Fernhill: Reinventing the Welsh tradition
March 01, 2025
Andrew Curry writes: It is St David’s Day today, which reminds me to write about Welsh folk music, which we probably don’t pay enough attention to here on Salut! Live.
(Fernhill’s final line up: from left, Christine Cooper, Ceri Rhys Matthews, Julie Murphy, Tomos Willimas. Photo: Fernhill.)
So this is an opportunity to celebrate the band Fernhill, which produced seven records over two decades from 1996. The core of the band was Ceri Rhys Matthews, who was something of a multi-instrumentalist, and Julie Murphy on vocals. Around them, at different times, there was a rotating cast of musicians, including Andy Cutting on accordion and Jonathan Shorland on the earlier records; later on they were joined Tomos Williams on trumpet, and Christine Cooper on violin and vocals.
Fernhill were influential too, associated with a renaissance in Welsh folk music, taking their music to 20 countries across four continents.
The first time I came across them was through their 2000 record Whilia, released in 2000. At the time I had been going on holiday regularly to Wales, and had developed an interest in Welsh music. We’d visit an excellent music shop in Abergavenny (sadly now closed) that always had a selection of current Welsh music, including folk music.
They’d recommend things—I’d bought Sian James’s record Distaw in the same shop a couple of years earlier. They might have been playing Whilia in the shop, because it has the kind of sound that makes you stop and listen.
The title track, which opens the record, starts with a recording of a Welsh cattle auctioneer selling a black bull, before Cutting’s accordion comes in, followed by Matthews on guitar, before Murphy picks up the lyric, in Welsh.
Her voice is distinctive, in its tone, its timbre, and the musical lines she chooses to follow. (Apparently Eliza Carthy is a big fan, as is Robert Plant).
The line-up on Whilia is completed by Tim Harries on double bass, and Cass Meurig on fiddle. Meurig later joined the band full-time for a spell.
These are songs rooted in place—many about west Wales, where Matthews and Murphy moved in the mid-1980s. Murphy is an unlikely Welsh speaker. She was born in London, moved to Essex and went to art college in Maidstone, where she met Matthews. She hadn’t listened to much folk music before that.
When she arrived in a Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire village, Murphy threw herself into the language, insisting on speaking Welsh rather than English. As she told Peggy Latkovic of RootsWorld:
I made a conscious decision to speak only Welsh with my new friends and neighbours right from the start because once you've established a relationship with someone in one language it's very hard to change to another.
Fernhill are fluid in how they interpret the Welsh tradition. There’s strands of Breton music in there, and English folk sounds, along with the Welsh tunes and traditional lyrics. But the rhythms are different from much Welsh music, because Fernhill draws on the traditions of south and west Wales, and the triban metre—as Murphy explained in the same interview:
It's the dance song tradition and singing rhythmic dance songs brings out a different quality in the voice.
And the band isn’t precious about Welsh. One of the more distinctive tracks on Whilia is Cariad Fel Y Môr, in which a traditional Welsh lyric follows a version, in English, of Tim Buckley’s Song for the Siren. As on Whilia, that song also ends with some found sound, of the noise of a Welsh pub.
As the band evolved through different line-ups, and working with different collaborators, you can hear the band experimenting. For example, on Hynt, from 2005, the Welsh rapper Nobsta Nutts—not his real time—features on one track, Gwalch.
On Na Pradle, a live recording of a 2007 concert in Prague that was organised by the British Council, they’re a trio, with Tomos Williams joining them, playing trumpet and some piano. He comes from a jazz background, and Murphy’s voice interplays with his trumpet lines.
Christine Cooper, on violin, joined this line up for the band’s final two records, Canu Rhydd (‘Free verse’) and Amser (‘Time’).
They had been on the excellent folk label Beautiful Jo Records, but no more (another casualty of the collapse in CD sales, perhaps) and these are self-released. You can only find these records on Bandcamp: musicians have to eat.
If Amser was their last recording, it was a good way to go. It is more than an hour of music, and features settings of poems by Thomas Hardy, Welsh mediaevel poems, traditional ballads (Barbara Elin), spoken word, and—on the title track—an elaborate reflection on the nature of time.
As through all of the band’s career, some of these songs are long, as they work through patterns of repetition and variation that seem to owe something to non-European music traditions while remaining unmistakably Welsh.
Matthews explained in a 2023 interview with Mick Tems of Folk Wales Online that the band came to an end when Christine Cooper contracted ME. They didn’t want to continue without her (fortunately she’s recovered since). He is teaching, running music workshops, and involved in local music—alongside a project called Y Gwythienne collecting and performing dance tunes from the music history of his native Swansea.
In parallel with her work with Fernhill, Julie Matthews has had a interesting solo career, singing in English, releasing Black Mountain Revisited and Lilac Tree, among others. She maintains a presence on Bandcamp, releasing striking merch that combines digital downloads with her own limited edition prints (and at modest prices). It seems a tough way to make a living as a musician.
All the same, at a time when humanities and arts courses are closing across the country, it’s a reminder that much of the most interesting cultural work across Britain in the last sixty years has come out of our art colleges.
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