by Patrick Ellis
On the weekend of 12th and 13th September 1998 in Castle Square in the centre of Swansea over 30 young, and not so young, bands combined to put on the first free Tune Town festival in the city. The main condition of performance was that the bands had to play predominantly original or Celtic material and they had to do it for nothing.
However polished
and spontaneous this event appeared it was in fact the result of
several
months of hard work by Swansea Song Writers Guild who themselves had
only
come into being the previous April. The SSWG, like many good ideas and
one or two people, was born on a kitchen table in Swansea. A handful of
musicians were chatting late one night, as musicians are wont to do,
about
the lack of gigs and especially about the lack of venues which
supported
original material. They came to the conclusion that the only way to get
an improvement in the local scene was to do something about it
themselves.
Their basic premise is that there are a lot of excellent players and songwriters in Swansea who weren’t getting anything like the exposure that they either needed or deserved. They felt that the best way to address this problem and to show the city what they could do was to put on a “one off”, completely voluntary festival. And that is exactly what they did..............
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© Patrick Ellis