Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
hyrwyddo a dathlu cerddoriaeth Cymru
promoting and celebrating the music of Wales
+44 (0)29 2063 5640
4. The bid process
Even though in principle the Welsh government were in favour of bidding for WOMEX, there were an awful lot of hoops to jump through first, namely getting the support of various local institutions, as Hâf explains. “The Welsh Government has something called the Major Events Unit and we went to see them and they said, ‘well, you’re not getting anything until you’ve got Cardiff Council on board’. And we just thought, oh, here we go. That’ll be the first door slammed in our faces. But as luck would have it, the door just pushed wide open and the council were like, ‘oh, this sounds brilliant! Yeah, just what we want to do.’” Then it was a question of getting the two main venues on board as well: Wales Millennium Centre and the (as it was then) MotorPoint Arena.
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With the support all in place, the bid was finally submitted in 2010 and a whole year of negotiating went on afterwards, including two site visits by the WOMEX team. “It was massive,” recalls Hâf. “We treated it as if it was the Olympics! I mean, there was a banquet in Cardiff Castle and recitals in St Fagans… we literally went to town with it.”
Winning the bid
“I had no idea we were going to win it!” admits Hâf. It was 2011 and the day Hâf found out that the Welsh bid had been successful, she was out with her young toddler twins. “I was in the anthropological museum in Brussels with my twins, who were running around screaming,” recalls Hâf. “And I got the phone call from Ben and then joined in the screaming!” she laughs. “My friend was saying, what’s the matter? And I said, I’m not allowed to tell you! It was just insane.” The announcement was embargoed for five months, meaning that Hâf and the team “had to keep it really quiet. And we did, although we really wanted to share with the world.”
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The official announcement was finally made at Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff in September that year. “We basically convened a big WOMEX information press conference, to talk about WOMEX 2013,” Mandelson remembers. “We did the whole kind of Olympics schtick, so I had an envelope and the word for ‘Congratulations’ written out phonetically in Welsh. And while it was very amusing, of course, it was obvious – why would I be in Cardiff with an envelope if it was going to be Glasgow?” Once announced, then began the real task of rallying and preparing the Welsh music industry for the big event.
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Davies contributed to some of the early meetings when objectives for WOMEX were being discussed. He was keen to emphasise “both the opportunities that Welsh artists had through WOMEX, to export their work and develop international profiles, but also about the need to manage artists’ expectations, that this wasn’t a kind of magic silver bullet that suddenly arrived in town, and then all your careers would be magically transformed. It doesn’t happen like that.”
It was massive.
We treated it as if it was the Olympics!
Davies feels that although there was plenty of encouragement prior to the event for artists to attend and make the most of the wonderful opportunity, it should have come with caveats. “While this is an opportunity, it’s not a gift, and you have to work at it. And you also have to have your careers developed to such an extent where you’re export ready, and you have the right kind of backing and support infrastructure behind you. Whether that’s you personally, or us, as an industry within Wales, that whole stuff needs to be around it. And you’re going into a global playing field here, which is very competitive. I think a lot of artists afterwards had expected magic to happen, then were disgruntled a bit because it didn’t happen for them.”
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Welsh Music Foundation and Trac were instrumental in preparing Welsh artists and companies by organising a substantial artist and industry development programme. “We started that plan back when we knew that we were going to bid for it,” explains KilBride. The artists involved in that first development programme included Calan, Gwyneth Glyn and Idrissa Camara with his Ballet Nimba (a Guinean dance company founded in 2010 by Camara – Wales’s first black dance company), with sessions on topics such as how agents work, how to negotiate your fee and how to discuss your USP.
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