 Front Cover YMWELWYRA GWRACHOD (VISITORS AND WITCHES) IT'S a dark night, made all the darker by being in the depths of the forest. The only light is from the sliver of moon in the sky, and the campfire crackling in the middle of the clearing. All around are the shadowy forms of trees. I have no idea where I am - this is a special place for Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and they insisted on blindfolding me as they lead me here so I could never return and spoil their peace. Euros Childs, the 21 -year-old singer with the face of a recalcitrant cherub and a maniacal laugh, is gently stirring a pot containing a murky liquid, while his sister Megan plays her violin and mutters incantations. Guitarist John Lawrence, hair streaming down his back, lies on the ground watching the fire, his pupils the size of cartwheels. Drummer Euros Rowlands and guitarist Richard James, both hooded, collect firewood and sing strange melodies as they go. Suddenly Euros turns to me - "Come now, it's time to drink" - and all five members of the band gather slowly round the pot as they prepare to seek inspiration for their magical song. Yeah. Like hell they do. BACK TO REALITY SINCE they took shape in the back of a Pembrokeshire classroom in 199l,that'sthe sort of image the band with the unintelligible name have had to contend with. If you know nothing else about Gorky's Mygotic Mynci, you probably know they're meant to be a little... strange. That name, for a start, is a neon signpost back to a mystical time, when magic mushrooms were sold in Sainsbury's and every third child had Beefheart as their middle name, while if you're on the wrong side of Shrewsbury and prone to typically English cultural imperialism, the fact they sing Welsh probably increases their exotic sheen. Add to this a song called, oh, say, "Eating Salt Is Easy" and a charming love lyric that runs, "Oh, isn't if a lovely day? My patio's on fire", and you can see why Gorky's are widely suspected to be the caterpillar on the mushroom of hallucinogenic weirdo pop. The unusual,though,is a different kettle of custard altogether-and no one would argue that,in the current climate, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci stand out a hundred country miles. If you've missed their first three albums on Welsh independent Ankst, just wait  You lookin' at me? Gorky's (l-r): Euros R, Richard, Euros C, Megan & John ...OR WOLVERHAMPTON FORGET the forest. This is Wolverhampton. A hotel. Even if Gorky's were on a weirdness course spirit-guided by Timothy Leary and Howard Hughes, this setting would soon knock it out of them. Upstairs, it's grey permanent waves as far as the eye can see; thousands of Mrs Merton clones at a Golden Wedding celebration. Downstairs, though, the bar has turned into the town's prime pulling arena, filled with enough white PVC to decorate 20 massage parlours. The atmosphere is ugly, and we decide to go upstairs before the bloodshed starts. Richard is the only absentee. "He's on the dancefloor," Euros Rowlands informs me, and the rest of the band giggle. Richard, they say, hasn't danced since 1981." He did nearly dance last night, though," announces Euros R. "NOWAY!" "Yup. The Man Don't Give A F***' came on and I was a bit drunk, dancing away, and you could see Richard was like..." -he twitches arhythmically, like a man desperate to get on the dancefloor but restrained by the iron bar of his inhibitions -"...then he just went 'Noooo', and fell back." They cackle delightedly until Megan admonishes them: "Shhh, you can't talk about his dancing, he's not here." And, judging from the scene downstairs, he might never be here again. BRINGING UP GORKY THE conversation about the bassist's dancing skills probably reveals more about this unique band than they're prepared to actually disclose. You can sense their closeness, and how far back they go; Megan's apparent role as the voice of reason, not to mention a shared fondness for their former Super Furry Ankst labelmates. If every popfan wants their favourite bands to be an unshakeable gang, then Gorky's are a dream. Euros and Megan Childs obviously go way beyond that (blood ties being what they are, he announces that, as children, his sister was always the boss), but John has been friends with the singer since they were four. They met Richard when they were 11 and started secondary school, while Euros the Second joined in 1994: "We had a drummer and we were going steady, but he couldn't fulfil our sexual appetite, so we had a bit of a fling with Euros and kept him" -and is now fully assimilated into their world. The closeness they share is obvious- both Euros the First and John have a tendency to lapse into silly voices, to finish each other's jokes, to refer to each other just as "him " like it's their Golden Wedding. "We used to do comics at school; we were big 'Oink' and 'Beano' fans, and we'd make radio programmes where he'd ben an old granny and go "Oooh,dear!" or something," says Euros. "We did comedy shows, too, and we were like, let's do the same with music." Were you bored, or seeking attention, or was it a vengeance/vindication thing? They all categorically assure me it was nothing to do with vindication, but more a serious case of the John Peels. " I used to tape the Peel programmes and feel a bit strange for doing it," laughs Euros R, "but then I soon found all the people I was meeting did it too." "I was on volume 17 by the end," admits the singer. "We should set up a club." A support group, more like. "I remember the first Peel programme I ever heard. I was 14 and I was completely amazed, completely baffled. I'd been looking at the charts, thinking, 'There's got to be something out there' and then I found it. Our only goal as a band was to have a session." Next thing you know... "Our first gig was at a youth club in Caermathen," remembers Euros. "We've got a tape of it and you can hear the ping pong. There were only about five people there-there'd been a big snow the night before, you see." Otherwise it would have been like The Sex Pistols at The 100 Club, right? "Well, there could well have been two or three other people there, perhaps." What did the kids at school think? John shrugs. "They laughed at us. There was a cool band and there was us. The cool band had all these amps and expensiveshit..." Euros: "And my voice hadn't even broken. People would come in while we were rehearsing, laugh at us, then walk out again." John adopts a sinister Mafia don voice: "They're laughing on the other side of their faces now." "They are as well, the bastards. Where are you now, you f***ers?" Everyone laughs, but it's the only time Euros speaks without thinking carefully all night. No vindication here at all, then.  Five go mad at the seaside
SOMEWHERE ELSE
EUROS Childs, Richard James, and John Lawrence are 21 years old. "Barafundle" is their fourth album. This is the sort of statistic that induces existential crises in anyone over 16 who hasn't . already tucked a couple of Nobel Prizes away or piled up their first million. "What the hell have I been doing with my life?" you think, but more to the point, what have Gorky's been doing with theirs? No wonder their reputation for strangeness has stuck - their very youth casts them in a freakish light. OK, bands like Ash, Kenickie and Bis have snatched back pop music for the teenage constituency, but Gorky's have never played up their juvenile credentials. It comes from having an unashamedly unfashionable and obscure idea of cool: an idea light years away from the normal cultural references of the under-twenties, from their Soft Machine and Gene Clark habit to their Mark E Smith sense of anti-style, to the way Euros and Megan's dad and his friends played the medieval instruments on the new record. They might have written such delicious adolescent anthems as"Merched Yn Neud Gwallt Eu Gillyd" ("Girls Doing Each Other's Hair"), but they're now too old to sing its hilarious call- and-response chorus legitimately: "There's no need to worry/Why's that, Stevie?/ Cos we ain't got school in the morning, baby... " While your contemporaries were hanging out in Camden with Blur,literally or metaphorically, you were off covering semi-obscure songs of the early Seventies. Why don't you capitalise more on your youth? "We were very young when we started out, so we don't feel like a young band now," Megan (who is, after all, 25) wisely points out. "When we first started we'd not got to grips with our instruments yet, and we were like BANG! BANG! BANG!" recalls Euros. He continues: "You're jumping around, shouting your arse off, and you get into the raw power of it without having to be musically competent. That's the great thing, but you can't just carry on with that raw energy. We've still got it, but unless you progress, you're nothing. What we're doing now is what we wanted to do when we were 16, but failed miserably to achieve at the time." He checks himself as a bit of pride flashes in: "Well, we didn't fail, but we get more satisfaction listening to what we're doing now. Being in a band is really similar to being in school. We started off in first form, we're in second form now, and U2 are school prefects. But who wants to be a school prefect? CHILD'S PLAY THE new album proves that Gorky's idea of progression is nothing to do with reaching a bland plateau of maturity. For every song as innocently euphoric as the single, "Diamond Dew", or as open-heartedly romantic as "The Patio Song", there's something as clammily unnerving as the hysteric psychedelia of "MeirionWyllt"or"The Barafundle Bumber", a tale of a young beach-side voyeur (" Couples are best/when they start to caress"), which Euros insists is not autobiographical, although he does later admit that he and John used to spy on people out walking their dogs, whom they thought might be murderers. There's a sense of childhood on the album, both in the innocent sense and in the way you conjure up a certain nightmarish logic. "We were going to have a children's section on the album," says Euros. "There is such a thing as a song a kid can latch on to. Some of our friends have children who sing along to our songs-that probably says more about us than about children - but if you can do that, that's really special. Like 'Yellow Submarine'." Brrr, I always thought "Yellow Submarine" was really creepy. There's something in that strain of Day-Glo psychedelia that's really itchy and unnerving-like your own "Game Of Eyes", all evil laughter and leering intent. Euros Rowlands nods slowly. "Do you remember a song called "Mouldy Old Dough" by Lieutenant Pigeon? There was this girl who used to push me in my pram when I was about two, and we used to go past this house in Swansea and this song was always coming out of it. 'Mouldy old daaawgh...' I was scared shitless." I get the feeling someone must have told you some weird stories as kids. Euros suddenly looks defensive. "People think our parents were hippies, that we must have listened to their record collections, but it was only when I was 14 or 15 that I got into pop music," he declares, with the air of someone who's had trouble with this line of questioning before. OK. How about the innocent side? The beach, or the countryside, for example? "If it was a nice day tomorrow and we were at home, we'd be down at the beach," explains John. "It's something we do now. It's something timeless." "It's quite natural for us to take a walk completely on our own with a north wind gale blowing in our face," adds Euros. Megan, the only band member to have tried living in London,smiles: "It's that innocent. If it's hot, you want to be outside, while if you're in the city, you don't want to be on the pavement." It's no wonder they get misinterpreted as hippies-the rock'n'roll ethos is so strong that such behaviour is positively subversive. Gorky's are capable of radically reinventing the way people look at pop stars, of gently altering the vocabulary of pop. Not just literally- although getting people to chant along in bad phonetic Welsh must make them laugh a great deal - but also kicking out the macho clutter that clogs up the horizon every time. A-HAH-HAH-ha-ha... A WRONG TURN DOWN THE PATH OF EXCESS  Beaux gestures GEWN NI GORFFEN
(LET'S FINISH) "HEY", says Megan, "you haven't asked us where we got our name from and we've actually found out now. It's like 'Call My Bluff'." "Yes," announces John, with great gravitas, 'Mynci' is apparently a block of wood on the back of a horse used to carry beer. 'Gorky' you can make up a bunch of shit about, but that was one we could never invent a meaning for." Who told you this, exactly? "Oh, a very reliable source," laughs Euros. "It was a bunch of very pissed 14-year-olds, so it must be true." He should know. If the truth is out there, something tells me that it definitely has a Welsh accent and a very silly name indeed. Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Poetry in motion. Diamond Dew' is out now on Fontana The album, Barafundle' is released on April 7. Gorky's are now on tour - check Gig Guide for details PRIME SIMIAN CUTS
A GORKY'S GUIDE "PATIO" (Ankst. 1993)
Gorky's very first album included tracks recorded before Euros Childs' voice had broken and had John Cale declare it one of his favourite records of all time. "Gorky's Zygotic Mynci are huge Beach Boys fans, clearly around the time Brian Wilson flipped and was found dragging a grand piano into his sandpit." Gina Morris, Select. "TATAY" (Ankst, 1994)
A delicious mixture of Dadaist pop, folk arcadia and meandering (yet always intriguing) lunacy, "Tatay" saw GZM looming nearer and nearer to their Platonic ideal. Best track: "Kevin Ayers", a tribute to their hero, founding member of late Sixties/Seventies Canterbury scene band Soft Machine. "If's not immaturity that betrays GZM's youth, but their versatility, energy, willfulness, irrepressibility and constant experimentation." Tania Branigan, MM "BWYD TIME" (Ankst, 1995)
Their "breakthrough" album broke through like a rash of gold stars. From "Miss Trudy", the tender tale of a violin teacher's unfulfilled dreams, to the leering psychedelic horrors of "The Game Of Eyes", this is spangled with delights through and through. A must in your home. "I'd no idea Wales was so far away. Like, the Saturn branch of Toys'R'Us. Ah, if only they catered for children's parties. No one would ever suspect Jennifer Nine, MM "INTRODUCING..." (Mercury Compilation, 1996)
A wonderful introduction to the band, not only collecting vital album tracks like "Miss Trudy" and "The Game Of Eyes", but also early singles (the explosively funny "Merched Yn Neud Gwallt Eu Gilydd", which is as exciting as biting through balloons) and EP tracks (their cover of Soft Machine's "Why Are We Sleeping?"). A spoonful of neat pleasure. STRANGE DAYS
FIVE REASONS WHY GORKYS HAVE GOT THAT REPUTATION 1) For the sleeve photos of "Bwyd Time" they were pictured standing in as forest wearing wizard costumes they hired from a fancy-dress shop. 2) Drummer Euros Rowlands' father is the Chief Druid of Wales. 3) Some random song titles - "If Fingers Were Xylophones"; "The Man With Salt Hair"; "The Game Of Eyes"; "The Wizard And The Lizard"; "Paid Cheto Ar Pam" ("Don't Cheat On Pam"); "Beth Sy'n Digwydd I'r Fuwch?" ("What Happens To The Cow?"). 4) John Peel and John Cale have been fervent champions of the band, which is famously not a direct route to daytime radio and chart riches. 5) There was a story that they all lived together in a caravan in Pembrokeshire, like The Monkees gone feral. They don't any more. They live with their parents instead. BARAFUNDLE
A USER'S GUIDE, BY EUROS CHILDS, SINGER "DIAMOND DEW" - A happy, happy song. If It's not, we've made a terrible mistake." "THE BARAFUNDLE BUMBER" - The sound of a distant Arabic radio being played in a hot desert. "STARMOONSON" -Travels back in time to a medieval banquet with Stevie Wonder-like funky piano. "PATIO SONG"-Written in a van for a van [When asked what this means, John points out that Euros formed a very close connection to their last touring vehicle Euros, for his part, just says it's nothing to do with Van Morrison.] "BETTER ROOMS"-Was going to feature cowboy noises (coconuts, whips, horses, bonfire crackling) but these were pulled at the last minute. "HEYWOOD LANE"-Very innocent song; we think we might have been listening to The Kinks when we did mis one. About passing John's great-aunts house on the way to school. "PER GWAG GLAS"-A song attempting to suss out past generations and failing miserably, hence the chorus, "empty headed blues". Also travels back in time to medieval ritual. "BOLA BOLA" - "I am rubbing my stomach, stomach" -one of our finest poetic moments. A lullaby of sorts. "CURSED, COINED AND CRUCIFIED" - Inspired by Radio 3, written on a Bontempi organ, adapted to classical guitar by a bloke with a beard. "SOMETIMES A FATHER IS A SON" coming soon, a jazz/funk/soul workout of this song entitled "Sometimes Your Father Is James Brown". "MEIRION WYLLT"-Riffing abounds! Heavy metal with classically trained opera singer singing Russian melody with answering brass. Inspired by Page and Plant at Glastonbury. "THE WIZARD AND THE LIZARD" In which the wizard places the sun in the lizard's mouth. The setting is a dusty, sweaty canyon. "MINIATURE KINGDOMS" Fanfare ahoy! "DARK NIGHT" - Set in a village during a power cut, it refers to a person drowning/burning to death. Features rain stick and ancient well-researched voodoo rhythms. "HWYL FAWR Y PAWB" - Six Beiderbeck farewell song. Some very silly keyboards from mad techno boffin in a tea cosy, Gorwel Owen, the producer. "WORDLESS SONG" it does have words, even though the title suggests otherwise. So now you know.
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