'Love the words': The Laugharne Weekend
Dylan Moore wanders through Laugharne's pubs, poetry and potted history, and finds a festival still keeping his namesake's spirit alive
Famously, the poet called it a ‘timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town’, employing those languorous long vowels to emphasise the slow pace of this place, which to this day revels in its unique charter dating back to the thirteenth century. But Dylan Thomas never had to contend with M4 traffic heading west on a Friday afternoon, the crawl through the speed restrictions at Port Talbot or the price of Pont Abraham petroleum.
And yet. After the bright blue of the motorway signs’ false promises about the proximity of Carmarthen; after the chocolate brown heritage waymarker for the Boathouse; after the bridge over the ‘other’ river Taf at the derrière of St Clear’s, we reach, inevitably, the starless sky stretched out over Laugharne – bible-black.
And at the Millennium Memorial Hall, Cerys Matthews sweeps in wearing a long red dress, star-quality burning solar-bright as ever. Jeff Towns – ‘the Dylan Thomas guy’ – sits beside her, spellbound still – as we all are – by the words she reads, set against the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of Arun Ghosh’s keys.
‘Love the words,’ Towns reminds us, was Dylan’s advice to actors preparing for those oh-so-familiar parts in Under Milk Wood, the ‘play for voices, perhaps’ that has lifted Llareggub – and its real-world counterpart in Laugharne – into the realm of literary immortality.

Can you come here and not think of Dylan? Such is the all pervasive presence of the poet in the township that most would probably be surprised to learn that Laugharne is the oldest still-inhabited settlement in Wales. Caves at Coygan Rock offer evidence of hunter-gatherer communities living locally 50,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Bronze Age and Iron Age forts long predate the Laugharne hoard, two thousand Roman coins scattered in the earth here centuries before the Normans established a castle here in the 12th century. Laugharne Corporation, presided over by the portreeve, is one of only two such bodies extant in the United Kingdom (the other being the City of London). And yet all this history now seems to have been obscured by the efforts of a man writing poems in a shed.
Everything here, it seems, is overwritten by Dylan. It is in Milkwood House, a part of the posh new Dylan Coastal Resort, that the writer and co-founder of The Laugharne Weekend John Williams reminds us: ‘We set the festival up not as the Dylan Thomas festival, but the type of festival that Dylan would have wanted to come to.’
Introducing the poets Owen Sheers and Joshua Jones, he says that if Dylan were alive today, ‘these are two routes he might have gone down’. Jones’ words, hard and filthy, rip through the atmosphere of ambient lighting, clinking glasses and chiming knives and forks. His plosives pop over the hiss of the coffee machine and the silver shine of white wine served on ice while rain streaks the grey horizon of the window. Sheers reads something that addresses the context directly, a poem that has waiters moving ‘like sharks through a coral reef’.


Owen is billed in the programme as ‘Wales’ poet now, 70 years after Dylan’, and he doesn’t disappoint. Reading from The Green Hollow, about Aberfan, another place that has become synonymous with a singular event, the words are freighted with the integrity of a poet determined to press his face against the glass of windowpane of contemporary experience. He dedicates sections to ‘all children caught up in the war in Gaza’; ‘the world ruptures,’ the poem concludes, ‘and we offer what we can’.
Later, he reads a heart-rendingly personal poem about his daughter. Soon to turn 50, evergreen Sheers has been on the scene so long now that we take his presence for granted. As he garners heartfelt applause for readings from To Provide All People, which says the NHS ‘speaks well of us’, it is worth noting that he is a national treasure too.
Down at the upstairs room in The Fountain Inn, John Robb starts his own talk by noting: ‘I come from a place that nobody comes from. Blackpool. People go to Blackpool, they don’t come from Blackpool. But I do.’
‘I love seaside towns,’ he says, and we’re unsure if Laugharne is included.
Robb’s presentation is a full-frontal assault of quick-witted eloquence, born of more than four decades writing about alternative music, first for his fanzine Blackpool Rox, then for the inkies, and latterly for Louder Than War, the website he launched in 2010. It’s a journey that reflects a sequence of musical movements and youthquakes.
The Laugharne Weekend is often described as a post-punk affair, and Robb says he feels sorry for bands nowadays when that label is applied, 45 years on. ‘Everything is post-punk,’ he says, a fact borne out by the talk, a life recorded in records, which covers everything from glam to goth and grunge. All the while, an appreciative audience issues audible affirmatives, heartfelt amens to Robb’s secular sermon. It’s a magnetic monologue, extolling the virtues of ‘the magic in the mundane’. Here too it’s hard not to think of Dylan.
Some drift off to see Irvine Welsh and James Brown at the Hall, just as Robb drops his acid house anecdotes. By evening, the millennials arrive, with their corduroy shackets and baseball caps, the crowd becomes a postmodern pick n mix. We’ve heard dispatches from the punk rock wars and tall tales from the nineties hedonists; now it’s the turn of fresh-faced lads with Edwardian moustaches.


First Cardiff’s Waterpistol bridge the generational divides perfectly with their blend of shoegaze and psychedelia, replete with Jaggeresque lead singer strutting in a paisley kaftan. Then Mari Mathias steals the show, atmospheric trad-folk melodies from the mists of time soaring over the textures woven by a tight and talented band, bright as brethyn. As captivating as Cerys, there is a maturity to Mathias’ music that promises a pride of place among Wales’ new galaxy of stars.
Downstairs the locals drink away the sorrows of the wooden spoon.