Hey people! 🙂
Staying within the Celtic language family, but moving away from folk, I’d like to share with you today another song from Trwynau Coch. For those unfamiliar with them, Y Trwynau Coch (which means The Red Noses in English) were a Swansea-based punk rock band that existed in the late 70’s and early 80’s. All their songs were written in Welsh, which I don’t think wasn’t all that common at the time as it is now (not in rock music anyway) and they clearly took advantage of that and sometimes wrote some really weird lyrics. One member of the band – Rhys Harris – later went on to become the father of alt-folk trio Plu – siblings Elan Mererid, Marged Eiry and Gwilym Bowen Rhys. –
I understand a lot of the individual words in this song, but despite that, I don’t think I get the broader context, other than what the chorus basically says, which is that the lyrical subject “can’t dance at the disco”. Interestingly, they also have another song, “Wastad ar y Tu Fas” (Always on the Outside”, that I believe I’ve featured in the early days of this blog, and which, if I understand it correctly, goes something like this: “I don’t want to go to the disco in T-shirts and jeans from Tesco…”. Which makes me think that maybe one of the Trwynau Coch members, or whoever wrote their lyrics, must have had a strong aversion to discos, and as I can totally relate, that makes me like them even more. 😀
My Inner MishMash 