We can abandon the comparisons with any and all of the vocalists to emerge from the valleys right now. For a start, this is an artist who composes his own songs, can move a live audience to high emotion even when they’ve never heard him before, and has packed a great deal of real life into his 24 years.
Rhys Morgan came to singing and songwriting relatively late, after teenage years playing other instruments. Born in the Brecon Beacons of South Wales, he entered the family business and made music as he made coffee. But that voice simply had to come out. Fiercely ambitious, he’s already amassed first-hand knowledge of how the record industry works, in all its finery and faithlessness. He’s stronger and wiser for it, owning an album that speaks of his independence and determination to succeed on his own terms.
“When I walked into this, I wasn’t a singer,” he reflects. “I had a voice, but I wasn’t a singer, and I wasn’t a performer because I was a bass player, and I loved being back of the stage watching somebody screaming down a microphone, and now I’m that idiot.”
Early days in the Morgan household also saw Rhys listening to Motown and rock, digging the record collection of his bass-playing father, who played in bands himself. “Voices for me were always a big thing, way above the flavour of the week,” he says. “As a kid, I used to get the piss taken out of me because I didn’t find any of that very impressive."
“I knew there was more quality out there. I suppose it shows when I sing and I write that I haven’t got many influences, which sort of works in my favour.” It also makes for a nice change to find a vocalist who doesn’t invite comparisons with endless artists who’ve gone before.
“Musically, it was a conflict,” he explains. “My mother’s side of the family always claimed they came from a very musical background, and that my father just picked up a bass and ‘got lucky.’ Nobody on my mother’s side ever taught me a thing about music, but my father showed me the bass guitar, and that was a stepping stone for me for going from a school brass band, into "This is real. This feels like something that can really connect with people.’”
Then someone picked up on the fact that a would-be group of “singers” couldn’t even begin to compete with the voice of the guy who was driving them up to London. Morgan signed up for, then happily escaped, the pop world, learned about the business, was seduced by a major label and got to record an album at the celebrated RAK Studios in north London.
Along the way, he found himself and developed the ability to write songs that are both personal and universal. Taking an unlikely starring role among them is ‘Aberfan,’ which Morgan was moved to write when he looked closely at his family’s own history in the town’s never-to-be-forgotten 1966 tragedy, when a colliery heap collapsed into homes and a school, killing 144 people, 116 of them children.
“I wasn’t going to put it on the album, for my mother’s sake, but it’s had such a strong response from people listening to it live, that I’d be stupid not to. My uncle that I never met was killed in that"
“It didn’t make any sense to me, or come into my thoughts at all, until I’d left Wales and started to think about my parents as individual people, rather than parents. It came to me, what a thing to go through. It’s me describing my mother’s perspective of that loss. That song affects a lot of people.”
Others among his songs have an autiobiographical streak, from ‘Turn Around,’ about his own failings when it comes to commitment, and ‘Back To You,’ about homesickness and regret. But for all that, and his love of home, Rhys Morgan is a stronger man for being out in the world, and he won’t be happy until his songs are on your lips.
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