Unitam populus Cambrianus unam cervicem haberet!

It's official. According to tubby online batchelors at Wikio, No Good Boyo is the Tenth Welshest Web Blog in the World!

This information was culled and presented by Ordovicius, future President of All Wales and suitor of Mrs Boyo's imaginary sister.

Well, I don't know what to say.

First of all, I'm annoyed to be listed as non-political - this site is devoted to making Wales a Maoist haven for slate-based autarky and slogan-shrieking Urdd child soldiers.

Second, I could not have done it without Mrs Boyo's constant denigration of my friends and very being.

This above all drove me to seek solace in the web community of my thoughts.

Third, a big, hairy-palmed hand to all the self-polluters who boosted my ratings with such searches as 'caroline quentin basque', 'charlote church bukkake', 'brithdir wife swap' and 'glenys kinnock's Moroccan op'.

I owe a great debt to those early readers who've stuck with me through the good times and the bad - like when I forgot what my blog was called and couldn't find it for six months. I'm thinking of Gorilla Bananas and Gyppo Byard in particular.

I'm delighted to have met - or, if you believe Mrs Boyo, to have created in the vortex of my rapidly disintegrating personality - such international playboys and grandes dames distinguées as Ordo himself, MC Ward, Gadjo Dilo and Mrs Pouncer.

Above all, I am proud to have received the recognition of my Silurian peers. If I were to annoy an Uzbek billionaire this evening and have my blog banned by the Old Baileys, my proudest moment would probably have been singlehandedly reviving the singing career of Shakin' Stevens.

Before I blogged, he was loafing around in Peter Kaye videos. Now he's headlining at Glasto, the muddy musicbox of Home Counties whiteboys.

My ambitions for the next two years of blogging? Well, first up, I don't want the celebrity to ruin me. No tabloid rumours about Duffy seen leaving my shed in the early hours, no freebasing Brains and cockles in John Malkovich's hotel. I'm happy with Mrs Boyo and her threats of unnecessary surgical procedures.

Otherwise, I want to clamber up the Wikio Top Ten like a bandwith-drooling zombie until I reign supreme over the deleted comments of mine enemies.

Hwyl!

Cymru Rouge Accepts Rugby Laurels

A Press Release from Cymru Rouge Retrospective Achievements Department:

Attention Welshes!

The Politburo (Angka-p) of the Standing Plenum of the Central Committee of the Cymru Rouge clenches its calloused, six-fingered hands into one screaming fist of indefatigability in acknowledging the total and utter victory of the forces of Welshness, Socialism and Narrow Nationalism on the occupied soil of Boyograd (formerly known as Twickenham), where once the English settlers planted their pagan altars and parked their BMWs.

Rugby, invented by Welsh prepubescent chartist Gwilym Gwe Elis (slave name - William Webb Ellis) at HM Children's Prison, Rugby, has been a potent weapon in the armoury of Welsh resistance to English rule and all intellectual pursuits since 1823.

The Thatcher Regime suppressed the Welsh slate (also coal and steel) industry in the hope that an end to compulsory body-building would turn the Welsh into a nation of football-watching frequenters of hairdressing salons like their lager-sipping oppressors.

The regrettable consequences can been seen in the non-dialectical regression of Welsh rugby post-1979, paralleled by the Kinnockite spurning of narrow nationalism in favour of appearing in musical videos with US agent Tracey Ullman.

It comes as no surprise to students of Lenin, Stalin and Stevens that the surge in bourgeois campanilismo that brought Plaid Cymru into dual power with Labour last year will soon yield, Kerensky-like, to the Dictatorship of the Workers, Peasants and Progressive Studentry (as Subcontracted to the Cymru Rouge Politburo).

The Welsh rugby squad, led by the indomitable [insert the name of the relevant no-neck here would you Griff? Ta, NGB], has felt the hand of history on its tackle, and heralded the advent of the Cymru Rouge by storming the Winter Palace of Englishness, causing a tsunami of spilt gin & tonic to engulf Virginia Water and other female dignitaries of the Brown Junta.

For this, we, the Rouge, accept the thanks of a grateful nation, the admiration of radicals worldwide, and the submission of the English ruling class.

The dialectic, nonetheless, demands its price. Just as a knave would whisper uncouth couplets in the laurelled ear of conquering Caesar, so the Politburo must warn the resurgent workers not to succumb to Dizziness With Success. The English enemy knows that rugby can sap, as well as seed, a nation's sorrel.

Our attention has been drawn by a Maltese plutocrat to the treasonable activities of this rugby personage, whose pebbledashing of our draconian tongue with English fool's gold can be heard on this slouched interview with a member of the Cymric Women's Battalion of Death:



This linguistic loucheness may be acceptable to the Tagalog-tattling trickshaw totos of Manila, but to us and therefore you it is a betrayal of all that is Welsh. Our vowel-free native idiom has adequate words for all the English expressions used therein, except for the alien concept of "shame".

Henceforth, in the brief interval before the abolition of television and all other non-slate-based media, the intrusion of English words into Welsh broadcasts will be drowned out by automatic gunfire and the chanted slogans of indoctrinated child-soldiers.

Otherwise, well done!

Brawd Rhif Un - Paul Pot
Brawd Rhif Dau - Ta Moc
Brawd Rhif Tri - Huw Samphan

Cyfres Y Ceirw III: Shakin' Stevens

Shaky is, of course, the greatest living Welsh after Tom Jones, Howards Marks and Charlotte Church. So why does he need extra exposure by here? Surely his body of work speaks for itself?

Indeed, but I come to praise not Shaky the Rock Colossus, for he belongs to the world, but Shaky the socialist politician and Welsh patriot.

As is often the case with great Welsh radicals, today's Shaky grew from unexpected roots.

Born Étienne Tremblant in the fabled Dynevor Tower of Oystermouth Castle in 1948, Shaky was the scion of one of Wales's oldest and most rapacious Norman families. His father, Sir Rollo Tremblant Bt, handed him over to a cabal of reves, makars and soused nursemaids, who instructed him in the ways of robber-barony in the back lanes and bedchambers of Gower.

A lifetime of sybaritic cruelty, ruffled shirts and bastardy awaited young Étienne until a fateful trip to the bordellos of Hamburg in 1967 organised by his private tutor - the unlicensed apothecary, Katangan consul and author of "Achmed, un fils du Rif", Conrad Latto.

As the two rode down the midnight Reeperbahn in a carriage drawn by a pair of Moroccan pony-boys, Étienne leafed through a copy of Adorno's "Minima Moralia" that he'd picked up in an alternative bookshop in the reasonable expectation that it was a Renaissance guide to mauve depravity.

As he told Michael Heatley, "[Adorno's] fragmentary aphorisms seemed to fuse together as I read them, forming a golden bar of philosophical bullion. The way forward was now clear to me. I told Conrad to rein in Mohand and Abdenour, dismounted, shook his hand for the last time, and strode into the dialectic as confidently as my silken hosiery permitted." ("Shaky: The Biography of Shakin' Stevens", Michael O'Mara Books, 2005, p38)

Étienne used his inheritance and shallow reading in the crepuscular classics of European and Near Eastern literatures to surf the spume of the German radical left, which began battering the bollards of bourgeois West Germany the following year.

But he soon grew disillusioned with the Marcusean posturings of the 68er-Bewegung, clearly foreseeing the rise of its violent, anarchic undercurrent to the surface in the form of the Baader-Meinhof Group (see his pamphlet "The One-Dimensional Movement: The Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund and a Superstructure of Gewalt", Spartakusverlag, Hamburg, 1968).

Many were unable to forgive him this incisive criticism, especially after the attempt on the life of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke, and Tremblant decided to return to Wales.

It was while toying with the radio in the family Bentley as he crossed the Heads of the Valleys that Étienne found himself switching rapidly between a recording of Aneurin Bevan and a track by a young rockabilly outfit called The Sunsets from Penarth. A second epiphany followed. "How to bring the tropes of Critical Theory to the working classes in Wales? For 'we are a musical nation' are we not? I had the car turn left - where else? - and we raced down the Rhondda towards the The Sunsets, towards the sea." (Heatley, p97).

It took a little time and a lot of money for Étienne to persuade The Sunsets to let him take lead vocals and songwriting duties, but it soon paid off in a string of consciousness-raising gigs.

The hits - "Sweet Little Rock & Roller" (1972 - dedicated to Leila Khaled), "Honey Honey" (1973 - a critical anthem mocking the statist posturings of the new East German Communist leader Erich Honecker), and "Jungle Rock" (1976 - in memory of Patrice Lumumba) - kept the band going while not compromising its revolutionary integrity.

After an uncertain start, Tremblant heeded the band's advice and agreed to change his name to something both more rock and yet more roll. In an early intimation of his interest in Welsh culture, Étienne opted for the name Steffan Y Crynwr, but the possible translation as "Stephen the Quaker" brought in too many earnestly silent men in cardigans and plain, plain women to make the joints jump. And so he bowed to cultural hegemony, and adopted another English version of his stage name. Thus was born Shakin' Stevens.

Shaky went solo in 1977, but the bond of solidarity he'd already forged with the workers, peasants and progressive studentry of Wales kept him in touch politically during the good times - and supported him in the locust years of the 1980s.

For Shaky's work was subject to a near-total and utter broadcasting boycott throughout the grim decade of Thatcherism following his alleged assault on Richard Madeley during an episode of "Calendar Goes Pop" in 1980. It was simply a Happening that Shaky had staged to illustrate a point he'd been trying to make about Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" to Francis Rossi out of Status Quo, but the coarsened social sensibility of the time was unable to grasp that.

Richard and Judy are the closest thing the English have to royalty, even though it was years before they'd met, and Shaky stood no chance. The only records of his that Radio One would play were either covers or songs with lyrics of such Æsopian subtlety that the BBC censors could not catch their thread of subversion. "I felt like I could look Vysotsky, Victor Jara and Wolf Biermann in the eye at last," Shaky recalled ruefully of those tense times (Heatley p178).

Highlights of the "Decade of Resistance", as Shaky called it, were "Shooting Gallery" (1980 - a chill warning of the advent of President Reagan), "This Ole House" (1981 - which pilloried the impotence of the House of Commons in the face of Thatcherism), "Oh Julie" (1982 - a bold doo-wop treatment of the semiotics of Julia Kristeva), and "A Rockin' Good Way" (1984, with miners' activist Bonnie Tyler, and dedicated to Woody Guthrie), culminating in the coruscating slab of anti-Eurocommunism that was 1990s "Pink Champagne".

Indeed, Shaky had been increasingly unhappy with the reformism taking root in the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and 1981's "Green Door" was a clear overture to Plaid Cymru's socialist wing under Dafydd Elis Thomas to form a broad Welsh left alliance.

An explicit invitation to Plaid would have cost Shaky his candidate Politburo membership, of course, and it is only to be regretted that Elis Thomas was unable (or unwilling?) to break free of Plaid's Gwynforite ascendancy. Shaky has written wistfully of what might have been in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Dafydd Wigley", a pamphlet that the Arts Council of Wales repeatedly refuses to print.

The bureaucratic establishment of the Welsh Assembly has long since cast the pall of osmosis over Elis Thomas and other erstwhile radicals, and the irony is that Shaky's political legacy is more widely recognised at home than abroad.

His record sales in Denmark are an indictment of us all, and it has been left to the Northern chronicler of proletarian culture, Peter Kay, to pay Shaky tribute by making him the only star to make two separate appearances in his homage to the Mexican Revolution, "(Is This The Way to) Amarillo":



As Tom Jones gradually reduces his public commitments and Owain Glyndwr persistently declines to heed the call, the stage may yet still be set for Shaky to take his rightful place as First President of the Welsh Republic. The question is, are we Welsh enough to deserve him?