“I WANT TO GET MORE INVOLVED WITH MY LOCAL COMMUNITY”
MUSICIAN CERYS MATTHEWS, 48, lives in london with her husband, steve abbott. she has two children, glenys, 14, and johnny, 12, from a previous marriage, a son, red, aged seven, with steve, and two grown-up stepchildren. she hosts a bbc radio 6 show and is co-founder of the good life experience, a festival in wales.
Festivals have become too corporate. i started the good life experience festival in 2014 as a way of bringing them back to the original idea – of sharing ideas, meeting like-minded people and being outdoors. it’s held in flintshire and includes crafts, talks, cooking sessions from chefs and music. there’s no vip area, no barriers – in fact, the public are invited to participate!
The driving force behind everything i do is my enthusiasm for the wonders
of the world and to share it with
others. the ethos behind my sunday morning show on bbc 6 music is the same, and i’m thrilled that it’s now become the biggest digital radio show in the uk. there are so many interesting things out there, and it turns out there are lots of people, like me, who are not satisfied with being told what to like,
and might want to hear a congolese rumba, say, or a cuban love song.
Success to me now means something totally different to when i was younger. then i was more focused on my music. you have to be single-minded to get anywhere in the music industry. but i was always interested in other things – reading, for instance, and biology. i
did actually start training as a psychiatric nurse – growing up in wales, my father was a doctor – but i would have been a useless nurse; i’m too soft.
There’s no time for downward dogs in my life! i don’t do yoga or anything like that. my life is chaos – my house is always full of people – but i like it like that. even in the modern world, it falls on the woman’s shoulders to do the majority of work around the home so my priorities are my children, work, my house, my husband.
I got together with steve because i thought his music collection was brilliant! luckily, we work together – he’s my manager – so we see a lot of each other. we like the same things. he’ll buy me opera tickets he knows
i’ll like, or i’ll take him for a hike up a mountain. if you have nothing in common, it won’t last. i tell my children that when the tweeting birds and popping hearts have gone, that’s the most important thing; to be with your best friend. but when you’re young, you don’t want to hear that!
There is so much pressure today on the way you look – and the way you think you ought to look. i worry about my teenage daughter using things such as instagram, where so many of the images have been manipulated. but there’s a lot of peer pressure and teenagers think that has become the norm – to be thin, to have no body hair. i find that frustrating. i care about how i look but can’t be doing with all that high maintenance and waxing.
Are my kids impressed with my previous life as a music star? not at all – catatonia [cerys’ band] were big around 20 years ago now! i don’t talk about it and they’re not interested but my life is music so it’s not a secret.
I want to be more involved in my community. i live right next to grenfell tower and my children go to the local state school. it has mentally woken me up. community has become a bad word but it’s what life is about. you feel very welcome here. i’m an immigrant in some ways albeit a very fortunate one.
The Good Life Experience Festival runs from 15-17 September. See thegoodlifeexperience.co.uk W&H