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“I think there are a lot of us who know the true value of things, we just need to shout loud and make sure children know it, too”Music, gardening, cooking and community may seem like the simple things in life but for singer and broadcaster Cerys Matthews, they’re the most important – and, she tells Natasha Goodfellow, the driving force behind her festival

t a pavement café in Notting Hill, just around the corner from singer, songwriter, author and broadcaster Cerys Matthews’ home, it’s clear she means it when she says that being part of a community is one of the most important things to her. There’s a

warm hug for the café manager; a smile and a nod for a tall Jamaican man she recognises, and a full-on chat with a passing cyclist – a women’s health doctor who she met recently at the local pub and who turns out to be an expert on yodelling. Seriously.

“As soon as I heard about the yodelling, I wanted to know more,” she laughs. It’s this curiosity about music in all its forms, which has made Cerys – once best known as the lead singer of ’90s Welsh rock band Catatonia – one of the most respected music broadcasters around today. Her Sunday show on BBC 6 Music is the most listened-to digital radio programme in Britain; she has a monthly show on the BBC World Service, is cultural reporter for The One Show and has curated events for theatres, Tate Modern and World Music Expo 2013.

Growing up in south Wales, music was a large part of Cerys’s life. “We sung all the time at school so I learnt to enjoy harmony singing when I was very young.” Chapel twice a day on a Sunday introduced her to the moving power of hymns and choirs. “I still love the sound of a male voice choir,” she says, but it was when she was given a recorder that everything clicked. “That was it for me. There was absolutely no way anything else was as exciting. I loved having instruments you could make noises and create melodies on.”

A Though Cerys disagrees with the notion that some families are more musical than others (“it’s just that perhaps some have the urge to become more obsessed with music than others – or maybe just to make more noise”), it certainly seems as if music was a constant in her childhood home. As she humorously recounts in her best-selling sing-along book, Hook, Line and Singer, when a large sow jumped out of an open trailer in front of the family’s Vauxhall Viva, instead of getting out to help catch it, her mother immediately burst into a song about a dead pig. (Apparently these tendencies are being passed on through the Matthews’ genes: “my six-year-old son served breakfast with operatic delivery this morning,” she says, sitting up and ‘Laaa-ing’ rousingly. “We’re probably the most annoying family to have next door.”)

MOVED BY MUSICThe pig incident is one of Cerys’s earliest memories and it is perhaps this power of songs to transport and connect you to life in all its colour and variety – “the mother, the orphan, the downtrodden, the maimed,” as she puts it, rather than the “ruling classes, the religious and the male” of most history books – that she values the most. In her book, she writes of songs that carry her back to the “woods behind our house in Swansea… full of rubbish and discarded top-shelf magazines” [Under the Bramble Bushes], to the “idyllic, quiet, black night” driving in the tour bus from city to city on Catatonia’s Scandinavian tour in 1998 [Wonderful Copenhagen] or to her “hut in the hills of Tennessee” [Will the Circle be Unbroken?],

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On stage in her trademark hat: “I don’t do my hair – hence the

hats,” says Cerys

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where she lived during the early 2000s.“Most music that has been made over the last

millennium has been made just for fun, or to comfort, or because it’s good to feel the physicality of singing,” she says. “It can be deeply spiritual or deeply hilarious – and the whole range in between.”

Recently though, she has noticed a change in attitudes to music. “There’s an idea that it is only there to be part of somebody’s business plan, something to make you famous or to make money from.” Festivals, too, of which Cerys has been to “about a million” have gone from a place to hear and discover great music, to something increasingly corporate, not to mention expensive. Equally, she realised that the world placed little value on the things she truly held dear – simple things such as home cooking and gardening. “Because they’re not putting money in anyone’s pockets, we’re not reminded – kids are not reminded – about this wonderful place we live in.”

Cerys’s determination to fight these attitudes lies behind her most recent venture, The Good Life Experience festival, which was held for the first time in 2014 at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire. “All of the best, most fun things I can remember doing as a child were about going wild in the country – being naughty and lighting fires, climbing mountains, skimming

stones, building straw bale stacks – all those things most children in cities and suburban areas don’t have access to today.” The aim is to encourage all of us, especially children (Cerys has three of her own), to get away from our screens, use our hands and be physical with the world around us again.

EXPERIENCING THE GOOD LIFEWorking with her husband and manager Steve Abbott and old friends Charlie and Caroline Gladstone (farmers and founders of homewares brand, Pedlars), Cerys has achieved exactly that in a small (“no hordes of drug-addled nutters”), carefully curated festival that welcomes everyone, offering a break from our consumer-driven society and a chance to engage with the simpler things in life. “It’s held at the end of summer and there’s a blue mist that starts to settle in the evening as smoke drifts over cornfields full of kids, filthy with dust and straw, firing bows and arrows,” says Cerys. “I remember last year sitting round the fire with a bunch of friends, rolling our own cigars – one of the activities on offer – watching the kids play and listening to the best Cuban music. It was perfect.”

This year, the festival’s third, there are talks from adventurer Ben Fogle and multi-award-winning author Michael Morpurgo; chefs including Thomasina

Miers and Bill Granger will cook up campfire feasts, and activities range from axe-throwing and archery to abseiling and spoon whittling. All this plus endless free rides on the vintage fairground will provide plenty of fuel for the soul. The music is typically eclectic, ranging from an exclusive performance of Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed by Mari Samuelsen and London’s un-conducted string orchestra, the 12 Ensemble, to fiddler extraordinaire Gordie ‘Crazy Legs’ MacKeeman and Balkan brass gipsy band Fanfare Ciocărlia, which Cerys describes simply as

“If you have a conviction about something, you’ve got to move while it’s still hot in your belly. There’s no failing in trying”

Top: Cerys in her Catatonia heyday.Right: from cocktails and campfires to bushcraft and bands – with a little tug-o-war thrown in... Cerys’s The Good Life Experience festival is the last word in simple pleasures and good, clean fun. Far right: You can sing-along with Cerys, with her catchy family songbook

1969 Born in Cardiff, Wales1991 Forms rock band Catatonia in which Cerys

sang lead vocals, co-wrote the music and lyrics and played guitar on early songs

1998 International Velvet, their second album, reaches No.1 in the UK Album Chart and later goes triple platinum – it has sold more than three million to date

2000 Cerys leaves the band and goes on a prolonged road trip around the southern states of America

2001 Is invited to sing for Bill Clinton when he visits the Hay Festival

2003 Has her first child Glenys 2007 Moves back to the UK with her two children;

begins presenting and writing TV and radio documentaries

2008 Starts presenting and programming radio shows on BBC 6 Music

2013 Publishes Hook, Line and Singer, her first book. Wins Sony radio academy award for her BBC 6 Music radio show and is appointed artistic director of Womex festival

2014 Launches The Good Life Experience Festival 2014 Wins a St David Award for contribution to

culture and made an MBE for services to music

A GOOD LIFEThe Cerys Matthews CV

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“the best live band in the world”. “People are starting to understand that, as with my radio show, you don’t need to know the names of the bands, you just need to know that they’re going to be damn good, the best we can find. Then it’s a case of keeping your ears open and judging according to your own tastes.”

This need to keep curious, to keep questioning, to “not be a mug”, as Cerys puts it, is a recurring theme, and something she tries to instil in her children. “We’re born consumers these days. Advertisers get at us every waking hour via all our gadgets and we can buy things whether we’ve got cash in our pockets or not. One of the greatest pleasures in life for me is walking to the local shop and the shop owner being pleased to see you. I think there are a lot of us who know the true value of things, we just need to shout loud and make sure children know it, too. Whether the

next generation wants to listen is another thing entirely. But go down screaming is what I say!”

So how does she fit it all in – the festival, the radio shows, the presenting, the songwriting, motherhood? “That’s my one big problem,” she says. “Time runs away. People with young children will know that as they get older, they need their mum even more. The children [Glenys, Johnny and Red] are at school in the day so that allows me some time but if you’re doing your job right and you’re being a mother right, it’s not a slick machine.” What does give are the areas that aren’t important to Cerys. “I don’t go to nail parlours, I don’t do my hair (hence the hats), I don’t really buy clothes,” she says. “If I find something I like, I buy duplicates.”

Crucially, she doesn’t waste time worrying about whether a new venture will be a success or not. “I think if you have a conviction about something, you’ve got to move while it’s still hot in your belly,” she says. “There’s no failing in trying. I feel that more now than ever as I know the clock is ticking. You see your parents starting to become frail and you gain a new respect for time and health. Life’s too short to worry about failing.”

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The Good Life Experience Festival runs from 16-18 September at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire. For more information and tickets visit thegoodlifeexperience.co.uk Readers of The Simple Things will get 10 per cent off festival tickets until the end of July – quote TGLESIMPLE to claim your discount.