GIG 0020: Anhrefn at The Imperial, Colwyn Bay

 

So I arranged for Anhrefn to play The Imp in Colwyn Bay in February 1987. The Imperial Hotel was at the bottom of Station Road and hosted regular heavy rock band nights, such was the glut of those awful bands. I made posters and flyers using Letraset transfers and my newly acquired second hand typewriter and with a bucket and brush, pasted them all over Colwyn Bay, Llandudno and Rhyl.

Anhrefn’s Welsh punk rock ignited the need within me to learn Welsh and break free from the mental abuse I endured in that oppressive village school of my childhood. The Anhrefn way was to promote Welsh culture by opening the doors to outsiders; to open up the closed mentality in Wales. It wasn’t the Wales For The Welsh and Fuck The English kind of jingoistic nazism we see all over Twitter today, it was about changing people’s attitudes toward the Welsh language. To stop non-Welsh speakers feeling like outsiders, to change the way people think. Welsh people were forever being called sheep shaggers, and rather than get all snowflakey and upset about it, Anhrefn would say;

‘Yes, we may shag sheep, but you eat them!’

This self-deprecating humour and punk ideal was catalyst in opening the psychological borders within the Welsh and English mentality and helped spawn Cool Cymru. We are all human! The fact you were born in Welsh Saltney or just over the border in English Chester doesn’t make you a different person; you are still human! Yes, it’s great to have a culture, a history, a cause, but is it really necessary to hate someone simply because they weren’t born in the same country as you?

The fretting, the panic, the worrying (a gig on a Sunday night!), the chewed fingernails, the financing; it all paid off. It was a good gig (I still have a recording on cassette), a good turnout and Anhrefn played well and they got paid £50. They brought a contingent of punks from Bangor, with whom I am still friends with today. And at the tender age of twenty I began to get a feel for local bands, and the need to create a local music scene.

Bands and local gigs were few and far between, there were rumours of ‘legendary’ punk or goth bands like The Dark, Foreign Legion, The Scargills, Sleepless Dream, Open Defiance but I had never seen or heard them. I caught a band called That Voodoo (from Llandudno) a couple of times who were a little like New Order meets the Wedding Present.

Also the ridiculously named Heroes On A Beach from Colwyn Bay who were nice guys but played fucking awful music, we dubbed them Hemoglobins In The Sand or Herpes On A Bitch. Aside from these, there was the poodle hair spandex pants high pitched screaming heavy metal brigade, whom we avoided at all costs.