Interview with Melys from Issue 5 of Welsh Bands Weekly, summer 1998

Was it really a year ago that I sat nervously on the 'phone waiting for Melys' Paul Adams and Andrea Parker to be the subjects of my first ever interview? Christ, it seems like only yesterday...

In the space of that year many people have had an eye on both WBW's and Melys' progress, and as this is our birthday issue we thought it would be a good idea to see how Melys are getting on. It turns out that they're doing rather nicely, thank you very much, and having taken on two permanent extra band members (Gary on drums, Carys on keyboards) the band has now released two singles and an album for Arctic Records, part of the Pinnacle Labels set-up.

We met with the band in a North London pub just before they were due to play at The Monarch in Camden. Not only were half of the WBW team there (myself and Emma), but we also had an unexpected helping hand in the shape of Owen from the Crocketts who came along to give us a bit of moral support.

The event, for us, was a far cry from the first time we interviewed Melys. That first time Paul and Andrea were shy, almost timid, and it wasn't easy to get them to say a great deal. I didn't have a clue how to record a conversation down the 'phone (it took me a few goes to realise that I should try recording through the extension. Doh!) and the finished article, although being good enough to read, lacked that certain oomph. Let's hope I can do a better job this time...

So, Melys are with Arctic Records, as I said earlier, and not with Ankst any more. "Ankst manage us," Paul enlightens me. "Ankst as a label aren't doing so much any more, and we've made a transition really, and we asked them to continue to manage us. We wanted to keep a link with Ankst - they've been good to us."

"It's not like how I imagined a management/band kind of relationship would be with a corporate company," Andrea adds.

Paul: "We didn't even sign a contract until after our second EP!"

"In fact," says Andrea, "we haven't signed a management contract at all yet!"

Melys come from Betws-y-Coed, a beautiful part of North Wales which contains the famous Swallow Falls waterfall. It's a gorgeous area, but hardly your obvious habitat for up-and-coming pop stars. Do you have any plans to move to somewhere a bit more cosmopolitan - perhaps Cardiff?

"We're Gogs, and we'll stay Gogs forever!" Paul jokes. "But seriously, we're quite happy there - well, for now."

Andrea: "It gets a bit boring every now and then. It's lovely to come home to, but when you've been there for a few months it's like, what shall we do today then? The trees are nice... it gets like that now and then."

Since we interviewed Melys last year we've all changed quite a bit. WBW, although being "different" from other fanzines from the beginning, has definitely improved and matured (well, sort of...) during the year, and Melys have done the same. The band are much more confident, for one thing - particularly on stage.

"We were really shy back then", Paul admits. It' pretty weird for us because suddenly we released Fragile... not even that, we did a couple of gigs then suddenly we were signed to Ankst and the EP was coming out. It was like, Woah! When you saw us last year we'd just got together and it was pretty new to us, so we've settled down."

"We've been together more as a band," Andrea agrees, "recording the album, definitely. We're all living together now as well."

In the last interview with Melys Paul told how the band started as a bet; he'd previously been in guitar bands and Andrea bet Paul he couldn't play anything electronic, so Paul countered by betting that Andrea couldn't sing it! Given Paul's indie background, does he ever feel a yearning for doing more indie/rock/guitar based music?

"Well, " he laughs, "you don't hear us jamming! I'm like, ‘It's my turn! I want the guitar LOUD!’ No, I dunno... it's a pretty hard market as well, isn't it? It's all about trying out new sounds, doing things I'd never done, so that was what we started out to do. It might not be new for other people but for us it is. We're learning lots. Like, ‘Fucking hell, if you put this keyboard through that other keyboard that happens!’ Shit like that. We've had more fun messing around than we do with guitars."

Andrea: "You can fiddle more!"

"Yeah," Paul agrees, "We just mess around and quite enjoy that. Especially on the next album. We'll be doing a lot more different sounds. We've started learning all our new instruments better now - we recorded the album before we got our new gear."

Have the band got any big plans or ambitions?

"Well, the record company has built us a rehearsal room at home," says Paul, "but we're going to change it into a studio. Maybe set up our own label next year."

Hang on a minute, run that by me again.... The record company have built a rehearsal room at your home?! "Yeah," Andrea laughs, "in our shed! Because we haven't got many rehearsal studios around where we live. For one tour's rehearsals we were travelling about too much to rehearsal studios, so the record company said they'd build one at our home for us. Without that it'd be really difficult to rehearse."

That's not a bad deal! Are there any strange clauses in your contract? For instance, it's rumoured that Super Furry Animals have it in their contract that they won't work on St David's day!

Paul: "Have we? We insist on doing so many Welsh language songs if we choose to on an album. And we made them sign the contract on top of Mount Snowdon, which is a bit strange!"

"It was October," Andrea remembers with a giggle. "We signed the contract on this rock and it was flying all over the place in the wind! And then we found some [does impression of children's TV presenter].... magic mushrooms! On Snowdon! I carried my coffee all the way up Snowdon and the wind was blowing hot coffee all over me!"

"For a while they thought they'd made a seriously bad mistake," Paul laughs. "A band who takes them up Snowdon to sign a contract!"

"What's really strange," Andrea adds, "is that I've lived in North Wales all my life but that was the first time I'd ever been up Snowdon!"

The conversation takes a turn towards the subject of Andrea's lyrics. They're a bit... erm... well, anti-men, aren't they? A sample: ‘Hey listen, I'm not your puppet / I cut those strings long ago / Put your name on my skin and brand me / But I'm not yours to own / You're still angry that I've finally grown up / Thrown my toys away...’ and so on. The general underlying message in most of Melys' songs seem to be, ‘Fuck off bloke!’ I ask Andrea if this is a direct reference to Paul...

"Actually," she laughs, "it's Paul who writes the lyrics!"

But Paul, you're a man! Why do you write stuff about...

Paul, a typical Gemini, finishes the sentence for me but manages to avoid actually answering. "Killing men? Oh no, it's the lyrics question! I want to go home now!"

The band's last single was Lemming, which we love but unfortunately the 60 ft Dolls weren't impressed with at all, it later turns out. By some strange coincidence, the night before the interview we'd watched this brilliant documentary about lemmings, and contrary to popular belief the little cuties don't actually commit suicide. Paul and Andrea watched the programme too...

"They're so cute, aren't they?" Paul croons. "We're gonna keep some as pets!"

You'd have to go to the North Pole to get them though...

"That's alright" Paul laughs, "If you live in our house it's like the fucking North Pole!"

Gary decides to make a contribution to the conversation. "You could keep them in a chest freezer!"

We turn to the more serious business of Paul and Andrea's two-year-old daughter. Being a mother myself, I know how difficult it can be to get babysitters just to go out to one gig. How difficult is it for them to go on tour?

"It's not that bad actually," says Andrea.

"It's just the mess when we get back! There's nappies everywhere!"

"And the boyfriends!" Gary laughs.

"Oy, she's not having any fucking boyfriends!" Paul and Andrea yell in unison.

"Actually, "says Paul, "we've got very understanding parents and they look after her."

You just wait a couple of years - little girls suddenly go man mad! You're thinking, no, you're my baby, you're not allowed to be intersted in men! But they are... my eight-year-old, Emily, is madly in love with Euros Childs from Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and there's no stopping her!

Paul: "I've already started dressing her up, just to please my friend when they come round for coffee!"

Andrea is horrified. "Oh, you sick person!"

"Seriously though," Paul says, aware that World War 3 is about to begin in his household, "we always make it so that we're not away for longer than two or three days at a time."

But what about when you do a long tour?

"We've got someone to take care of her."

"Yep, we've got that job lined up, haven't we!" Andrea smiles. "Gary's girlfriend is going to come on tour with us to look after the baby. She's really good."

Have you brought your daughter up bilingually?

"Not really, no" says Andrea. "Even though my family are from Wales, my parents have never spoken Welsh. All our families are English speaking so it's difficult to start her speaking Welsh all the time. When she hears people speaking Welsh she looks really confused, although I'm trying to teach her the colours in Welsh. Give her another year and she'll start picking it up."

Within the first six months of Melys' career they were already being hailed by Melody Maker as one of the bands to look out for in 1997. John Peel is also a bit of a Melys fan, isn't he?

"Yeah," says Paul. "He's a cool dude. We've had a lot of plays on the Evening Session and on Mark Radcliffe's show too. Diwifr was the only Welsh language song to be on the radio in the daytime, which was great."

The band have just released their debut album. I ask them to tell us a little bit about it.

Paul: "It's called Rumours and Curses. We tried to write stuff that we know about. We've done a few tracks which are pretty un-Melys, like a few acoustic tracks, and there's a song out there that's completely cursed. It's called ‘Hatchepsut’. We went to Egypt and wrote this song about an Egyptian queen, Hatchepsut, who had to disguise herself as a man to become the Pharaoh. She had an affair with her advisor, which was unheard of back then, and the song is all about all the rumours going around about her having an affair with this man. In the end they got rid of this guy. So the song's all about that, which is quite strange really. As we were recording it... it took days to record in the first place - it was at Gorwel's and there were air force planes going over all the time - and then we went up to Liverpool to mix it, it took so much time to mix.”

Andrea picks up the story. "You get to a stage in a mix where you can guarantee that it'll be down within an hour and a half. So it was all mixed, then we went out for a meal and came back three or four hours later and there were all these weird sounds on it!"

Paul: "When we mixed it from tape to mix tape, we played it back an realised that there were popping and crackling sounds all over it, and we couldn't understand why. So we played it back again and the popping and crackling sounds were in different places! Woah! So we mixed it down again and the same thing happened. We had the machine serviced, and the next day we started again on a new machine and the same thing happened again! Then we sat in the back room listening to it again and it had gone all slow and weird! So this Hatchepsut curse started, this Egyptian curse, and we were like, oh SHIT!"

That must have freaked the life out of you!

"Yeah," says Andrea, "but it gets worse!"

Paul: "Eventually we got a mix with no popping, no crackling, put it to DAT, and thought, great! But then all the tape got chewed up! We mixed it down again, thought, yeah, sorted, got back home, and when we got home the first thing we heard on the news was about the massacre in the temple of Hatchepsut where the tourists had been killed! So we'll never play that live!"

Andrea: "I want to!"

At this precise point of playback of the interview, my dictaphone starts making all these weird buzzing and crackling noises! No word of a lie! I shit myself - has my tape, too, been cursed by Hatchepsut? I'm relieved when I realise that it's Andrea's mobile phone making the noises. Their manager, Gruff, is phoning from about 3 ft away!

We start speaking about Ankst again, and I tell the band that if the position of God was democratically voted, one of my nominations would be Owain who works at Ankst. He's one of the nicest people I've ever met and I think he's do a marvellous job as God. Who would the band vote for?

"Mother Teresa," says Paul, without any hesitation. "She was better than that Di slapper anyway. It's a bit wanky - she dies and the nation mourns for years. Mother Teresa dies and she gets half a fucking column in the paper."

I read a good quote from Daf Ieuan, SFA's drummer, last year. He said "Princess of Wales? She was about as Welsh as a Kebab!"

Andrea makes her vote. "John Peel - he's a god!"

Paul adds another candidate. "My Mam!"

What about more than one god?" Andrea suggests. "John Peel could be god of music, and Mother Teresa could be the main god, the big god."

"My Mam is the god of making meals for us when we get home from touring!"

Okay, another one from the realms of irrelevance. If you won the lottery what would you do with the money and would you want publicity?

Andrea and Paul are in total agreement: "Definitely no publicity!"

"How much money are we talking about?" asks Paul.

The jackpot - say, seven million.

"In that case I'd set up a North Wales record label," he decides.

"I dunno really," Andrea muses. "I'd definitely want no publicity though because of all the begging letters. People recognising you in the street and that. Weid."

You say that and you're in a band?!

"Yeah, I don't like that!"

So, what really pisses you all off?

Paul, as usual, has an instant answer. "No drugs, no beer! No, not really. Caravans!"

Andrea, again, is in complete agreement. "Ah, fucking caravans!"

Paul: "They're the scourge of the earth!"

Andrea: "They are!"

Paul: "Tax the bastards!"

Andrea: "Damn right! They do my bloody head in!"

Gary: "Tourists in general really!"

Andrea: "And Nigels!"

Paul: "And purple hair! No, caravans!"

Well, it seems that the general concensus among Melys is that Caravans are bad. Caravans are very bad. Caravans in fact, are evil forces that must be wiped from the face of the earth without delay, before they get a chance to influence our children. If we're not careful, we'll spawn a generation of young men with beards who smoke pipes and wear socks with their sandals, and young women who wear headscarves and call each other 'dear'. Watch out for the caravans! They're coming to brainwash your children!

It's obviously a subject that Melys feel very strongly about. Is there anything else that makes them foam at the mouth as much as caravans obviously do?

"Yeah," laughs Paul. "I wish you'd given us warning - I would have written them down!"

Andrea is fidgeting, waiting for her turn. It comes, and she bubbles with enthusiasm.

"Old biddies on Sundays - they drive like farts! They cause accidents!"

"What, like Carys?" Paul shoots a sneaky glance at the blushing keyboard player. A long discussion ensues about Carys' driving skills, but for her own peace of mind and to save her further embarrassment, I won't repeat Paul's insults here.

Is there anything else, before we go, that the world should know about Melys? Any big message for the readers of WBW?

Paul: "Some stupid twat has asked us to translate our songs into Mandarin Chinese!"

What! Do any of you speak Mandarin?

"No!"

Then how are you going to translate it?

Andrea: "I think they're going to get someone else to sing it."

Paul: "We could tour our arses off over there though."

Andrea: "I wouldn't mind that!"

And whether singing in Welsh, English, Mandarin or Double Dutch, I'm certain that Melys are going to be huge, and soon. Yippee!