Someone just pointed a camera at bands they believed in. That material is usually lost.
On the third of May, a room at London's Southbank Centre will go dark, and footage that most people assumed was gone forever will flicker back to life — Welsh bands from the 1990s, caught on camera during one of the most creatively charged periods in the country's modern cultural history.
The screening is part of the British Film Institute's Rip It Up festival, and it carries the kind of weight that comes when archival material and personal memory collide in public. The footage features Ffa Coffi Pawb, Catatonia, and Super Furry Animals — bands that, for a stretch in the nineties, made Wales feel like the centre of something. That era has a name now: Cool Cymru. At the time, it was just life.
Rhys Ifans will be there. The actor, who grew up in Ruthin in north Wales, was the singer of Super Furry Animals before his film career took off with the 1997 crime comedy Twin Town. He will join young people from CellB — a cinema, venue, hostel, and pizzeria based in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd — for a question and answer session after the screening. The pairing of a Hollywood name with a youth programme from a small Welsh town is not incidental. It is the whole point.
The project is called Video Hud: Have You Seen Your Culture Baby, Standing in the Shadows? and it forms part of CellB's tenth anniversary celebrations. It was led by Gwenno Llwyd Till, Cian 'Clinc' Roberts, Yannick Hammer, and Rhys Roberts, and it draws on film, music, and lived experience to trace what Welsh youth culture looked and felt like during that decade.
The footage itself was captured by Emyr Glyn Williams, a record producer and one of the founders of Ankst Records — the independent Welsh label that released early work by Super Furry Animals, Ffa Coffi Pawb, Datblygu, and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Williams died of cancer in January 2024, aged 57. What he left behind, apparently, was more than anyone fully realised. Freelance director Gwenno Llwyd Till describes the material as priceless, and it is hard to argue with that word when you consider how much of this era was never formally documented.
CellB founder Cian 'Clinc' Roberts put it plainly: this was a moment when Welsh youth culture reshaped music, film, and identity, and it is now widely understood as such. The recognition came later than it should have, as recognition often does. But the footage exists, and it is about to be seen.
There is something quietly significant about where this is happening. The BFI's Southbank Centre is one of Britain's most prominent cultural institutions, and bringing a project rooted in Blaenau Ffestiniog — a former slate-quarrying town in Gwynedd — into that space says something about the reach of what CellB has built over the past decade, and about the enduring pull of the music that came out of Wales in the nineties.
The screening on 3 May will not bring Emyr Glyn Williams back, but it will put his work in front of an audience that can appreciate what it represents. For the young people from CellB sitting in that room alongside Rhys Ifans, it will be a chance to see the culture they inherited from the inside — raw, unpolished, and very much alive.
Notable Quotes
The programme captures a moment when Welsh youth culture reshaped music, film and identity — a period now widely recognised as Cool Cymru.— Cian 'Clinc' Roberts, CellB founder
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does this footage matter now, thirty years on?
Because most of it was never meant to be preserved. It was just someone pointing a camera at bands they believed in. That kind of material is usually lost.
Who was Emyr Glyn Williams, and why does his death change the texture of this story?
He was one of the people who built the infrastructure for Welsh independent music in the nineties — Ankst Records was the label that gave those bands a home. He died before he could see this footage properly celebrated. That absence sits in the room.
What is Cool Cymru, really? Is it a marketing term or something more?
It started as a cultural moment and became a label after the fact. At the time, bands like Super Furry Animals and Catatonia were just making music in Welsh and English and finding audiences. The name came later, when people needed a way to talk about it.
Why is Rhys Ifans the right person to anchor this screening?
Because he was inside it. He was the singer of Super Furry Animals before he became an actor. He is not a celebrity lending his name — he is someone who lived that era and can speak to it from memory.
What is CellB, and why does it matter that this project comes from there?
It is a cinema, venue, hostel, and pizzeria in Blaenau Ffestiniog — a small town in Gwynedd. The fact that a project from there is screening at the BFI says something about what grassroots cultural institutions can build over a decade.
What do the young people from CellB get out of being part of this?
A direct line to a cultural inheritance that is usually mediated through nostalgia. Sitting in that room with the footage and with Ifans is a different kind of education than reading about it.
Is there a preservation argument here beyond the celebration?
Absolutely. If this footage had not been found, it would have been gone. The question the screening quietly raises is how much else from that era has already disappeared.