The History of Pontardawe Festival 1978 onwards

The Pontardawe festival is an annual celebration of world music and dance which has taken place every August, with one exception, since 1978.

It has developed from a small, essentially Celtic folk music-based event into an important international world music festival attracting up to 20,000 visitors

It is organised entirely by volunteers and run on a not-for-profit basis. The original idea for a festival came from the late Brian Harris, a local teacher and councillor, founder of the Valley Folk Club in Pontardawe in 1967, who wanted to run a folk festival in Margam Park.

During the next ten years, VFC, with encouragement from the council, started to stage folk concerts in local venues. But Brian's dream did not go away, and was shared by a number of fellow 'folkies'.

Sadly Brian Harris died in 1973, his dream unrealised. But in September 1977 a group of people just back from Bromyard were fantasising about running a festival in the bar of the Dynevor Arms, where the folk club was based.

Suddenly, the then landlord John Beynon interrupted: "For goodness sake don't talk about it, do it!" and handed over a £20 donation to kick-start a fund. The Pontardawe Festival was conceived!

A week later, following announcements of the plan and an appeal for volunteers, a group of twenty plus people attended the inaugural meeting of the festival committee. The Pontardawe Festival was born!

Chair clearing for the ceilidh and world music

Despite some initial qualms in the village that a festival would attract all sorts of unsavoury hippie types, permission was given to go ahead on the old steelworks site roughly where the Somerfield store now stands.

There was one concert marquee which also hosted the ceilidh and contained a bar at one end plus a small ancillary marquee which held the CAMRA bar. It was a nightmare clearing the chairs out for the ceilidh come 6pm!

In addition there were about fifty craft and charity stalls and about a hundred camping tents. Word soon got around and the first festival was a huge success, attracting about 600 visitors from all over Wales and the rest of the Celtic fringe. There were even some visitors from the USA!

We were lucky enough to get top Irish band NA FILI to headline (one of their last gigs together) along with Scots bands OSSIAN and THE CLUTHA. Welsh band Ar Log (then a VERY new band) also played and got their first recording contract (With Dingle Records) as a result of their appearance!).

Over the next few years, the artistic focus of the festival grew from featuring essentially Celtic traditional music to a more international based artist list.

Bands from all over the world beat a path to Pontardawe and audiences grew from hundreds to thousands.

The festival was also on the move, down the valley, as the bypass, the Somerfield supermarket and then the Leisure Centre sprang up on the original site.

The Leisure Centre became an important part of the venue, and the addition of hot showers proved popular with the growing number of campers!

The scope of the festival also grew through the 1980s. It became obvious that there were no real definitions in world music other than it owed it's beginnings in traditional ethnic music - and the artistic policy developed accordingly, embracing good new music wherever it came from, whilst keeping faith with the fundamentally Celtic tradition that had been the festival's starting point.

Don't just sit there - join in the haka!

It was at this time that the tradition of encouraging participation in music among the community emerged, with workshops, master-classes, meet-the-band sessions and an extensive outreach programme that extended throughout the county.

How many festivals can boast the "largest haka in Britain" as performed by some 1,000 festival goers following one of the best attended workshops ever - given by Te Vaka!

The festival's reputation grew and we became the festival with the slogan - you saw it first at Ponty! - who will forget the first time La Bottine Souriante graced a British stage? Yes, 1992 at Ponty!

And what about the terrific "Convocation of Harps" master-class and subsequent main stage performance with 8 harps of varying shapes and sizes and harpists from every corner of the globe or the spellbinding performance one Saturday afternoon by Chinese flautist Guo Yue.

The festival continued to build on its success through the 1990s. The purchase and restoration of the Pontardawe Inn (Y Gwachel) in 1995 - achieved entirely by volunteers - gave the festival an additional string to its bow, as well as its own administrative base for the first time. It was an association that was to last six years.

Then in 2000, disaster struck! By this time, the festival was firmly on the international map, rated in the top ten festivals in the UK. But the cost of staging it had soared. And when the rains came in 2000, the event was left high and dry.

The massive financial loss that year forced the organisers to retrench. Complete disaster was averted thanks to the generosity of the local council who stumped up a loss guarantee.

But with nothing in the bank, and a pile of unpaid bills, the committee was forced to sell the pub to make ends meet. Then, more bad news... 2001 was the year of Foot and Mouth.

In common with many other events throughout Wales, the festival fell victim to the restrictions imposed to combat the epidemic sweeping the country and for the first time since its inception in 1978 the festival had to be cancelled.

In 2002, with no income from the previous two years to fall back on, the organisers faced a dilemma. The solution was to retreat from the field into the town centre and for the next two years a much smaller-scale event was held with concerts in the Arts Centre and a much-reduced craft market set up in the main street.

It soon became clear that this was not what people wanted. Ticket sales slumped and it simply did not feel like a festival.

Going back to the old way

So in 2003, artistic director Ruth Exell-Stevenson announced - much to everybody's surprise - that next year's event would be returning to its grass roots, on the Parc Ynysderw field!

For six months, the committee - much reduced in size and much increased in age! - deliberated on whether this was feasible. And in June 2004, when it came to the crunch, the vote was split 50:50.

Eight weeks to go, and no festival! But the 50% who had voted to go ahead decided it was too important an event to let die and offered to give it a shot.

Luckily, as word spread that festival was going back to the field, people who had deserted it started to return and a small but enthusiastic team was put together.

Eight weeks later, the festival's genial Irish MC Rory Furlong strapped on his guitar and struck the first chord that announced: "We're Back!". The gamble worked. The sun shone and around 5,000 people joined in the celebration of a resurrection.

The next chapter has yet to be written. The 2005 festival built on the foundations laid down the year before, and the 2006 event continued that process. In particular, we took the first steps to re-integrate the festival in its field with the town centre, through the introduction of fringe events involving a range of local businesses and organisations.

The festival is also looking to spread its wings and embrace a wider artistic brief in a wider geographical area. Over the next 3-5 years, we hope to turn the Pontardawe Music Festival into the Swansea Valley Arts Festival as part of the Neath Port Talbot Valley's Strategy.

Whether it succeeds or not depends on the people reading this history. We hope we can count on your help.

David Hammond-Williams