Datblygu’s David R Edwards: a brave, brilliant interrogator of Welsh culture
One of the many advantages of being bilingual is that it doubles the number of languages in which I can enjoy music. But only one lyricist has ever made me gasp in awe: David R Edwards, frontman of Welsh band Datblygu, who has died aged 56 after a period of ill health including diabetes and epilepsy.
Edwards’ way with words was absolutely extraordinary, and 25 years after I discovered his music, his songs still make me marvel. Writing almost exclusively in Welsh, he recognised that his Welsh-speaking listeners all spoke English, and took advantage of that fact to fill his work with interlocking bilingual puns (which make his lyrics difficult to translate). He was a working-class social commentator who tackled topics ranging from the drudgery of work to
his chain smoking and the banality of most popular culture.
With a different background, and a different life, he could have ended up on a late-night review show, turning the BBC2 midnight slot into appointment television by hurling invective at the other panellists who, deep down, knew he was right. But his ire found its platform in the vibrant Welsh-language alternative music scene of the 1980s.
Formed at school in Aberteifi in 1982 with his friend T Wyn Davies, Datblygu began as a vehicle for Edwards’s disillusionment with life under Thatcher’s Conservative government, and “a hatred for what was being expressed by Welsh-language rock and the Welsh language in general”. The multi-instrumentalist Patricia Morgan joined in 1984, and her remarkable musical imagination helped the band straddle everything from uncompromising postpunk to string-laden, piano-led pieces such as Dymuniadau Da.
Musically, the band were most often compared to the Fall, but lyrically, Edwards was a tantalising combination of Smiths-period Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Bob Dylan and Gil Scott-Heron. Datblygu were initially ignored by mainstream Welsh-language radio but found a patron in John Peel, who gave the band five sessions between 1987 and 1993, and introduced their appearance on Channel 4’s The Tube.
Before discovering Edwards’ music, I had never heard anyone criticise Welsh-language culture in Welsh before. I’d heard it criticised by monoglot English speakers, of course, in a chip-building exercise for my narrow adolescent shoulders, but never by anyone from a Welsh-speaking community. Edwards chose to articulate these misgivings and observations about Wales in Welsh because it was his first language. Just because you’re from somewhere, doesn’t mean you have to like it.
Edwards had a prodigious knack for articulating the nagging, nascent doubts that I and his other fans had about contemporary Wales into coherent arguments, and all expressed with a snarling delivery that was utterly thrilling. There was a tendency for the alternative scene’s political bands of the late 80s and early 90s to stray into piousness, but love songs such as Y Teimlad displayed a humanity that many of his contemporaries lacked.
The sheer depth of his intellect also meant his political work never stooped to adolescent sloganeering, each song a perfectly realised, cogent manifesto.
Datblygu were an enormous influence on the Welsh bands who emerged in the 90s, such as Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – the Furries covered Y Teimlad on 2000’s Mwng, which is still the best-selling Welsh album of all time. However, Datblygu withdrew from performing in 1995 as Edwards began a period of treatment for his mental health problems. The band’s legend grew during this period of inactivity, and when they played their first gig in 20 years, at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff in April 2015, they were finally accorded the reverence that was deserved but lacking during their heyday.
Edwards’ lyrical subject matter could range from students on gap years, to the dullness of being unemployed in Aberteifi, to Fidel Castro, to the kind of people who make their kids have harp lessons. But as wise, profound, and provocative as his lyrics could be, they were usually brilliantly funny. He referred to the unimaginative bands on the Welsh-language music scene as having “one track minds in 48 track studios”, and Cân i Gymry, his masterful skewering of the nepotistic Welsh middle classes – translated as “not forgetting to raise a fuss, about the deadly strain of the husband’s job / he has to work 1-to-3 as a producer for the BBC” – makes me laugh as much now as when I first heard it 25 years ago. Wales is a small country and Welshlanguage Wales is even smaller, which can, at times, feel claustrophobic. This is what made a radical such as Edwards so brave. His English or American equivalents could castigate from the anonymity of London or New York, but Edwards would bump into the people he’d written lyrics about in Tesco.
I was lucky enough to get to know David over the last 10 years or so, something I will always treasure. I will remember him as immensely kind and deeply generous, a fiercely intelligent person and unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Welsh music has lost a colossal talent, and Cwm Gwagle, the album released in February, showed that time hadn’t dulled any of Datblygu’s potency. Wales was lucky to have David R Edwards, and we are worse off without him.
The sheer depth of his intellect also meant his political work never stooped to adolescent sloganeering, each song a perfectly realised, cogent manifesto