Award-winning Welsh Celtic indie-folk band Calan, are set to play a huge international online concert during which the band will transform a theatre stage into a living gallery of home life in Wales.
Acclaimed for the huge, pulsating sound they bring to traditional Welsh music, Calan have created their very own wonderland as a solution to the problems caused by playing live in an era of Covid-19 (and rules around social distancing).
Worldwide audiences will see each band member playing inside their own socially distanced pod and each room will be a glimpse into the world of a modern Welsh traditional band, including a grandmother’s terraced house from the 1960s, a lamp-lit North Wales night scene and a forest of harps festooned by plants from the garden to represent Wales’s glorious music heritage and the green of the land. Welcome to Our House (or, in Welsh. Croeso i Ty Ni)
Calan’s Guided Musical Tour of Our House
“We wanted to invite everyone over for a guided musical tour of our houses,” says Calan’s guitar wizard Sam Humphreys. “Each room is a glimpse into the world of a modern Welsh traditional band – not just how we live now, but the places and objects that have inspired us and given us our personalities.”
Singer, accordionist (and Welsh champion step dancer) Bethan Rhiannon adds, “My section is a recreation of my gran’s terraced house in the South Wales valleys in the 1960s, complete with a lampstand with fringed shade, a side table with a lace doily and a patterned rug that I can push back when I start stepping!”
Virtuoso harpist Shelly Musker-Turner adds, “I’ll be surrounded by a forest of harps festooned by plants from my garden to represent Wales’s glorious music heritage and the green of the land.” Other on-stage ‘rooms’ will range from a lamplit North Wales night scene to a city party house – all a backdrop to multi-instrumental wizardry ranging from thundering Welsh bagpipes to soaring fiddles, driving guitar and haunting vocals.
Calan Record Concert At Soar Concert Hall
The concert is being recorded at the glorious Soar concert hall in Merthyr Tydfil – a converted chapel in the South Wales town that was once the Industrial Revolution capital of the world. It will be broadcast online on April 6 2021 to Calan’s UK & US fans.
“We’ve made sure that the concert will remain available online for ten days,” says guitarist Sam Humphreys. “It gives people plenty of time to listen at leisure… And means our fans in California and Japan don’t need to listen over breakfast. This isn’t music to eat your Rice Krispies to!”
Calan Debut Live Performances of Tracks From Album, Kistvaen
Due to Covid restrictions the band were unable to tour with their latest album Kistvaen so this is the first time the music from that album will be played live – an exciting premiere for fans and the band.
It will be their first ticketed online concert since performing with opera god Sir Bryn Terfel in a Christmas recital for New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. “For that we had to be on our very best behaviour,” says Calan’s fiddle player Angharad Jenkins, daughter of the great Welsh poet Nigel Jenkins. “This time we can let our hair down. Expect fireworks.”
- Tickets for the full-length Our House show are available now
- Calan photographs by Richard P Walton