Mojo - The Music Magazine

There are some things a man doesn't countenance seeing in his lifetime, and one of them is happening right here in the sleepy Welsh village of Laugharne. At Browns hotel, an elegantly faded watering hole on the main - well, actually, the only - road through town, Mick Jones of The Clash is sitting on a plastic chair, his body protected by a white boiler suit and his head smothered in bright blue gunk. The last time Jones wore a boiler suit splattered in coloured goo was, one suspects, at The Clash's Camden Town rehearsal space back in 1976, but today's shenanigans have nothing to do with recreating the punk past. Jones is, rather, having a mould of his head made by artist Nick Reynolds, son of the Great Train Robbery mastermind Bruce.

Such weird and extraordinary goings-on are among the many addictive charms of the Laugharne Weekend, a music/literary/poetry festival on the Carmarthenshire coast that's so quaint and unassuming it makes Hay-on-Wye look like the evening of Altamont. Now several years old, it caught MOJO's eye last year when Patti Smith "headlined", with reports filtering back to the office of the New York punk poetess spending the weekend propping up the bar of Browns, 'twixt wandering blithely through the village chatting amiably to locals and festival attendees. Her pièce de resistance was a spirited musical and poetry performance at the Millennium Hall, the unassuming 250-capacity village hall that doubles as the festival's main venue.

Patti's appearance (which went widely unreported - they like it that way down here) will make more sense when you discover that Laugharne was once home of Welsh poet and literary treasure Dylan Thomas, who lived in the boathouse overlooking the stunningly beautiful estuary on which the village sits. The house is now a museum, and is joined in its historical 'Well f__k me' factor by the nearby garage shed in which Thomas wrote, and in which his personal effects and writing desk can still be viewed. Laugharne was the inspiration for Llareggub in his play Under Milk Wood - Llareggub spelling 'bugger all' backwards, as in 'bugger all happens here', though Thomas relieved the boredom with a whiskey or 18 every night at Browns, where he and wife Caitlin would get trolleyed, then sway home at midnight past the haunting, dun-coloured ruins of Laugharne castle at the end of the high street. Happy days.

So, on a balmy Friday in April, in this most romantic of settings, this year's event kicks off, its modest and eccentric itinerary unfolding to a couple of hundred attendees at a dreamy, unhurried, otherworldy pace unlike that of any other festival MOJO has ever attended. Having got there late - missing Icelandic writer and eco campaigner Andri Snaer Magnason reading at Browns Hotel, novelist Louis de Bernières making music on weird instruments with his Antonius Players at the Congregational Church, and dulcet folkie and deliciously dark novelist Charlotte Greig performing at The Stable Door - there's barely time for a quick livener before Friday night's headlining slot: award-winning author, comedian and former Clash road manager Johnny Green interviewing his old boss Mick Jones at the Millennium Hall.

Hurdling initial nerves, a dandily dressed Jones is on playful and disarming form, discussing everything from childhood holidays in Wales with his late father Thomas Jones, whose family hailed from the hills above Treforest where the other Tom Jones lived, to his enthusiasm for the 2005 Russian film The Sun, about the Japanese wartime emperor, Hirohito. Naturally, there are numerous Clash war stories too. Watching the cogs in Jones's brain spin laterally from subject to subject is something to behold: though not perhaps for the sonorous, sing-song Welsh youth in clumpy boots and a German army jacket who heckles, "Why aren't you dressed like a punk?" The evening ends with unscheduled solo acoustic renderings of Train In Vain and Should I Stay Or Should I Go, and Mick enthusiastically holding court outside Browns with wife Miranda. Happy days, indeed.

Laugharne's homely rugby club, in a room upstairs at the Fountain Inn opposite the castle, proves to be the venue for some more sublime music over the weekend - sunkissed psych-pop blues from former Gorky's Zygotic Mynci singer Richard James; the melodious West Coast-flavoured weirdo pairing of Johnny, featuring Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and the Mynci's Euros Childs; mesmerising folk picking from teenager Ed Mugford; and a raucous midnight folk-punk set from ex-Mekon Jon Langford.

But few, it seems, are prepared to absent themselves on Saturday evening from the centrepiece of this year's festival, a turn chiming perfectly with Laugharne's unspoilt, time-warp setting. Sat on the stage of the Millennium Hall, reading glasses perched on nose, Ray Davies merely has to strum a couple of chords of Dead End Street and Waterloo Sunset to evoke a wave of euphoric warmth from the sold-out capacity crowd - high purely on the occasion, as there's no bar. Tonight, Davies intersperses songs with a reading from his autobiographical novel, X-Ray, in which a civil servant goes in search of the legendary Raymond Douglas Davies of The Kinks. That the singer frames his own story in a book that intricately plays with notions of identity, literary convention, reality and legislative nostalgia suggests R.D. Davies is a very clever man: but not too clever to realise that his audience are primarily here to bask in his timeless tunes.

Tunes, timeless or not, aren't Simon Armitage's thing, but words are, and his poetry reading at Thomas's boathouse on Saturday afternoon is another highlight of the weekend - as is the Q&A session with Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, now a sprightly and stylish old blade of 77, whose vivid recollections of England's most famous blag are splashed with colourful literary allusions (Shakespeare, The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner, Brideshead Revisited) and suffused with a philosophical tinge that perhaps only a man who's done the crime, then done his time, could conjure. Being the brains of the outfit had its advantages: "When we were counting out the money," he explains, "I said to one of the guys, What's that pile there? He said, 'That's no good, it's Scottish money.' Well, I said, 'If you're not bothered, I'll take it...'"

Sunday sees some dark, unsettling stories from the American neon gutter courtesy of Willy Vlautin, Keith Allen performing his forthcoming spoken-word album, the vividly cinematic and thought-provoking Two Pikeys On A Minicruise, and a lot more besides. By this time, festival goers are starting to look dazed. Three days of sun, red wine and ale, and meeting lots of famous people ambling down the narrow main street is taking its toll. It's time to head back to the future, where electrical things work (no-one can get a mobile phone signal here - miraculously) and there's noise, traffic, council tower blocks and the like.

Patti Smith's rumoured to be back next year. But don't tell anyone, or Laugharne will no longer be Britain's best-kept secret.

By Pat Gilbert

Photo courtesy of Athena Picture Agency

More on the Laugharne Weekend here...