April 2012 £1.50
ND A R G SLAM YEAR
FOLKSY FRENZY
GEORGIA
RUTH
Special
HARPS
WILD
ON . .
..
EDITION
e Jen
kins
. ..... >
“TOM JONE MY G S EA T RAND says MA” Cathe rin
ut o b ... a h ate h ve t i o l my ship w n o i o t o t a l t re ta y m
ENT U R E IN G L L A V A B D N D O A U O E A TH R TO FS L O E D A L N A U R MUSI C
Out now on Deutsche Grammophon
BRYN TERFEL
HOT GOSS 21 Gruff Rhys & Shirly Bassey? A very strange affair 23 Missing Manic Richey Edwards & Lord Lucan seen swimming at Rhossilli
NEWS 43 Max Boyce to record an album of Rugby songs with The Stereophonics 44 Spandex & Metal at The International Eisteddfod, 2012
sings The Birdie Song & other Classics
in April’s
MiXMag WHY IBIZA WHEN YOU CAN HAVE RHYLL Out now £4.20 in all good Newsagents
PICTURES 35 MeL C and Aled Jones caught clubbing and behaving badly 37 Cerys shopping toys
Matthews for sex
s ’ h t n o m t x e Char n n I lo Chur tte ch on : M e u u rdoc the iss hs
!]??
MUSIC & LEISURE - April 2012
CONTENTS
PAGE 12 Mary Hopkin on why the Russian Grannies will knock spots of Engelbert.
COVER STORY
Page 18 Georgia Ruth Williams harps on about her new 10 inch, her tattoo, singing in English... ...and, of course, her harp! Page 27 Freddie Starr may well have eaten a hamster, but we ask “could Tom Jones really have eaten Catherine Jenkins’ Grannie?” The full mystery is revealed! Page 31 From Barry Island to Bangor, we visit all of Wales’s hottest musical hot spots.
GEORGIA RUTH WILLIAMS
A half-pissed Harpist... ... with a Mission Our celebrity reporter Gavin Henson interviews Georgia Ruth Williams; but doesn’t propose marriage! Hi Georgia, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time, but the fist question has to be THE TATTOO? “I know it sounds strange, going out and getting a Red dragon tattoo on your forehead on St Patrick’s day, but that was the day that Wales won the Grand Slam, and let’s face it, I was three sheets to the wind at the time.”
“Just a moment of madness really, and my so called friends urged me on.”
Do you regret it now... ... and do you worry that it will affect your record sales? “Yes and no and yes again. I’m proud of it because I’m Welsh but it is a daft place to put it. However something daft like that attracts attention and that can only boost record sales...
...I think I’m going back to having a fringe though, so I can cover it up when I feel the need!”
I see your new EP got a vinyl. Are you a lover of the format? “Well I do love to get my hands on a big 10 inch, but no, seriously, they say vinyl sales are booming so it does make commercial sense. And, well, you can get it on iTunes too if you want.”
But not on CD? “Nah! that’s for old folks like you!”
“I hope that’s not a poke at my Oxbridge education”
Only if you want it to be.
I don’t know what you mean! “Well, let’s face it. When was the last time you played a proper game of Rugby?”
... u o y f f “ P i s s o l b a s t a rd ! ” ca Point i t s i t o g taken; But I am back e ...
So what on earth made you do it?
And even a chav like me knows that’s a long way from Debussy!
in the Ba Ba’s now.
“You were until you got pissed on a plane!” Leigh
enny
Halfp
I’d rather you didn’t raise that as an issue.
By the way, who is your favourite Rugby player? “Leigh Halfpenny. It’s the shy smile wot does it. Something you’ll never suffer from.”
Let’s get on to the music. What made you take up the Harp in the first place? “About 15 years ago, at the ripe old age of seven, I started taking harp lessons in school because I didn’t want to play the violin. I plucked a string and I was hooked. I started playing Classical music, Debussy and that, but ever since I’ve been on a mission to make harping fun and cool. I moved on to my now familiar folk-blues style of playing and songwriting over five years ago now”
“To tell the truth I don’t really care. A harp might be Welsh, very Welsh, but it’s not very street is it. Not yet anyway!”
You sing as well? “True, very true... I like a song with words. Don’t you?
Well I used to, until Charlotte started to get carried away with herself. You sing in English? “It’s called spreading the word. Making my music accessible to more people.’
And finally, back to your drinking. Is it getting to be a problem? “Like yours? Nah! To tell the truth I’m only half pissed right now, and I don’t go out and get mad tattoos in obvious places every day!”
“ I li k e a s o n g w i t h wo rd s . Do n’t yo u? ” Fancy a shag?
“Piss off you oversexed egotistical bastard!”
Georgia’s EP “In Luna” is out now on Gwmon Records as a 10” Vinyl and Download
18
Garrielle “Coco” Chanel with her Nazi boyfriend, German Military Intelligence officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage
WHEN YOU SLEEP WITH THE ENEMY BE SURE TO SMELL NICE
“TOM JONES ATE MY GRANDMA”
and, when you compare the expression on his face with the expression on the face of Cronos in the Goya painting above you can quite believe it! When you come across a sensational headline these days you invariably take it with an extremely large pinch of salt. When the Sun announced to the world “Freddie Starr Eat My Hamster” everybody knew that he hadn’t really eaten a hamster, but The Sun would have sold many extra copies that day simply because people wanted to know what level of sophistry was used to justify such an absurd headline.
Working on the old adage of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story we then extrapolate using a heady mix of platitudes and innuendo to leave you with clear impression that something clearly did happen.
If you don’t it still doesn’t really matter, because the lurid headline has drawn you inside persuading you to buy our publication simply on the grounds of something you never even believed in the first place.
Also we lace the story with the phrase “SHOCK
The classic example of this was in 1983 when Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times published extracts from the “Hitler Diaries”, knowing them to be forgeries at the time the paper went to press. The nation knew them to be forgeries by the morning as it was all over the TV and radio news, but we still went out and bought an extra 60,000 copies of the paper that day when we should really have shunned it for telling porky pies.
bb le i n a d e” e an l i r h e h w e h l “A n i bb e s i t a l l wo r t ak m e r HORROR” in e h t
urdoch
- AKA
The Dir
Even if you aren’t, the journalist still hopes that you pick up on a few of the titbits we throw you, on the grounds that a nibble here and a nibble there makes it all worthwhile.
ty Digg
Are all these lies we lap up so eagerly just harmless fun or do they do real harm and affect peoples lives? Well next month we ask Charlotte Church what she thinks! er
27
Of course Tom Jones never actually eat Catherine Jenkins Gran and we have no reason to believe or even suspect that he even knew her. All we know is that Catherine Jenkins is of an age where her Gran could have been young at the same time as Tom Jones and that one or more of her Grans is probably Welsh, so who knows, they could have met, and if so they could possibly have got up to the sort of shenanigans that could vaguely justify such a headline. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination...
various strategic places. In journalistic circles this is a clear indication that we are lying. However we hope that you, the reading public are too thick and ignorant to know this. Rupert M