Cool Cymru () was a Welsh cultural movement in the 1990s and 2000s. The movement saw a rise in the popularity of Welsh music, with bands such as Catatonia, Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics and Super Furry Animals, many of which were adjacent to the Britpop and post-Britpop movements.10 essential post-Britpop albums you need to hear, Radio X It also saw developments in Welsh politics, sport, visual art and TV and film.
Cool Cymru is often seen as more of a wide-ranging movement than its British equivalent, lasting well into the twenty-first century. Some commentators have linked the movement to a new cultural confidence in the nation and a more positive view of Wales outside the country while others have criticised it as homogenous and jingoistic.
Terminology
The term Cool Cymru ( is the Welsh name for Wales) derives as a Welsh alternative to Cool Britannia (itself a pun on the British patriotic song "Rule, Britannia!"). Cool Britannia described the revival of British art and culture in the mid-1990s which was typically more centred on London and England, emphasised British culture, and used British symbols such as The Union Jack.
The term Cool Cymru gained popularity for the cultural figures and phenomena which were specifically Welsh or Welsh in origin, and continued to be used by Welsh and British commentators long after the term Cool Britannia has fallen out of favour. By 1998 many Welsh cultural figures were gaining prominence across the UK, at a time when the use of Cool Britannia was already falling out of favour.
Politics Commentators have alluded to both Cool Britannia and Cool Cymru as by-products of social and economic issues that dominated the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. In Wales, this era saw the rejection of a devolved Welsh government in a 1979 referendum and the shift in economic policy during the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher; which led to the 1984 Miners' Strike) and the eventual closure of collieries throughout the UK. This resulted in an era of unprecedented turmoil in the south Wales Valleys, with unemployment rates ranking amongst the highest in the whole United Kingdom well into the twenty-first century.
1997 United Kingdom general election in Wales saw the rise of New Labour and a landslide victory for Welsh Labour, winning 34 of 40 Welsh constituencies, a result which also saw the Welsh Conservatives lose all of their MPs, leaving them without Welsh representation for the first time since the 1906 general election. The new Labour government had promised another vote on devolution for Wales in its manifesto, with a referendum being held shortly after the UK election on 18 September 1997. The new referendum saw a reversal of the 1979 result, with a narrow win in favour of establishing a new Government of Wales.
Five months after referendum, the band Catatonia released their album, International Velvet, and would perform the album's title track at the opening ceremonies of both the new government and the 1999 Rugby World Cup. The contemporary anthem would also be used by the BBC for sports trailers and was used to illustrate a post-referendum national confidence by academics and commentators both inside and outside of Wales as an example of Cool Cymru.
Music culture
The economic decline of Wales in the 1980s was mirrored in the era's music. While artists such as Shakin' Stevens achieved great success and became the UK's top selling artist of the decade, his Rockabilly persona and musicality were a deliberate attempt to evoke nostalgia in an older generation, familiar with American culture and music of the 1950s.
With a few notable exceptions (such as the celebrated Rockfield Studios), there were few professional facilities within Wales before Cool Cymru and the market necessary to sustain a professional touring scene remained centred on London and Britain as a whole. This changed in the 1990s when acts from the two popular music traditions in Wales (which until that time, had both been equally ignored by the British mainstream press) emerged onto the UK anglophone market under the banner of "Cool Cymru". Iain Ellis describes these two traditions as "self-consciously Welsh Acts" (such as Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and Catatonia) and "neither eschewing nor celebrating Welsh Acts" (Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, and Mclusky). Outside of the UK, Welsh music was still associated with "old-fashioned crooners" such as Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, both of whom would reinvent themselves as part of the Cool Cymru movement.
In 1997 Shirley Bassey released History Repeating in collaboration with the English electro duo Propellerheads. The single reached No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart and No. 10 on the US Dance Club Songs chart, marking Bassey's first top ten appearance on any US chart since 1973. This was followed in 1999 by Jones' own career resurgence following the success of his Reload album, which saw Jones collaborate with other musicians, many of whom were already established part of "Cool Cymru". The album was commercially successful across the UK, becoming Jones' first number one studio album in thirty years.
As such, any popular Welsh act under the "Cool Cymru" label could now share their own understanding of Welsh identity "beyond their own borders", regardless of the language, musical style or influences they brought.
Stereophonics
The Stereophonics' debut album, Word Gets Around, was released in 1997; the band drew attention when they became the first to sign for Richard Branson's V2 Records. The album went on to receive acclaim, with its asking of potent questions for 1990s young people in Wales, including the line from Traffic:"Is anyone going anywhere?
Everyone's got to be somewhere."
Stereophonics - "Traffic"Tackling the topic of youth unemployment was also a focus of the era:"I don't live to work,
I work to live,
I live at the weekend."
Stereophonics - "Last of the Big Time Drinkers"
Writer Griffin Kaye described Stereophonics as "proud, unapologetic Welshmen who serve as the anchormen of the Cool Cymru sound, helping carry the sound from one generation to the next."Kaye, Griffin (2022-08-05). "Cool Cymru: The Fantastic Five of the Welsh Sound". 25 Years Later. Retrieved 2022-08-8.
Super Furry Animals
Ellis describes Gruff Rhys' psychedelia driven art as "the heart and soul of the "Cool Cymru" movement", yet he acknowledges it was the act's resonance with the "London-based Britpop movement and its attendant media" which helped its growth, thanks to their dissonance with the more standardised acts of the era such as Oasis. The group famously reached number 11 in the UK charts with Mwng in 2001, to much surprise given the presence of a full ten Welsh language songs on the album.
Welsh Music Foundation Pooh Sticks lead singer Huw Williams, who helped raise the profiles of 60 Ft. Dolls and Catatonia, co-founded the Welsh Music Foundation, a now defunct Government supported organisation which in the Cool Cymru era was praised for raising the profile of Welsh music internationally and at home. The organisation is credited with individual successes such as the growth of Lostprophets and Mclusky, as well as bringing BBC Radio 1 on its first visit to Wales for Sound City in Cardiff.
Criticism
Similarly to the Cool Britannia and Britpop movements, elements of Cool Cymru were criticised as jingoistic. The Super Furry Animals bassist, Guto Pryce said: "Britpop was quite a risible scene. We didn’t like the idea of flag waving and we never waved a Welsh flag – it was other people that told everyone we were Welsh. There was a backlash against that scene – and rightfully so."
Issues around the use of the English language by formerly Welsh language bands came to ahead at the 1996 Llandeilo Eisteddfod. The Super Furry Animals performed their English language songs by whistling the lyrics and handing out lyric sheets exclusively in Japanese to the crowd. In another venue during the same week, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci also publicly expressed their anger about what they perceived was a form of censorship.
The Stereophonics concert at Morfa Stadium on 31 July 1999 attracted criticism when video footage of famous Welsh rugby triumphs was played to the crowd. The footage included two tries by Gareth Edwards in the 1970s and most controversially, Scott Gibbs' try in Wales' victory over England at Wembley earlier that year. Some English attendees at the concert wrote to NME to complain about the videos which was published on 21 August under the editorial banner "Is Wales the new Germany?" The NME journalist James Oldham even linked the rise in Welsh patriotism and nationalism to a supposed rise in "race related attacks in South Wales." The debate continued elsewhere in UK media, with NME noting that "the Welsh issue" continued to dominate it's readers contributions as late as 18 September. NME would review another Stereophonics concert in Cardiff later that same year, although this time the reviewer stated that "only a paranoid English tourist could interpret the crowd’s cries of "Wales, Wales" as hostility" adding that he observed no "chest-beating nationalism."
Writer Iain Ellis declared that "Cool Cymru is dead" in 2010 and noted that the musicians at its peak were placed together "less by common genre than by common geography". Although Ellis also noted that new Welsh acts benefited greatly from the infrastructure that "Cool Cymru" had established.
Film and TV The long running Welsh language soap opera, Pobl y Cwm found new audiences in The Netherlands, when it was given a primetime broadcast on broadcast by the Nederland 3 channel. The series premiered on 11 August 1992, and was preceded by a promotional film featuring facets of Welsh culture. In 1994 the series again found a new audience, when the BBC broadcast it across the United Kingdom for the first time since 1982 in a daily afternoon slot four times a week.Welsh BBC adds to drama output, The Independent, 9 February 1993
Although many filmmakers had found success outside Wales, locally based productions often experienced a lack of opportunities and a lack of faith from their Anglo-centric distributors. This became evident in 1994 when despite being critically acclaimed and nominated as a "UK entry" for Best Foreign Language Film at the 66th Academy Awards, Paul Turner's film Hedd Wyn was not given a distribution deal in the UK.
Despite this setback, Hedd Wyn would go on to win global acclaim, winning the Royal Television Society's Award for Best Single Drama in 1992, the Celtic Film Festival's Spirit of the Festival Award in 1993 and First Prize at the Belgium Film Festival in 1994. However, its nomination as a film from the United Kingdom (as opposed to Wales) caused controversy, and was seen as reflecting the film's theme of Welsh struggles against an Imperial Britain. Hedd Wyn marks the start of an unprecedented period for critically acclaimed Welsh that continued throughout the "Cool Cymru" era, and was the first of six consecutive Welsh language films nominated as the British submissions for Best International Feature Film which included Branwen in 1995, Cameleon in 1997, Solomon & Gaenor in 1999, Do Not Go Gentle in 2001 and Eldra in 2002.
The prominence of Welsh actors such as Ioan Gruffudd (who starred in Solomon & Gaenor), Rhys Ifans and Anthony Hopkins (who appeared together in the Chekhov tale August) were all seen as leading figures in the Cool Cymru movement. House of America (about a dysfunctional family in a Welsh mining town) was released in 1997; in that same year Newport-born director Julian Richards released Darklands (the "first home grown Welsh horror film").