The Netmums Podcast - S8 Ep10: Under Milk Wood with Cerys Matthews

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Cerys Matthews reads Wendy and Jen her new bedtime story, and talks about those precious raw moments just before your kids falls asleep.  Cerys Matthews’ Under Milk Wood: An Illustrated Retelling by Dylan Thomas and Cerys Matthews, Kate Evans published by W&N 3rd November 2022 available in Hardback, eBook and audio £20.00 

You're listening to the Netmums podcast with me, Wendy Gollich. And me, Jennifer Howes. On this week's show... Oh, it's gorgeous. Listen to the text. Cobbler Jack Black grinds his night teeth, climbs into his religious trousers, their flies sewn up with cobbler's thread, and pads out, torched and bibled,

grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk. But before all of that... Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to a lovely new episode. Now, I've got to say, it's cold. I feel like winter's coming. There's some sort of economic meltdown going on. There's the threat of nuclear war. I'm feeling a bit blue. Jen, tell me about your week. Tell me you've had a better week than me. Yeah, I've had a good week. I've had family over from America. And so that's been good.

And still adjusting to life with my daughter away at uni and trying to avoid breaking out the jumpers as long as possible so I can kind of acclimate. So when it actually gets really cold, I'm not shivering in my home that I can't afford to heat. Well, this week's guest is taking me right back to my misspent youth because I went to university in Cardiff. And while in Cardiff, this particular lady was doing lots of magical things with music and I will never hear her name mentioned without hearing my lovely friend Claire Guns singing one of her most famous songs at the top of her voice terribly, might I add, sorry Claire, while we all got ready for a fancy dress party. So, ladies and gentlemen, may I welcome Keris Matthews to the pod.

Oh, gosh, listen, thank you so much. I'm going to have to make you sing a line of Road Rage later for Claire because she'll never forgive me if I don't. I don't know if you'd want that. It's been a while. Trust me, you'll be better at it than she was that's all you need then over to you give us an intro about this lovely lady yes so caris matthews caris of course amazing musician author broadcaster the more you dig into her work and everything she's done the

more amazing it is she hosts an award-winning radio show on BBC Six, a blues show on BBC Radio 2, and co-hosts the new Radio 4 show that explores connections between pop, rock, hip-hop, jazz, and more. She's founded a music festival, was part of the multi-million selling group Catatonia, that has highly influenced Wendy, has been awarded an MBE for her services to the arts. She also sings my personal favorite Christmas song with Tom Jones, Baby It's Cold Outside. I love that too. And she has a wonderful new adaptation of Under Milkwood. This retelling is Dylan Thomas's beloved classic written by one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century Dylan Thomas if anyone knows anything about Welsh poetry you know about Dylan and it's a features an omnipresent narrator listening to the dreams and thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small village which name I can't pronounce, but it's Buggerall backwards. So

tell me how to pronounce it, Keris. You pronounce it Sharagib. Yeah, never would have got that. So Keris, mum of three, tell me how old your brood are. Well, actually I'm a mum of five, if you count a blended family. We always count blended family. family yes family's family right so my youngest is now 12 so no more scrapping on all fours finding food everywhere which is good and then I have a 17 year old which is brilliant actually I love it I have a 19-year-old, fiercely independent, who's just moved out and moved in with her boyfriend, which is interesting and brilliant as well. They've been together for three years, so she's amazing. But you just don't, you know, when you become a mum, you don't factor all these different kind of chapters. So I'm at that chapter now whereby they're getting ready to jump out of the nest or have jumped out of the nest.

And it's really interesting and it's wonderful at the same time. So anyway, so 19 year old and then my lovely blended family members. My children are who are already cut kind of thing. They don't mind me saying that. 25 and 30. So pretty much adults were definitely adults and lovely too. So how are you coping with the nest jumping? I was really keen during COVID for nest jumping to happen, I must admit. It was so loud and so intense.

And having us live in central London, like we did, it was a small space for what has become pretty much, apart from one child, all adults. Adult-sized, adult needs. Adult appetites, I'm sure. Even their feet. Even their feet. I found my daughter.

Adult shoes. Their shoes and feet are everywhere. All of a sudden it goes from being sort of children and adults to just like, boom, we are a house full. We've got an audience. We've got a football team, adult size, you know, with all of that needs and chaos and everything. So it was hard. And then Glenn moved and she's happy happy and i'm happy if she's happy um but it was really interesting because when it happened i wasn't quite prepared for it because

it's like well what happens now when you're coming back like what when you're coming back like do you know me and it's like oh oh that's what happens so they become adults and then they go and that's it and you're done well it really, really, I found it quite interesting and not something that I'd kind of prepared psychologically beforehand, if I'm being quite honest with you. I find myself, I have to kind of just sit with the rollercoaster of feelings with my daughter being gone from being jubilant to being very down about it. What are your coping mechanisms? What I find really interesting about this sort of privilege of hopefully, you know, relative chunk of time on the planet is that it does come in little chapters. I'm really looking forward to

the idea of sort of looking to a chunk of time where most of my time isn't this frantic jungle between work housekeeping and children I'm really happy that that's kind of looking like it's ebbing away now like my boys help me shopping they're all starting to be aware of the more we all help in the house the less frantic it is and you know that's an amazing moment honestly I'm loving it I'm nowhere near that moment I have to kind of bribe my children with pocket money to just put their plates by the dishwasher but they're much littler they're kind of seven so yeah all right sois, going back to the poem, it's been called a bedtime story for people of all ages.

How on earth did you get involved in doing an illustrated adaptation of a Dylan Thomas poem? Well, just to be completely correct, and I hate this, but it's not a poem. It was erroneously labelled as a poem elsewhere. So it's not your fault. It's one of those things where the untruths get out and then you can't put them back in the box. It's a play for voices. And it was one of the last pieces of work that he was working on before he died at the age of 39 in 1953.

However, he's been Dylan Thomas now, the poet and writer and broadcaster. He began this as a teenager when he was still in school. This is what I love about his work. He's absolutely fascinated by humans, the human condition, about us, warts and all. Some of my favorite TV programs, Sopranos, Spiral or Engrenage, 10%, you know, the 10% coma agent. They show us human beings that are not all what, nobody's all good or all bad. We're all really complex mix. Sometimes we're good, sometimes we're bad, sometimes we're a mix.

This is what Dylan Thomas' work. He's all about this complex nature of man. He's all about the innocence of youth, that sense of wonder that we must keep reminding ourselves to keep in this really tough world, especially at the moment with, you know, everything that you were listening at the beginning of our chat. He just wants to remind us to keep that sense of wonder somehow alive even as we go through the chapters of life and he's also very aware of our mortality so even though he was writing some of his biggest poems when he was just a teenager and and then went on to write some of the you know do not go gentle you know is a very famous poem by him about you you know, mortality and going and dying, essentially.

Even though he's a very, he brings us to the fore, he just wants to grab life by the horns. And so that's why I adore the theory behind, the philosophy behind his writing, but also then you come to his text, which is for the sound of text. And listen, Bedtime Stories is all about the sound of text and listen bedtime stories is all about the sound of text and the rhymes good night moon um gruffalo wonky donkey these three are my favorites they absolutely embrace rhyme and sounds and nonsense and beauty all of these things you find in this play which was a play

which is now a 17 minute bedtime story I mean it's such a long-winded answer sorry I a I love his work be when when I I was a mother to little children and I loved those moments when you tuck them in and just before they go to sleep those moments to me were the absolute pressure you can feel your shoulders drop a bit you know you're putting them to bed in a minute you're going to have peace but in those minutes before they fall asleep are some of the most precious raw influential inspiring sponge like moments you can have with your offspring or with other people's children or with children in general. You know, they are wide open to any story. You can go anywhere with them.

And by going with them, you go yourself as well. Can I read you a bit from Under Milkwood? We were just about to ask you that. Yeah, we've had a look at it. It's amazing. So this is a farmer. The farmer, what Dylan Thomas does is make the farmer, who is a human, who's meant to be intelligent, really angry.

And it's the cows that have got the intelligence. And they're gentle and kiss him, even when he's bawling at them and hitting them and being absolutely horrendous. I don't include in that in the books. This is for babies. And I don't want to burst too many bubbles too early. But anyway, everyone who knows Under Milkwood

will know that this farmer, Watkins, is a bit angry. And then it goes, Farmer Watkins in Salt Lake Farm Bores to a cow on the hill She kisses him And moves gentle words As he raves and dances Among his herd,

walking delicately to the farm. And what's lovely is that Dylan Thomas names them Peg, Meg, Buttercup, Mull, Fan from the Castle, Theodosia, Daisy. What a lovely name for a girl, Theodosia, CO for short, isn't it? Anyway, this is what happens when dusk happens. It turns into a kind of a snow globe. So Dylan describes, these are pairings. So it's like scraps of buttons, bottle tops, fish bones, feathers, nail pairings, and dandruff and whale juice. So this is what happens when dusk happens. Now the town is dusk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk and dusk and

ceremonial dust and night's first darkening of snow and the sleep of birds drift under and through this place of love. Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, there she is here, at the first drop of the dusk shower, seals all her doors and draws the blinds. Mr. Ogmore and Mr. Pritchard, that's ghosts, they're ghosts, reluctantly sigh and sidle into her clean house. You first, Mr. Ogmore. After you, Mr. Pritchard. Husbands, soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your tasks in order. We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas. And then you must take them off. Basically, the story begins at night nighttime. We go to their dreams. Then they wake up.

Then it's morning. Then it's afternoon. Then it's dusk. I think you just should keep going. I'm having far too nice a time. Please don't stop. Oh, it's gorgeous. Listen to the text.

Cobbler Jack Black grinds his night teeth, climbs into his religious trousers. Their flies sewn up with cobbler's thread and pads out torched and bribled grimly joyfully into the already sinning dusk and he's off into the woods we don't know what he's up to and then there's the pub scenes because as people that are fans already will know, the thing with Under Milk Wood is that it's full of characters. So you've got the drunkard, the womanizer. You've got the hard worker, the clean freak.

That was Mrs. Ogmer Pritchard. She's the clean freak. You've got the dreamers. You've got the beautiful. You've got the bigamy, the family with two wives. You know, it's all in there. People all over the world should be able to recognise. And that's one of my favourite scenes.

So Organ Morgan, who's kind of loosely modelled on Bob Dylan. Like eagle-eyed people will know that there's a lot of Dylan Thomas fans in the world. And I've kind of nicked a few cast members. So Bob Dylan is organ Morgan right there. And he just plays the organ, organ Morgan all the time. Organ, organ. Anyway, he imagines he sees Sebastian Bach in the graveyard. I'll listen.

I'll do one more line and then I'll put it down. Organ Morgan, or organ Morgan, goes to chapel to play the organ. He plays alone at night to anyone who will listen. Lovers, revelers, sheep. He sees Bach lying on a tombstone. Johann Sebastian. Who? That's Cherry Owen.

Johann Sebastian, mighty Bach, oh Bach, Bach. To hell with you, says Cherry Owen. Johann Sebastian, mighty Bach, oh Bach, Bach. To hell with you, says Cherry Owen. There he is. Who is resting on his way home. We say resting. He's actually, he's had a few, bit of whiskey there, see? He's got the bottle in his hand. Cherry Owen is the one who has a little bit of an issue with alcohol in the book.

Yes. You'll find him in the pub. Then there's pub scene. And then I will put it down, I promise. It's my favourite line. Sinbad, here, who's the barman, he's got a fox tail. So all of the detail in here comes from the text that we had to lose because it had to go down to a bedtime story.

He says, I'm Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday, as he is every day of the week. the text that we had to lose because it had to go down to a bedtime story he says and cherry owen sober as sunday as he is every day of the week goes off happy as saturday to get drunk as a deacon as he does every night evening cherry evening sinbad what do you have too much i mean it's not all alcohol let me just say to prospective parents, there's goodness in there. It's actually a story of love and hope, essentially. It's quite biblical in that it's got all the elements of good and bad in it, but you end up in a peaceful area full of love. I have to say the illustrations, I mean, of course, the words,

and hearing you say them, they're so mellifluous and beautiful illustrations too. It has, because they're so, they're so detailed, you can see reading this story over and over and each time discovering something new, both in the text itself, but in the pictures as you kind of look more look more closely yeah I'm glad you brought up the illustrations they were made by a Bristol-based artist called Kate Evans whose own grandfather has a little history with Dylan Thomas although she's not strictly speaking Welsh her grandfather was and we we worked on this absolutely night and day you can get lost in this and I'm glad you picked up on all the detail um because Kate was brilliant to work

with nothing was ever too much and we just tried we didn't want to lose any of the magic of the text that we had to lose so she just pulled it out the bag. There's tiny little mice with gloves on, things that you can find, little bats. All the things that appear in the text are there somewhere as much as we could do. And I honestly, I've never enjoyed working as a team more than working with Kate on this because she was just so patient and willing and just said, send me more details, send me more details said send me more details send me more details send me more detail and the way she works I wanted it to be like a timeless thing that all generations could enjoy and keep forever and so she works in old-fashioned ways uh art wise um and she often works on maps so you can see the attention to detail and the sort of textures that she uses are quite old-fashioned so I think they suited Undermilk Wood really well and this idea of a timeless

piece of magic. Obviously Wales, Welshness, the language is so important to you. Do your children speak Welsh? You know my heritage is Welsh. I'm as interested in your heritage or French heritage or Ghanaian heritage as I am. It just so happens that mine is Welsh. So I know more about it than I would Ghana. Just, just, I just, I think the more you know about your heritage, the more you can appreciate other people's heritages and the world's, you know, ever, ever, you know, it gives up all of these wonderful riches of cultural riches wherever you go on traveling you know something I've always loved to do I speak

Spanish I speak French um I try and speak English sometimes um but yes in short my children do speak Welsh although they were brought up in the heart of London. So they have an English sounding speaking voice and then they can speak Welsh with a lot of English words in it, which is what I do as well anyway. But I hope that I brought them up feeling connected somehow because, again, that connection is part of understanding and your belonging on the planet. But I just wanted to

say that I I I don't know if you if you listen to six music show I I've collected music from all over the world all my life so it's not just including Welsh music and and stuff um but I was always quite hungry to find out about other cultures as well as my own. I want to talk about music, Keris. I've already said your music played an integral part in university life in Wales 20-something years ago. What do you listen to as a family? How is music a part of your life as a family at home in the car this is quite complex because it changes as they get older and things shift didn't really I mean it's quite funny because I have a sister I'm on a four and my sister loves Disney so she went full-on with all the Disney

musicals and like to me that is torture so you know the thing is the beauty of music is that really is up to you and and whatever I'm highly opinionated about it as as you might might imagine because it's my it's my passion and it's my work pretty much if you listen to my show on a six music you'll know what I'll be playing in the car like I'm yeah I'm a terror in terms of I'm intolerant to anything that gets highly repetitive lax groove is not original it's played badly or it's just noisy so off it goes my children are used to that so but anyway what we do now is they've got obviously they've got their smart phones and stuff and then what I love the most is like for example my 17 year old will start DJing in

the car so I'm like sitting there going like this uh to Kanye West or to Tyler the creator keeping hip for the kids you know it's it's um it's a bonding moment isn't it can be when you when you you know have what we used to call the my pod wars my daughter's got a playlist called her banging house playlist she is 11 and she's got a banging house plate nice and you just have to like we have these little rows no I don't like this one no I do and then someone in the back turn it off it's brilliant but that's the beauty of modern life as well and it's complex but it's beautiful in the way that you can access all this music from all over the world. And that's the beauty of this emerging generation as well, that they do.

So they're listening to Korean K-pop or the Coffin song, which I'm told is really super old now. So in all the memes that are going around with various music on it. So there's a dance at the moment, which is, what were they? It was a dance with a girl that was putting lipstick on when an earthquake was happening.

I don't know if you've come across that one yet. I've been spared that one. It's something pink that mine, someone, a K-pop band, someone pink that is constantly played in my house. For all of the parents listening, K-pop is coming your way. If you've not got there yet, it's coming. Probably everyone will know the gang gang style yeah riding a horse isn't it something yeah anyway it's varied in short it's varied

and it's fun music is such a joy isn't it so you talked about some of the themes of under milkwood you had this universal themes the complexity of people, which I really love and so important to teach children about that. The importance of family and community is also kind of a theme running throughout. Do you talk to your children or have you talked to your children or did you when they were younger about those values? Or is that just something that you kind of try to impart? I think with most things it's by default that they pick up and an awful lot of followed behavior and what you value they will start to value because you show value to them

or respect to them. I've always thought that life would be nothing if you had no community to belong to. So it was always something that I tried to do, was to keep my children in local schools, to stay in one place as much as we could. But especially as a parent, because that community is what saves your skin. The amount of times my community have picked up my kids

or taken my kids or whatever they do. So that you don't feel alone. Yeah. And that is something that I guess the majority of us want to not feel alone, whatever age we are, whether we're a child, you know, a mother or, you know, a single widow. You know, we all want to feel like we belong and that our presence on on earth is would be messed maybe you know that you can call on somebody so yeah so it's I hold community and cultural stuff like books and art and films and music as as as the most important things that that's to my taste.

That's a philosophy. That's what's important rather than, you know, worrying about what car you're driving or, you know, what jewellery you can wear. I don't really find much value in that kind of thing. I can't let you go without talking to you about a little bit more about Baby It's Cold Outside. I absolutely love your rendition.

And of course it's with your fellow Walesian, Tom Jones. Welshie, fellow Welshie. Fellow Welshie, yeah. I mean, was that as fun to record as it looks? Well, first of all, I mean, the whole setup was just remarkable because they gave me a choice of songs and we went with that one because it's such a great song Frank Lursa wrote it for his wife it was their party piece at parties it was never meant to be released to the public

she was apparently really angry with Frank the writer of the song for letting it out and so this whole thing that's happened about the poison in the drink and it's been the me too movement stuff is take it into the context of the the age of it and also who wrote it for whom there's a lot of love in it and anyway the poison thing probably our fault because in our video that we did with tom jones that's what he does in the video but that's taken it's not the song's fault i don't think it's if you think about it from the age there were these two couples that obviously i mean these two people that obviously fancied each other that just wanted any excuse to spend more time in a social construct that wasn't going to allow them the freedom to spend more time together that's that's all that's a brilliant brilliant song to sing so Tom said let's do this

song I said yes please we went to the studio in June um it was Tommy Danvers who's a great friend of mine he got the studio all Christmassy uh lava lamps and fairy lights and Christmas trees even in June and it was a full orchestra as well which is really highly unusual in modern recording terms so we had the drummer there and all the strings and the brass. It was buzzing. We went into the vocal booth. Now, usually you have one vocal booth each, one singer there, one singer there, and you usually do it separately. Now you do it remotely.

One can be in Texas and the other one can be in London nowadays. But Tommy deliberately wanted a vibe. So we were all in the studio. Not only did he want a vibe, he put me in the same booth as Tom. I'm like, how the hell is this going to work? Tom's voice is like a train coming. And my voice is a lot kind of, I mean, I can get there,

but it's naturally quite small. How's that going to work? Do it. Okay, I trust you. Into the booth I go. You know, Yanta Thomas on drums. drummer beautiful sound old-fashioned like a big band sound it is an absolute romp from the minute it starts I the the take that we cut was the first take we did um and it was the take where in the middle of it you hear me go oh like that because Tom had actually given me a huge elbow in my in my waist.

And I jumped. And you can hear that. What was the elbow for? What had you done? Just playing around, you know, he's hilarious. And we're in this house together, which is kind of unusual, you know, side by side. But the song sounds like that, that that's what's marvelous it sounds like you're all having the best time oh we were it's a great song tom's great the musicians are great it was a great time yeah i i love that i'm so glad you like it how does it feel to be part like i said earlier you were part of my uni days Jen said that's one of her

favorite songs what does that mean to you to be part of the fabric of people's existence I think it's quite impossible to live your life thinking that that is the case you know I mean it's quite metaphysical is that the right way of looking at it so it doesn't you can't really compute it I don't I mean you can't I think you'd be a strange person indeed if you were going around going oh one one day back in 1999 somebody danced to that song or something I don't know I I I don't know I I'm so flattered and I feel so lovely being reminded for the moment about it. But I think with all musicians, I don't want to talk for everybody, but you're only as good as your last gig. You're such a bunch of insecure people pleasers, as many of us are anyway, not everybody that that you just you just it's you're almost you have to move on you have to move forward you know what I mean you can't just

can't sit on your um on your past stuff at all so you may not walk around every day Karis thinking I'm amazing but we do so that's okay no well that's so nice of you to send it over no I think that would be impossible i think it'd be a bit of a sociopath if you did go through life a bit like that wouldn't you i think you'd be a bit odd maybe maybe not you know i don't know maybe i don't know mariah or you know big legends can do that like you know proper legends but But I like a normal life on the whole, and I don't think thinking about yourself too much is very healthy for a normal life. What do the kids think of it?

Do they kind of play old Catatonia songs at you, or do they just not care? Yeah, a mixture of everything. There's a moment when they turn about six or seven when they start going, that's Carys Matthews. And you're like, what? What are you doing? Because I think that's the first time

that they go to school and somebody says something and then they pick up on it. And then that's over quickly. And that's happened to the three little ones. But now, then they reach teenagers and they couldn't think of anything more excruciatingly embarrassing as as as you know a mother that used to do music you know it's all all hat to them and it's like oh yeah whatever mum no which is fine i've got the best taste in music. That's fine. As long as they can see to that, it's fine.

And on that note, Karis, thank you so much for being so wonderful and for reading us a bedtime story. I could have filled a whole pod with you just reading, in truth. And I have to remind everyone, Karis Matthews Under Milkwood, an illustrated retelling by Dylan Thomas and Karis Matthews, illustrated by Kate Evans, is published by WNN on the 3rd of November 2022. It's available in

hardback, ebook and audio for £20. And it is beautiful. So do check it out. Thank you very much for joining us. Honestly, I've had such a lovely time thank you