culture Tongue tied In her latest album Gwenno Saunders uses the traditions of the Cornish language to explore contemporary feelings of isolation, Brexit… and cheese interview marta bausells portrait liz seabrook Gwenno Saunders’ mum was a Welsh Gwenno had to consider where she fitted Kov is “dhyn ni oll” – “for us all”. political activist, her dad a Cornish poet. into a culture that was ancient but with so Like its predecessor, Le Kov will only be She grew up listening to protests and few surviving artistic outputs. Le Kov explores understood by a minority of listeners – but speaking English, Welsh and Cornish. the individual and collective subconscious as she says, “the challenge with creating Despite being fluent in the latter, little and the myths and drolls of Cornwall. music is to communicate through music, Gwenno never got to spend much time “When you’re a smaller culture or language, which is a language in itself”. It’s not all in Cornwall outside of occasional family you’ve got to keep evolving, otherwise myths and legends, though. In ‘Daromres trips to visit the Cornish-speaking you disappear. That’s what excites me, y’n Howl’ (“Traffic in the Sun”), she pays community there. So, she assumed that that drive to create new things, because homage to Cornwall’s congested roads in the language’s situation was similar to otherwise [the culture] doesn’t exist.” the summer, with a rapping cameo by Gruff that of Welsh. It wasn’t: Cornish had Le Kov is a fascinating cross between Rhys evoking the car horns of tourists. And been diminished to the point that it was those legends and Gwenno’s very ‘Eus Keus?’ (“Is There Cheese?”), is about considered technically dead for 200 years metropolitan experience. “I wanted one of the oldest surviving Cornish phrases: until it was revived in the 20th century, to imagine a city, a utopian Cornish “Is there cheese? Is there or isn’t there? If especially in the 1970s; it now has fewer metropolis, where you can be whoever there’s cheese, bring cheese, and if there than 1,000 fluent speakers. “I just knew you want to be.” Indeed, the album, while isn’t cheese, bring what there is!” everybody that spoke it,” she laughs. Then she moved to London and formed a band, The Pipettes, a move that couldn’t have been further from that cultural “I believe that there’s still room for landscape: the trio made retro-pop English tunes. But when the band went on hiatus, lightheartedness, particularly now” she went back to Cardiff to explore the roots she had needed to leave behind for a while. Out of that came her celebrated feeling otherworldly and timeless, has a “There’s still room for lightheartedness, first album, Y Dydd Olaf, a sci-fi electropop very current sound and energy; it might be particularly now,” she explains. There’s a wonder which was lauded as spearheading about ancient myths, but it has an urgent balance to be found between the “intensity” the Welsh-language music revival. contemporary message. “Le Kov” means of the subjects she’s interested in, and the Now, she’s gone full circle: her second “The place of Memory,” and it is a reference fun to be had. She equates it to allowing record, Le Kov, is in Cornish, and with it she to the fact that people have mined tin for yourself to dance to your own tune. “Having fully comes into her own. She explains: “A thousands of generations, a “celebration of been in a band and danced a lot, it’s really massive motivation for making the record the internationalism of Cornish people”. The difficult to shake off that wanting to do really was taking ownership of something that way that politics is going, she continues, bad dancing. I probably could have been I’d been given that – even though it was “the fact that these trade links have always cooler, but you just can’t shake it off! You’ve a small minoritised thing from a linguistic existed and the fact that we’re trying to got this awful way of dancing, and that’s point of view – I wanted to be able to use. cut them, it’s just insanity.” In ‘Herdhya’ alright. It’s about accepting what you are.” What’s the point of having it if I can’t use it? (“Pushing”), she hypnotically sings of the Creating in your language makes it alive.” feeling of isolation after the Brexit vote; Le Le Kov is out now 88.