Cerys Matthews, Hidden Orchestra and Ten Poets

We Come From The Sun Out now

Cerys Matthews (right) was once best known as the lead singer of Catatonia, the Welsh band who sold a lot of records in 1998. Soon, Catatonia may be best known as the band that launched Cerys.

Now 51 and an MBE, she’s a rocking renaissance woman – singer, author, radio DJ, reporter for The One Show and founder of The Good Life Experience festival. Even her books wear several hats, from anthologies to cookbooks and stories for children. She’s not so much a pop star, more a oneperson department of culture.

For this album, she’s the director rather than the vocalist. The tracks are all poems, read by their authors and set to music played by Hidden Orchestra, aka Joe Acheson. Cerys has selected them, given them a theme (‘genesis’) and co-written the backing tracks. The ten poets, all British, are united in their diversity, ranging from Imtiaz Dharker, whose work appears on the GCSE syllabus, to Cia Mangat, a Foyles prize-winner who sat her GCSEs only two years ago. The poems transport you to the Highlands, the Lake District and the Black Country (complete with dialect), but the most moving tale unfolds in a deaf boy’s bedroom in East London, as Raymond Antrobus delivers a miniature memoir about a bedtime story.

‘I’ve always been in awe,’ says Cerys, ‘of the power of a great turn of phrase.’ She shows it by picking poems that are vivid and memorable. The music, while elegantly done, is mostly a side-dish – a bassline here, a flute solo there. Only MA.MOYO’s Flame Lily, with its rhythmic lines and crunching groove, grows into a song. This may be the first album ever released in which the best bit is the lyric sheet. Two of the poets appear twice, making you wish that the extra poems were read by Cerys herself. She ends up being too selfeffacing – final proof that she’s come a long way from being a pop star.