The A5 was/is the road that leads from Holyhead to London, it was much vaunted by long distance truck drivers, who would bore you of their trials and tribulations of life on the road (I endured a lot of this while hitch hiking the country and beyond). I guess when all you see is hundreds of miles of tarmac hour after hour there's little else to talk about. So when the brand, spanking all singing all dancing A55 opened across Anglesey in 2001, the once eminent A5 in that part of the world was relegated to local traffic and learner drivers. No longer did you have to go through dreary villages and over cattle grids, opening and shutting gates and swearing at nonchalant farmers in order to get to Holyhead, now you could ton-up across Ynys Mon with the cops in tow.
A5 was an Anglesey based project, featuring DJ and producer Johnny R, of the label R-Bennig. A5 were a Welsh language hip-hop and dance loose collective/catch-all project which were created/produced from 1988 to 1992. Musical collages featuring a snapshot of youth culture recorded for the main in little studios around North Wales and beyond and in Johnny “R”s own back-room “Heath Robinson” set up Gwalchmai. It was tape decks, analogue keyboards, samplers from Argos and record decks mastered on 4 track cassette decks.
R-Bennig and A5’s first release (and arguably their best), first featured on Musique Plastique & Henry Jones’ groundbreaking ‘Mapio’r Dyfodol’ mix spanning the idiosyncratic sounds of Cymru. Aptly named, the track speaks of the ‘Hiraeth’ that only Welsh people can truly understand, a word not best suited for translation.
Johnny R pronounced himself dead a few years ago. You never know, as he's the ultimate wind-up merchant. If it's true, well that's a shame. If it's not, well, some would say that too is a shame.
