Cerys Matthews: 'Poetry's the new rock'n'roll'

‘Gafr wen, wen, wen…” It’s a grey January morning, but a ray of sunshine is beaming down the phone line: the voice of Cerys Matthews, calling from her home in west London. Husky and sweet, instantly recognisable, and capable of bringing a golden ­shimmer to anything – even the interminable Welsh folk song Cyfri’r Geifr, which she’s just launched into on a whim. “Many people hate it. It’s about goats.”

The sudden burst of song is a reminder of how rare a treat Matthews’s singing has become. The last album she sang on came out seven years ago, and her latest – We Come From the Sun – doesn’t feature her voice at all. Instead, it’s a set of soundscapes she has composed to accompany readings by 10 poets, whom she herded together for a pre-lockdown recording at Abbey Road last year.

“People used to record the leading writers and poets of the day” on major labels, she tells me, reminiscing about listening to Dylan Thomas in her childhood. This record – the first in a planned series – is her attempt to revive that tradition.

“For the young generation,” says Matthews, “poetry’s the new rock’n’roll.” It’s a claim that’s been made many times over the years, to the point of cliché – but a recent wave of releases seems to back it up. Pop stars Lana Del Rey, Imelda May and Patti Smith have all released spoken word albums, while Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, is in an indie band.

Matthews’s love of poetry won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever tuned into her BBC 6 Music show. She’s as likely to play crackly recordings of Tennyson or Plath as the kind of indie rock with which she made her name in the 1990s, as lead singer of Catatonia. Each time that she mentions “Dylan” – which, in our conversation, is every few minutes – it’s a toss-up whether she’s referring to Bob or Thomas.

For the Cardiff-born singer, being Welsh means being immersed in poetry “from the minute you’re born” – from recitals at eisteddfods to traditional counting rhymes (hence the goat song). Verse is a more central part of everyday life in Wales than it is in England, she tells me. “Our history of poetry is written not just by academics but by farmers and carpenters… the most famous people from Wales, who are they? They’re the singers and the poets.”

But the new album proves Wales has no monopoly on bards. It features the varied voices of Zambia-born Kayo Chingonyi, Pakistani-Scottish poet Imtiaz Dharker and Birmingham’s Liz Berry (who recites a poem written in Black Country dialect).

Has their work inspired Matthews to write any poetry of her own? “No! I write song lyrics.” What’s the difference? “I hold poets on high pedestals, I wouldn’t dare to look at myself like that.” It’s the kind of answer that makes Matthews likeable as a person and irritating as an interviewee: she’s self-effacing to a fault, hesitant about expressing an opinion on anyone else.

It is a decade since she released an original song; being “a full-time mother as well as a full-time worker” means she has little time for writing and recording. “I have always imagined that once the children have got to an adult age, I might take it up again when there’s hours of quiet – but right now I’m in that part of my life where it’s a lot of noise.” Her “blended” family from two marriages – to Nashville producer Seth Riddle, and punk singer Steve Abbott – includes five children aged from 11 to 28.

Parenthood is a theme threaded through the album. She quotes Berry’s poem about pregnancy, Connemara – “I was beautiful to the crows/ as a butcher’s window” – and tells me the “butcher’s window” image reminds her of the first time she gave birth. “The smell of the blood, the sweat and the slime on the baby was really visceral – nobody tells you about that aspect of it.”

On the album, that poem is set to an ultrasound recording of the then-unborn son of her musical collaborator, Joe Acheson (who makes music as Hidden Orchestra). “He and I have both collected sounds all our lives,” says Matthews. As well as an eclectic range of instruments – dulcimer, double bass, Slovakian flute, electronica – the album is full of “collected” sounds, including traffic in Paris and Cairo, and the cooing of pigeons.

Matthews takes an omnivorous approach to music – her radio shows have even featured the world’s first recording of the human voice, a wobbly 1860 rendition of Au clair de la lune. And she’s equally democratic when it comes to literature. “I’ve always been completely in love with the way you can put words together. It never bothered me whether that was in novel form or song form or hymns or nursery rhymes or slogans or manifestos or so-called poems.”

For Matthews, literature doesn’t even need words: “A walk through the forest can become a poem, in the sense that it moves you.”

We Come From the Sun is out on Decca