South Wales Was the New Seattle? Total Bollocks

All this week on Noisey, we’ll be falling arse-backwards into the state of UK music in a special series of articles about scenes outside the capital: from club closures to brain drains to free parties to local legends. Follow all the content on our Fuck London hub here.

When I first discovered punk and hardcore in my teens, I got this Revelation Records book called “All Ages” about the history of straight edge hardcore in the US, and I always imagined my hardcore scene would be just like that. Obviously, it was Wales, so it never really was.

The hardcore scene in South Wales in the early 00s was super casual and it incorporated so many aspects of what punk rock was in our community, which is what I liked about it. Kids could come to shows and see local bands like Hondo Maclean, Midasuno and The Blackout hold their own against American bands like Sparta, Boysetsfire and The Juliana Theory. That made a lot of people realise that bands here are actually presenting something in this scene of music; it was unique and identifiable. It was a bastardisation of other sounds that, for some reason, made it totally geographically Welsh at that time.

Anyone who knows Funeral for a Friend, will know we started as a really shitty metalcore band called January Thirst. They were together before I joined, and I discovered them through working part-time at a record store called The Jungle in Bridgend. One of my brother’s friends, Matthew Evans, used to hang around with me a lot because he liked my musical taste more than my brother’s. He used to pop back and forth to the shop a lot from college, and one day he came in and said he’d joined this band and they had recorded a song. He knew I was into hardcore – I was kind of a part of the local scene and doing a zine at the time called Third Engine – so he played it to me. I wasn’t totally into at the time, but seeing that one of my friends was part of a band, that were this technically proficient, was a real awakening for me of the breadth of this South Wales scene. When one of their vocalists left, they asked me to join, and and even though it wasn’t my thing I said, “Yeah, cool”. Of course.

There wasn’t a particular mould to the bands coming out of South Wales back then, but there were definitive elements shared. There were certain albums that everybody was influenced by: Worship and Tribute by Glassjaw, Tear From The Red by Poison the Well, Full Collapse by Thursday. We took that American sound and spun it on it’s head, gave it a bit more of a geographical sensibility. You write what you know, so the lyrical content distilled all the elements of the world around us. It was like Thursday and Manic Street Preachers smashing their heads together.

The Manics were very influential on absolutely everyone, whether they admitted it or not. In relation to hardcore, their album, The Holy Bible, gave us a license to write music that was as diary-based as theirs. That record was bare and emotional – it was a fucking emo record, really. It followed two terms of conservative government. Some areas in the Welsh valley’s were some of the worst areas to live in the UK. Child poverty was high, youth unemployment was high, and to be honest it’s still like that. If you grow up in that environment, and you’re around it every day, then it feeds into who you are whether you’re aware of it or not. Sometimes, that frustration, that lack of opportunity, often breeds creative ideas. I know people who turned to alcohol or drug abuse and that was their outlet, but if you can do something creative with that frustration that’s a much more cathartic way to shed those emotions. That struggle in the area may not have been a unifying factor, but it was certainly an underlying one.

That sense of community was vital, and local venues played their part. We used to play little pubs like The Maltsters in Pontypridd, which was the ultimate floor show. I remember being smacked on the head by Chris’ guitar stock a bunch of times there. It feels like there’s nothing there now. Then there was The Toll House in Bridgend, TJ’s in Newport, or The Barfly in Cardiff. Even if I wasn’t too familiar with the band playing, I’d go to shows knowing my friends were going to be there and there was probably going to be a pop-up record store there and I could pick up some records and find some cool shit. It was a very honest, pure environment to be in.

At shows and you’d get 13-year-old’s and 30-year-old’s going mad in the crowds. It affected so many generations, through friends and relatives. Whether it was valley’s mentality or not, everybody supported each other, and you could feel that something was positively affecting the area. You’d have hardcore kids, punk kids, nu-metal kids, hip-hop kids; nobody really knew what they were and it didn’t matter. It was a mash-up of people and influences, which made being a part of it quite beautiful. There were no boundaries, most people were just really passionate about the fact that local bands were writing their own songs that were actually good.

As more people got interested in South Wales though, things started to change. The problem with having the music industry centred in a city like London, is that the moment anybody gets a sniff of something cool, all of a sudden it’s got a record deal and a million dollars slapped behind it and the PR machine would kick in. We were barely out of our nappies before we had people wanting a piece of us. After the success of Lostprophets, everyone started sniffing. That London influence, billowing across the M4, was the start of some real difficulties for the scene in South Wales. It felt like everything was being pulled apart a little bit unnecessarily.

What was happening in Wales was probably happening other places in the UK too, but for some reason the quirkiness of “oh, it’s got an accent and it’s got bilingual road signs” seemed to appeal to the marketers. It started happening in the 90s with the Manics, 60ft Dolls and Novocaine. You’d pick up Kerrang! (when Kerrang! actually meant something), and it would be say “Newport is the new Seattle”. Then the millennium happened and it was like “OH CHRIST, ALL OF SOUTH WALES IS THE NEW SEATTLE”. It was total bollocks. They were nothing alike other than the fact that we’re by the coast, it’s depressing, and it rains for 290 of the days of the year.

The hype both galvanized the scene and tore it apart. When you gain success, your true hardcore mentality comes out and the youthful exuberance of: “We’re going to stand and unify with everybody” totally splits. You get people saying, “You’ve got money now, you’ve got a record deal, you’re playing shows outside of Wales, you’re obviously a cunt.” That’s when scenes start to fracture and become more insular, and that’s when they start to die. People start to try and control it, by vetting who’s cool enough to be a part of it, but that’s just stupid. I don’t like it when people start throwing down airs and graces like they’re the Lords of the Scene. So, I was so happy to give the middle finger to South Wales at the beginning with Funeral For A Friend, because the scene became a reflection of something that I felt was negative and hurtful – it no longer resembled the scene I had become a part of. Internet forums with people I knew and used to help out with stuff were all of a sudden putting up pictures of my face on Hitler’s body.

For a while South Wales became less important to me. We were going to America a lot and I felt more kinship with bands there that I idolised growing up. It felt like that was my surrogate scene. It always felt a bit like Funeral For A Friend was straddling the lines of a lot of things. We were post-hardcore, we were rock, we were emo, we were screamo, we were extremo (if you read the NME), we were metalcore or whatever the fuck – nobody could quote pigeonhole us. We were just like our own little island floating around, refusing to be anybody’s bitch. We’d be very stubborn in that regard, and that’s held us up really well now that we’ve come almost full circle as a band. A lot of the people who hated us growing up have come to realise that all the issues they had with us were nothing short of petty jealousy, and we’re all cool now. We’ve never forgotten where we came from, and people can see the genuine affection that we have for hardcore, for the community, and that we want to do something positive here to keep whatever we’ve got in South Wales going.

Find Matt on Twitter.

Funeral For A Friend’s ‘Hours Live at Islington Academy’ will be released on DVD / Audio on June 15 via End Hits Records.