10 Puckish Spells, 15/16 June 2025

Valleys rave-ups, the jaw-dropping account of Barry McIlheney's first Cannes, women's work to lose yourself in, and poor cows

Sorry, a day late, ‘thanks’ to the prospect, earlier in the week, of an easy Sunday being derailed by sorting son for a school residential trip, dodgy trains, and three hours driving. But here I am. Last week, I published a Mid-Week Culture Blast (on Satie and childhood tapes) and Friday Flashback (on my first time in a music magazine) for paid subscribers. Last week, news of the 2026 Gordon Burn Prize judging panel was also announced - and I’m one of them. I join (gulp) Val McDermid, Andrew Macmillan, Nooruddean Choudry and Freya McClements. Am very much looking forward to reading lots of fabulous books.

But for now…let’s start with psychedelic goings-on in the Valleys.

1. A psychedelic all-dayer in the Newport Valleys, in fact, in Cwmcarn, a village not far from Risca and Caerphilly, overlooked by forested hills.

   

   
   I was here with friends to go to the Fork and Tune – an old bunkhouse, now an independent music venue – for a festival called Pwca, named after a mischievous sprite from Celtic mythology (Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream finds its roots in this character).
   
   Here’s something from the festival organisers about Pwca, stuck on the wall in the ladies’ lavs.
   

   

2. Cutting through the warm air of the afternoon came the music of the gorgeous Destan Dönemi. They mix Turkish folk (sung beautifully by Büşra Algeç, who also played gorgeous flute solos) with fingerpicked, sun-struck guitar (by Evan Graham). My video of them is rubbish, so find out more about them here.

3. Inside the Fork and Tune later on were Water Pistol, a great glam gang of a band that are somehow the sound of 2025 fed through filtered visions of 1994 and 1968. They made me feel both old and young.

   

4. The glory of seeing a double-female-fronted band, Nookee, as headliners, especially watching singer Gemma and singer-for-tonight Ruth (standing in Gemma’s twin sister, Violet, who had “an incident with the pwca”) sing to each other. The music seemed to gobble up the influences of Janis Joplin, Egyptian funk, Chic, power ballads, girl groups, the Nova Twins and ‘70s Heart without stopping for breath. Mega fun, and they look amazing (no Ruth below in the band shot, of course, but props to her for her talent, as well as her bejewelled white cowboy hat).

   

5. Seeing loads of teenagers and twenty-somethings dancing like mad with the same white glow-in-the-dark face paint as we were wearing, and feeling, for a few hours, that everything was going to be alright.
   

   

6. I’ve had a few major culinary epiphanies in my forty-seven years, and my first pot of ‘Irish curry sauce’ in the Cwmcarn Fish Bar is up there with them (AA Gill review: “it’s like chip shop curry sauce but spicier and well lush”).

7. Back home in the postbox was this Empire Magazine book, Movie Heaven. Thanks to Nige Tassell for mentioning it on BlueSky last week, which prompted me to find a copy online.

   

   It came free with the monthly in April 1995, and I’ve only had a chance so far to read my old editor Mark Ellen on Withnail and I (hilarious) and brilliant Barry McIlheney (see last week’s Substack) on the launch of the magazine at Cannes in 1989. His piece is a hell of a read - unfiltered and brazenly honest. Here’s a taster.

   

8. Thanks to Hannah Peel for introducing me to the beautiful music of Caterina Schembri – a Dublin-based, Italian-Colombian composer – one night last week on Night Tracks. Real beauty floats and soothes in this album’s small sounds, spaces and silences.
   
   

9. The joy of seeing three brilliant Welsh women in conversation about life, death, trauma, relationships, Welsh identity and so much more at Bookish in Crickhowell on Friday – I don’t go to enough of this brilliant bookshop’s events, and I always leave feeling like my brain has expanded. I also loved coming home with new novels by Caryl Lewis and Fflur Dafydd, plus made a note to read the books of the excellent host, crime writer Alis Hawkins.

   

   

   
   

10. Another bookish note to end, from Lally Macbeth’s book, The Lost Folk, which I reviewed in yesterday’s Observer. I didn’t mention this in the review, but the moment she mentioned the cow heads that I see out of the window every time I go to my office in in Abergavenny…it fair well blew my mind.
    
    Cows were paraded up this road, before going to market. I like how these guys look like they’re going to raise mischief instead. Another puckish spell…