- PhD Thesis proposal - The Welsh Music Industry (09.1998)
- Music on the Internet - The Internet as a new distribution medium for the music industry (09.1998)
- MA Thesis proposal (05.1998)
- The Welsh Pop Music resource Pages (1998)
- Sgrechian EP (1997)
- Tutorial - Music on the Internet (1999)
- In what ways has the use of pop music in films helped integrate the otherwise separate artforms of film and music video? (1996)
The research degree would attemp to analyse the complex network that comprises the Welsh-language popular music industry, the organisations and institutions that work within the industry, how they interact with each other and how each works towards the goal of achieving the continuation of the Welsh pop music industry.
Certain questions will be raised, discussed and hopefully answered during the course of the theseis, such as
- What are the characteristics of Welsh Popular Music and how do performers assert their cultural identity?
- How has Welsh popular music developed as a genre (or more accurately, a collection of genres) over the past thirty years?
- What are the differences in definition and cultural significance of pop and gwerin and how do they influence each other?
- Is it merely the language that makes Welsh pop music Welsh or is there a culturally defining element within the subject matter or the musical language?
- How has the Welsh music industry grasped new technologies, from electric instruments, to digital recording to the use of the Internet as a marketing tool?
To date, there is very little academic research available concerning Welsh popular music and culture - the most significant of which are Roger Wallis and Krister Malm's books on minority cultures and music (Big Sounds From Small Peoples and Media Policy and Music Activity), and their articles which have appeared in Popular Music Journal. This research now ranges from six to fifteen years in age and is quite obviously inappropriate and dated,since the Welsh pop music industry has moved on, and several Welsh media policies have changed since the research was written.
More recent research includes a chapter on Wales in the Rough Guide to World Music, and published essays by local writers Damien Walford Davies (on the poetry of Welsh music) and Pwyll ap Sion (the roots of reggae in Welsh pop music).
The thesis would take into account the differences between a major music industry and that of a "minority culture" and how one is influenced by the other. The influence of Anglo-American music is strong in Welsh pop music, but now, at the end of the 1990s, Welsh music is making an impact on both the national pop charts and the music industry psyche. Super Furry Animals and Catatonia are household names and Welsh heroes, and are redefining the way the music press and the non-Welsh regard Wales, the Welsh and their music.
Since I first decided to study Welsh pop music in 1996, record company A&R personnel are still coming to Wales to sign up new talent, and Wales is still fashionable in the eyes of the music press. There is an increasing number of Welsh bands being signed (one of the most recent being Melys to Arctic records and whose Lemming single contains a Welsh-language B-side, 'Hedfan'), Rockfield studios in Monmouth has been a major recording centre for international pop music since the 1970s, and with the current resurgence of interest in "folk" and traditional music both inside and outside Wales, there has never been a better time to place Wales" popular music firmly in its historical and cultural context.