn’t over yet though, as the audience calls for an encore which Gwenno thankfully gives us. She plays a stunning cover of ‘Baby I’m Broke’ by the band Lucky Soul, who she explains she played lots of gigs with back in her days as a member of the brilliant 2000’s indie pop band the Pipettes.
Completely mesmerising, Gwenno is such a beautifully unique artist. Going to a Gwenno gig is an otherworldly, daydream experience.
Phoot : Lily Cottrell
