Never ending tour of the Welsh Bob Dylan

Dafydd Iwan - never-ending tour

Dafydd Iwan’s Wales-wide fiftieth anniversary tour comes to Pembrokeshire next week. The troubadour, politician, businessman, language activist, architect, song-writer and lay-preacher will be giving one of his inimitable performances in Fishguard next Friday evening.

He started giving anniversary tours in the early 1980s with the band Ar Log (For Sale). These events have now become so frequent that one can say that like Bob Dylan, Dafydd Iwan is on a never ending tour. It has always seemed to me that he has a lot in common with Bob Dylan, though he insists it’s the American’s model of political protest rather than his music that has had most influence.

Dafydd Iwan first came to prominence in the 1960s as a student activist with  Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society), and especially its campaign for bilingual road signs. Peintio’r Byd yn Wyrdd (‘Painting the World Green’) was one of Dafydd’s most notable anthems of that era. He was ‘discovered’ by the television news programme Y Dydd (The Day) and given a weekly slot. As a result he became  “perhaps the first modern Welsh language singer to become a teenage idol”, to quote the sleeve of his first record in 1966.

He became chairman of Cymdeithas yr iaith between 1968 and 1971, one of the most dynamic periods in the Language Society’s history. This was due in part to its stand-off with George Thomas, the Labour Secretary of State for Wales who had adopted a stridently anti-language profile. In particular George Thomas ardently supported the Investiture of Prince Charles at Caernarfon Castle in 1969, which Cymdeithas yr Iaith opposed. Dafydd’s satirical anthem against the event was entitled ‘Carlo’.

Soon, however, he began a more conventional career on a number of fronts. He co-founded the record company Sain (Sound) which became a hugely successful business. Utilising his qualification as an architect he became involved with the Cymdeithas Tai Gwynedd housing association, dedicated to providing affordable homes for local people. And he switched from direct action campaigning to party politics. He stood as Plaid’s candidate in the two 1974 general elections in Anglesey, became an influential councillor in Plaid-controlled Gwynedd, and was eventually elected President of the party in 2003.

Dafydd was born and spent his early years in in Brynaman on the western edge of the southern coalfield. But when he was twelve his father, a nonconformist Minister, was called to be a pastor in the village of Llanuwchllyn near Bala. This upbringing gave Dafydd an instinctively national rather than local identity.  His was a family of nationalists in any event – grandfather Fred Jones, another Minister, was one of the founders of Plaid Cymru in 1925.

But what Dafydd’s 50^th anniversary tour underlines is that throughout his career he has never ceased composing, recording and singing. Undoubtedly this has been his greatest influence and achievement. As the writer Simon Brooks once said, Dafydd’s songs have changed the cultural universe in which the Welsh people live.