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Bandicoot || Rhys Underdown
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Introduce yourself…
There are four of us in the band: Rhys (me), Billy, Tom, Kieran. I sing and play the guitar, keys, sax. Tom also sings, plays guitar and keys. Billy plays drums, Kieran plays the bass and jumps off amps.
What is your hometown to you? What was your experience growing up there?
It’s very hard to put our exact feelings towards Swansea into words; it’s a mixture of deep affection, and a slight sense of claustrophobia, especially as a band that’s now been playing around Swansea for going on seven years. You know when memories are so cherished that they become oppressive — where you have countless associations with every street corner, and can’t really escape them. It’s been a wonderful place to live and grow up, and a great place to start a band and make music. It’s naturally beautiful, surrounded by the sea and brilliant characters, and a great and ever-adapting music scene.
But it’s also full of nostalgia for us now. It has just about enough record shops and music venues to make life as a teenage musician sufficiently exciting, or even possible, but not quite on the level where you could stay forever, I don’t think. We’ve spoken about this a lot, but Swansea has really formed who we are, not only as people but as artists; it’s a central part of our collective identity.
How has Swansea influenced or shaped you and what you do, if it has?
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In countless ways, really, and it’s very hard to acutely express how. But I think, from my point of view, Swansea has a brilliant aura of mythology about it — it’s a place where it’s very easy to make up your own mysteries. The people possess the strangest characters, the most vibrant and hilarious, natural poets. You spend any time in pubs around Swansea and you’re injected with the same kind of magic. It’s also a brilliantly creative place, there’s always someone playing music, always a poetry or jazz evening, and we all started attending these things at really young ages, like 16 or 17. As quite impressionable teenagers, this sort of artistic outlook has rubbed off on us quite strongly, and I think the best thing it did was to remove any inhibitions about being creative.
It taught me to be absolutely unafraid of writing anything. I never felt restricted to stay within a certain style or topic. Much of that has come from growing up in Swansea, I think. But also, for me, a lot of time was spent on the Gower, in the countryside, absorbed in these dramatic landscapes. I mention the sea or some element of landscape in pretty much everything I write. I can’t think of another place that could have so fully influenced the way I write like Swansea.
What do you know about your hometown’s artistic history, does it resonate with you?
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Dylan Thomas obviously looms large as a famous figure from the town, and it’s impossible to exaggerate the influence he’s had on us, especially me and Tom. I remember reading ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog’ when I was about fifteen, and for the first time realising, that not only is it ok to write about your town, and yourself, and what you know, but that’s sort of what you’re supposed to do — that’s when you start to produce something authentic and sincere, and how you develop an individual voice. It validated Swansea as a place worth writing about, which to me at that age was pretty massive; it also encouraged me to look for certain details, to view Swansea through a certain surreal lens, which Thomas does so well in that book. In the same way that I’m constantly aware of my own memories on street corners, there’s also an awareness of Dylan Thomas’s presence everywhere — not only is he painted on all the walls and bars around certain areas, but reading in his diaries and letters about where he drank, where he walked, what he did, around Swansea, makes you constantly aware of his presence. So his influence is enormously pervasive.
Obviously Dylan Thomas doesn’t encapsulate all of Swansea history — it’s brilliant and rich otherwise, with enormously inspirational bands like Badfinger having a similar effect on us. But for us, he was the most influential by far, artistically.
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Is there something about the topics you address in your music or the way you write, perform or click as a band you feel stems from coming from Swansea?
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It’s interesting, because despite all the influence that Swansea has had on us, we haven’t written any songs as a band that you could say are explicitly about Swansea, (although it’s something that’s informed a lot of mine and Tom’s solo music). I guess you could say that some of our old material portrays that vibrance and bizarreness of the characters, like ‘Pongo’, which really plays with that grotesque, Dickensian eccentricity that a lot of people in Swansea seem to display.
But most of our songs are about looking in on Swansea from the outside. They’re usually about the experience of leaving it, usually written on the train out, or something like that. In fact, the reason me and Tom first met in 2016 is because I heard his band (News From Nowhere)’s song ‘Stranded at the Border’, which was pretty explicitly referring to Swansea in his lyrics, and it really blew me away. The opening verse is: ‘washed up on the beach / I stepped into my old hometown / But something’s out of reach / and no-one will buy me a round’. Aside from Dylan Thomas, Tom’s music was a big influence for me in terms of thinking about Swansea, because it was exactly how I felt about it too, on a more subconscious level. Hearing it, like reading Portrait of the Artist, gave me the sort of tools to start expressing it more overtly. Eventually he joined the band, which has really developed how we’ve approached our writing.
One Bandicoot song I can think of which implicitly concerns Swansea is ‘Being Erased’, which I partly wrote on the train out of Swansea back to university in England. It’s more about a feeling of national / individual loss of identity, but it mentions the sea and is kind of imaginatively positioned in Swansea. It was actually influenced by a dream I had about Swansea, where i witnessed a volcano erupting where Port Talbot steelworks are, and stood watching it from the Bay. Freud would have had a field day with that.
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Is there something you see or feel from your hometown that you look to include when working on songs about other subjects or performing?
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Well as I mentioned, a lot of the time we write about Swansea from a perspective of absence or loss, usually when we’re leaving it or have left it for a period of time. Now we’re apparently leaving it for good, by moving to Cardiff in the summer. The music scene there has gradually become one that we feel at home in — it’s where we’ve been recording our new music — so maybe you’ve caught us in the middle of a strange period of transition. It’ll be interesting to see what happens musically when we leave Swansea. In fact, we do mention Cardiff in our song ‘O Nefoedd’, so maybe we’ll start mentioning Swansea now that we won’t be living there. God knows why. The grass is always greener and all that. Wherever we go, though, it’s the sort of place that stays with you.
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Finally, what about Swansea would you want to document in a project/song for the world to see?
There’s a vibrancy, a brilliant energy, and a beauty to it, but coupled with a pervasive melancholy. It’s quite a sad place, as a lot of post-industrial places are, and the natural beauty it has seems to intensify that sadness somehow. It’s my favourite place in the world, despite our complicated relationship with it, and I’d just like a song that could express all of that in one go.
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Click here to keep up with Bandicoot, or stream their most recent release 'O Nefoedd!' below.
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By Hannah Nicholson-Tottle