Meic Stevens, the legendary folk singer from Solva, emigrated to Canada earlier this year. Before leaving he wrote Mas o ‘Ma (Out of Here) – an account of his life during the last thirty years. The volume, to be published in Welsh by Y Lolfa this week, will be launched at the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham on Thursday the 4th of August.
Meic says, “I wrote things down on bits of paper whilst travelling on trains and ferries, in bars and hotels, and in the early hours following performances. The book bears more resemblance to a diary than an autobiography.”
Life stories can occasionally be more remarkable than fiction and this is true for this, the third part of his autobiography. He writes emotively about the sadness of losing a lover to alcoholism and of finding 76 empty vodka bottles under her bed; of the time he spent in court, fighting for custody of his children; of the intensity and frustration he felt during his relationship with a singer who was forty years his junior; and of the night he and his girlfriend were woken in a St David’s hotel room in the middle of the night to find themselves surrounded by dogs and armed police officers. He was arrested and accused of threatening to shoot a barmaid for refusing to sell him a bottle of wine.
“The girlfriends, the drugs, the touring and the drinking. A riot of a diary. A volume that gives new meaning to honesty,” says Hefin Wyn, the author of several books on the history of pop music in Wales. “Better to listen to the songs than to think about the storm in the background! If this is what it takes to compose a classic such as Môr o Gariad, then so be it.”
Then Meic brings us to his present love story, after receiving a phone call in 2008, from a woman he hadn’t seen since 1962. He decided to start a new chapter with Liz in the tranquillity of Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, painting and preparing an exhibition of his artwork and photographs that will be displayed at Oriel Plas Glyn-y-Weddw next year. According to Meic, he has “come to the end of one chapter and is on the verge of starting a new one – strange, exciting but not the final one!”
Mas o Ma (£9.95) will be launched at Y Lolfa’s stall on the Eisteddfod field in Wrexham on Thursday the 4th of August at 2pm.
