#caryl parry jones

[mywifeslasagne]

Haven't watched many TV shows but ones I'm aware of (which are dramas, not crime dramas though) are Pobol y Cwm and Gwaith Cartref - people I know enjoyed both shows

They also translated Spongebob episodes which, if you're familiar with particular episodes, may be a good way of learning - Spynjbob Pantsgwâr

Music recs - Euros Childs, Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog, Threatmantics, Super Furry Animals, Bryn Terfel (iconic opera singer if you're into that)

Hafan Gobaith by Bryn Terfel & Cyfeillion (friends) is a song that slaps so hard and is on Spotify

Pan Ddaw Yfory by Caryl Parry Jones also slaps very hard

does anyone have any recs for shows in welsh? im not a fan of like, detective dramas/crime procedural dramas (which is what google brings back and the recs I've gotten from my mom so far). kids shows are fine too, since i'm only learning

music recs also welcome! i like what i've heard of gwenno so far

[coto524]

finally put the lyrics for pan ddaw yfory on genius and in the course of doing so discovered that it’s a cover???? of a really sad lament by caryl parry jones?????? wow

[tinknevertalks]

So I mentioned a load of songs earlier in an ask meme answer (if you wanna know more about my not an American-ness, click here for the questions), so I thought, bugger it, you can hear them too. XD

International Velvet - Catatonia

Gwahoddiad (Arglwydd Dyma Fi) - Cerys Matthews

Ti - Edward H Dafis (live version)

Pishyn - Edward H Dafis (literally a song about how hot someone is XD)

Ysbryd y Nos - Edward H Dafis 

Cariad, Cariad��- Mega YouTube has failed me! :(

Calon Lan - Cerys Matthews (there are other versions, but I love Cerys. XD)

Sosban Fach - DJSG/Alistair James (this is more like a dance remix but it’s amazing!)

Cyfri Geifr - Llangollen Male Voice choir (it needs to be sung in a choir tbh, to get the feel).

Calon - Caryl Parry Jones

Rhedeg i Paris - Candelas

... 

There’s a whole bunch of folk songs I love too, but yeah... I love Edward H Dafis (to the point where I mention their old band - Y Tebot Piws - in my NaNo) so if you can, listen to them...

[queerwelsh]

Yn 2014, rhyddhaodd y band Cymraeg, Clinigol, fideo cerddoriaeth 'Ymlaen' i ddathlu Priodas Cyfartal. Mae Clinigol yn band synthpop o frodyr o Bontypridd, Aled a Geraint Pickard, a ffurfiwyd yng Nghaerdydd yn 2002. Mae lleisiau gwadd wedi cynnwys Caryl Parry Jones, Heather Jones, Margaret Williams, Elin Fflur, a chwiorydd Carys Eleri a Nia Medi. Mae'r fideo yn cynnwys Carys Eleri a Tara Bethan fel cwpl sy'n priodi ym Mae Caerdydd.

In 2014, the Welsh language band Clinigol released the music video ‘Ymlaen’ (’Forward’) to celebrate Equal Marriage. Clinigol are a synthpop band made of brothers from Pontypridd Aled and Geraint Pickard, formed in Cardiff in 2002. Guest vocals have included Caryl Parry Jones, Heather Jones, Margaret Williams, Elin Fflur, and sisters Carys Eleri and Nia Medi. The music video features Carys Eleri and Tara Bethan as a couple getting married in Cardiff Bay.

[terastalungrad]

Also in the 80s, the Welsh language had a look at charity songs and thought it was worth having a crack at them as well.

It is just as fun to play "spot the obtrusively good singers" with this as with English charity Pop Avengers songs.

Also, if you are part of the mighty Pobol y Cwm fandom, why not try to spot a young Emyr "Dai Sgaffalde" Wyn singing in this?

Answer with a strikethrough: He's the one you see in the freeze frame before playing the video.

[terastalungrad]

Also, in the 80s, Caryl Parry Jones and Rhys Ifans were in a band together.

[terastalungrad]

The Welsh language also reckoned hypercheesy 80s Christmas pop was worth a go.

Caryl Parry Jones wrote this.  The song is very much not a well-remembered highlight of her career.

[terastalungrad]

Caryl Vs Eden

... we came in?

Last night, Caryl started - Caryl Parry Jones's latest show.  It's a very strange show.  The trailers for it feature lots of clips of the various comedy characters Jones plays in the show, with a final shot of Jones singing on a stage to remind us all that there's some music in this.

The show itself starts with a quick trailer-like montage of comedy clips, leading into the first song of the show.  The songs aren't comedy.  They're mostly performed by Jones and backing singers on a very impressive presumably-custom-built stage set.  Lovely.  There are three songs in the show.

The rest of the running time is spent cutting between sketches.  This is strange as well - Jones plays a relatively small number of characters (I count five off the top of my head), so they all get lots and lots of sketches.  They're great and I loved them all.  I checked the writers' credits at the end, to see how many writers there were on the show, and it BLEW MY MIND!

And then I stopped thinking about that, because I was thinking of something else instead.  And that all starts with the Spice Girls.

The Spice Girls were a big thing, you know.  Of course you know.  Check the Spice Girls tag.  I'm sure it's mad and glorious and colourful and huge.  I'm sure this post sticks out like a sore thumb.  They formed in 1994, but everyone noticed them in 1996.  Even the Welsh language noticed.

Welsh media had never really bothered with boy bands.  But GIRL bands!  That's a different thing entirely!  Especially if the Spice Girls is what they look like.

So work started to produce the Spice Girls on a budget.  We worked out what we felt were the most important bits - Scary Spice, Posh Spice and misc.  And so we end up with Non, Emma and Rachael.

At least, that seemed to be the idea when we got our first glimpse of Eden.  One Eisteddfod, at an unexpected moment (my childhood memory can't be clearer than that, but let's pretend it was during the big giving-a-poet-a-massive-chair ceremony), some mysterious music started.  Then some sexy man dancers appeared.  Then Eden turned up - Non in a tigerprint leotard, Emma in a classy crop top, Rachael in misc.  And the music resolved into a brilliantly 90s-pop version of Hen Ferchetan, a Welsh folk song.

Soon after that, they released their first single - Paid â Bod Ofn - and later their first album.  Ooh, Tumblr - I listened to that album over and over and over again.  I kept stealing my mam's CD player, because it had the option to put the album on repeat, starting it again from the beginning once it had finished playing.

Incidentally, why not put this very post on repeat?  Then you can read it over and over and over again.

S4C is famously hungry for stuff to fill their hours of broadcasting - so much so that they were willing to broadcast 8 minutes of TREASON!ous Lucozade ranting - and Eden ended up with their own TV show.  Despite their position as a faddy girl group for kids and teens to like, this TV show helped them gain a strange degree of respectability.

The second thing that helped was that they were mentored by Non's cousin, who also wrote lots of songs for the group.  Non's cousin is Caryl Parry Jones.  Oh, yes.  She gets everywhere.  It's not for nothing I'm clumsily discussing two completely different things I watched recently in the same post.

One song written by Jones, Wrth i'r Afon Gwrdd â'r Lli, was arguably the high point of Eden's career.  It's proper lovely, and they sang it for Radio Cymru's millennium concert the eve of the Fake Millennium of 2000.  I was there to watch it live, you know.  Caryl Parry Jones was there to sing her own songs too.  She gets everywhere.  She was billed significantly higher than Eden, obvs.

Anyway, that was the end of the relevance of Eden, and they moved on to join comedy actor Iwan John to form the regular cast of children's sitcom Hotel Eddie, a sort-of Fawlty Towers thing featuring a zombie butler.  That happened.

Then they went their separate ways.  Rachael became a children's TV presenter.  Emma became a grown-ups' TV presenter.  Non probably found something to do too.

Fast-forward to modern day, and ooh, look!  Take That done a reunion.  Welsh language cares not.  Ah, but!  Spice Girls done a reunion.  Welsh language cares about that.  And Steps done a reunion!  I love Steps, so let's just remember their reunion for a bit.  Ahhh.

As such, I wasn't at all surprised to see S4C dust off Eden for a reunion of their own - Noson yng Nghwmni Eden ("An Evening With Eden").

The show starts with promise of seeing the three women reunited, but then cuts to what we really want - some lovely singing.  Okay, it's not great.  They've not kept their voices, and most of the songs have dated badly.  But it's some lovely nostalgia, so go with it.

After the first song, we go to find Non, who's living ... in a caravan.  With a chicken and a duck.  Um, what?

Next, we see Emma, who's living in an enormous house, and is completely obsessed with food, spending a minute of airtime adjusting a cupcake, before explaining the concept of humous.

Finally, we find Rachael, who's still living in the past - her house is a shrine to Eden.  She performs old Eden dance routines as she walks, and likes to look through old publicity things and wearing the old 90s outfits.

Then a song.  Then we see them meeting for a breakfast, and it's pure sitcom.  Non stealing food as Emma struggles to eat a single baked bean and Rachael just celebrates having the old group back together.  To my inexperienced eyes, it looks like a parody of the Steps reunion - but presumably, it's really a parody of all the reunions.

Emma - the Posh Spice of the 90s - is the one who's incredibly successful and doesn't really need to waste her time on this vanity project.  Non - the Scary Spice - didn't really have an existence in public perception outside of Eden.  And Rachael - the misc - gets to play both, since she's living in the past, but also (as shown in one scene) the most recognisable face of all three, since Welsh language children's shows attract more viewers than the adult provision.

The reunion scenes remain entirely ridiculous, but the songs are all played straight.  But, hang on - I've described that format already, haven't I?  And ... wait, wait - that stage looks awfully familiar.

And that's what blew my mind when I read the writers' credits on Caryl.  Because one of the chief writers is Non Parry.

I've double-checked the trailers and publicity.  Noson yng Nghwmni Eden was marketed as a straightforward reunion show.  There isn't a hint anywhere that it isn't entirely serious.

But what's happened here is that the writers and ... yes, I've checked, the producers of Caryl made an Episode Zero to the show.  Because these two shows are the same show.

Isn't this where ...

[terastalungrad]

Caryl Parry Jones

Listen carefully, Tumblr.  You'll like Caryl Parry Jones a lot.

Caryl (we're first-naming her, because that's the Welsh speakers' way) is primarily a singer, but that word "primarily" is essential there.  Because she's also a radio presenter and TV presenter and an actor and a judge on the Welsh-language X-Factor all all those things.

So, you know.  She's a big deal.  What English-speaking Brits would call "TV royalty".  We call her the Welsh equivalent, which is "Caryl".

I'm about to take you on a journey to a particular route through her career.  Because Caryl Parry Jones is also a comedian.

How does that work, then?  Well, Jones (yes, I'm changing the rules now) had been presenting television since the late 70s, and in 1983, she was given her own show, which ran for five years.  The requirement was a programme about music, of course, but the decision was made to include comedy sketches as well.  This was immediately accepted as a perfectly normal decision by all who viewed.

I don't want to say this is a particularly Welsh thing, of course.  I'm sure if an English-language female pop musician had wanted to start doing comedy in the 80s, this would also have been accepted without the slightest suspicion.

Jones also performed character comedy on the TV show Dawn (Welsh for "talent"), creating several well-loved characters.  Such was the success of the comedy in this show that a TV movie was produced based on the characters.  In 1986, Ibiza Ibiza was broadcast - in which a large ensemble cast of characters played by a small cast of actors went to Ibiza on holiday.  It's the League of Gentlemen format, basically.  A sequel was produced three years later; Steddfod Steddfod, in which the same characters attend the massive Welsh language cultural festival, the National Eisteddfod.

While I've seen both those films by now, my very first experience of Caryl Parry Jones was playing the mother in the family sitcom Hapus Dyrfa.  I adored that show to bits.  A Christmas special repeat was broadcast this Christmas, and despite the wonderfully dated sets and credits, the performances are still really great.

Jones continued to portray comedy characters, particularly in the real-life National Eisteddfod, and S4C is already trailing a brand new series of sketch character comedy which might as well be called "Caryl Parry Jones Vehicle 2013".

So I hope you understand the state I'm in after receiving a message from her on Twitter calling me "flicking hilaaaaarious".

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

Calon - Cerys Matthews, Connie Fisher, Shân Cothi, Caryl Parry Jones, Catrin Finch & Only Men Allowed

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

Pan Ddaw Yfory - Bryn Terfel & Caryl Parry Jones

[welshmusic-cerddoriaethcymraeg]

Yn y Dechreuad (In the Beginning) - Caryl Parry Jones