My dad was the high school music teacher in Llandovery, a small town in West Wales. So music has always been a consistent thing in my life. The first band I was in formed for the school eisteddfod. I think a lot of Welsh bands started that way.
Playing at the National Eisteddfod feels like a rite of passage. It’s a major thing that we have a festival that is held just in the Welsh language. People from all over the world come to it now. It represents a huge part of Welsh culture and very few places with minority languages have that luxury today.
I live in Cardiff now. All the bands and musicians know each other and go and listen to each other. It’s a really welcoming space, and you’re free to be as experimental and weird as you want. Or straight down-the-road pop, if you prefer. You can be whatever you want to be, and that’s cool.
HMS MorrisAll the bands and musicians in Cardiff know each other. It’s a really welcoming space. You’re free to be as experimental and weird as you want."
We share the same recording studios and rehearsal spaces, so it’s natural that we start collaborating on each other’s projects. I really like writing by myself, so I’m not good at collaborating in the songwriting process. But if someone asks me to pop on stage and sing with them, I’ll happily do it. And I like getting people to sing with us as well.
In HMS Morris, normally there’s a core of four of us: me and the three boys. But for bigger shows we get in extra backing vocalists. In the photo there’s me and Sam plus Elin Parisa Fouladi and Katie Hall, who both have creative projects of their own.
Why the blue choir robes? We like costumes! I come from a theatre background, so our performances have more of a theatrical quality than with normal guitar bands. We’re quite comfortable with the ‘art-rock’ label. Melody-wise it’s quite accessible and poppy, but then in some of the arrangements and synth sounds, we try and get out of the comfort zone. We listen to a huge variety of things and we like to feed that into whatever we make.
The role of the artist in society? For us, I think a lot of it is about bringing energy and joy, especially in the live performance. I think that’s really important when everyone’s feeling a bit glum.
We always wanted to play outside the UK. We’ve been to Japan and to festivals in Canada a few times. South by Southwest (SXSW) in Texas is mayhem, but it’s wonderful. This year the Welsh bands shared a venue with the Scottish bands, so there was a Celtic vibe in the middle of Austin, which was really fun.
We’ve just come back from the SUNS Festival, which celebrates minority languages. It takes place in a region of Italy that has its own language, Friulian. We’re not representing Wales in the sense that we play traditional Welsh music. It’s more that, hopefully, our music encapsulates the type of music that’s generated by young people and artists in Wales now.
What’s next? We’ve just started working on a Christmas show at the Wales Millennium Centre. Sam and I are composing the music and performing in an alternative cabaret version of The Nutcracker. Then we’re going to knuckle down and write a fourth album.
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