Back in the 1990’s if someone had said that in 20 years Clint Boon of the Inspiral Carpets and Cerys Matthews of Catatonia would be sharing a stage in Salford taking about a food book, you would have been laughed out.
But in 2019 it is fact-Cerys is promoting her book, Where the Wild Cooks Go,is having been experimenting with music and food ever since she can remember.
The book has been described as a decidedly rock and roll take on cooking, recipes collected from thirty years of travels around the world.
Today she is known best for her DJ on BBC World Service, BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music where she programmes and hosts an award-winning weekly show as well as writing and presenting documentaries for BBC Radio 4, 3 and 2 as well as BBC Television.
Going back twenty years she was the founder member of multi-million selling band Catatonia and duets with Sir Tom Jones on the perennial winter favourite, Baby its Cold Outside.
Her self-produced album of traditional Welsh songs, ‘Tir’ is the biggest selling Welsh language album of the past ten years, the second volume, ‘Hullabaloo’ followed in 2013
But tonight it was all about food.The audience were treated to a culinary journey, a lesson in how to make Ian Brown’s favourite cocktail which Cerys had discovered while the two were dangling their feet in the clean waters at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan.
The delights of faggots, the Spanish use of a cantaloupe melon, the origins of the sandwich, interspersed with Cerys quoting from Confucius, singing viva Espana and reminding the audience to live life to the full.
She grew up thinking Findus Crispy Pancakes were the bees knees of food, her parents only getting what she described as an epiphany when they ventured to Spain on package holidays
Her own epiphany came when she was given a book by Roger Philips called Wolf Food at the age of eleven and discovered a copse at the back of her house littered with prams and porn mags where she began to forage herself for nettles believing this was the way to survive the apocalypse.
Cerys is currently putting the finishing touches to her own festival, the Good Life Experience,which will be held in Flintshire from September 12 to 15.
This year’s line-up includes Norman Jay, Guy Chambers and the International Teachers of Pop as well as best selling authors such as Helen Sharman and Dame Stella Rimmington and her foraging hero Roger Philips.
