A year after the release of my debut album, the second album is coming! We'll record it in January in Belgium and Germany. Below is a clip from a recent gig with my London band of our brand new German song, Ich Liebe Sofia a.k.a. Sofia ist Vergeben. This will be on the new album, as well as the other new crowd favourites "Goldfish" and "Special Cream", updated versions of some of our other popular songs, and some brand new never-heard-before songs.

On November 2nd I played this song in Tubingen at Klangfolk, infront of Sofia and all her friends, and then again on November the 4th in Lichtenstein Haus (audio and video from that is on the way). This was the second time she's heard it performed. In summer 2019 I was in Tubingen, and I performed it in front of her boyfrend, in the basement of Lu 15, with Cristobal on sax, Ana Maria on clarinet, Mira on flute, Vilma on bass, Ammar, Sami & Jonas L on percussion (did I miss anyone?).
The idea for the song was born back in 2017, after I visited Tubingen for the first time on my way back from Rila music exchange.

I started 2018 partying in Brno to a balkan band, after playing a set with my own travelling folk collective, Transglobal Troubadours (chucked in some Worldwide Welshman songs, of course). As the new year came in I was dancing in the street with Nemat, a beautiful Palestinian-Jordanian singer and dancer who lives in Sweden.
A few days after Christmas I'd taken the bus to Gent, where we began our road trip to the folk marathon in Brno, Czech Republic. Jonas Malfliet, Joachim Thyrs, Vilma Tavitie and I drove through Europe. Well, they drove, because I still didn't get round to learning to drive. We stopped over in Tubingen, in the house of Steph who I would later meet on Ethno England. We arrived in Brno to meet my brother, Sion, and many friends including my EthnoEngland pal and fellow Transglobal Troubadour, Frankie Archer, Joseph Woods from Jay Sunaway, Susi Evans from the London balkan scene, and many friends from Rila Music Exchange (where Jonas, Frankie and me went in September 2017), Ethno Flanders (also a significant occassion) and Tubingen (my favourite German town).

On the way to Brno, Jonas was called by master accordionist Keiren Alexander, who asked us if we would perform that night. So we made a set in the car. Half way through this video you can hear the Transglobal Troubadours balfolk set, curated by Jonas Malfliet our accordion maestro. In this one we had Jonas, Joachim and Arthur from Belgium, Frankie from Newcastle, Vilma from Finland and me from Wales (singing a Russian song taught to me by Granny Bella).

Another  highlights was dancing to, and jamming with, an amazing Israeli balkan band, Gute Gute, who you shoould definietly check out: https://www.facebook.com/GuteGuteMusic. They also make orginal Israeli indie-folk music.

After Brno, Jonas, Vilma and I drove onwards to Pazin, Croatia, for the Trad-In-Etno Mini-Folk-Marathon where we made a lot of new friends who we'd see later in the year. We were joined by our friends Gabriel and Angelika, and Joachim went back to Belgium, and my brother went to Wales via Prague.
This event was the reason I later went to Folktrepo in Italy and Ethno Portugal, and also was lucky enough to host the talented Ray & Luna in London. I say host, they actually spent most of the time with some friends of a friend, just down the road in a property guardianship. My flat isn't really kitted out for guests, or even for me...

I've been living without a fridge or a shower for three years...I put my food in a cooler box on the balcony, and I was by tipping a bucket of water over my head; I use the kettle to heat the water. Now my kettle has broken; no problem in summer, but I need to get this situation sorted before winter.

Above: Rayo De Luna, French-Venezuelan and Turkish-Kurdish-Danish duo. When they played in the Bunker I thought, "I need to bring them to London" so I took this video to show to venues here...and it actually happened! They played in Meyhane, The Golden Hinde, Ravensdale Warehouse and Jam in a Jar.

Across The Sea
I set up "Across The Sea" in order to promote gigs for friends I met on ethnos. The first was in December on the Golden Hinde, with myself, Anna McAndrew, Deda Lera and THE EMBERS COLLECTIVE (but a mini version...you need to see this crew in their full glory, they are quite something).
The second was the best ever, with Old Salt from Gent. I met the main man, Daniel Wall, in Rila music exchange, and I met his band mate Lote in folk marathon Brno. They came to London in February and plaed a sold out show on the Golden Hinde.

but that's another story...

After Brno we drove onwards to Pazin, with two new travel companions, our friends Angelika and Gabriel who Jonas and I met on Rila music exchange. for more magical experiences in Pazin, Croatia.

Then in easter came Folktrepo in Italy, organised by Elisa Mandriola and her friends. She was on the Pazin one and was inspired to make a similar event in her home town.
For this one I again traveled overland with the two members of Transglobal Troubadours who couldn't make it in the winter - Lewis and Helen from Edinburgh. On the way to Italy we played a show in Robinialand, Gent, and in...you'll never guess.... Tubingen, the Epplehaus! But we were interrailing this time, and we went through a new place - Lugano in Switzerland! It is indeed rather expensive.

After the folk camp in Spessa Po, near Pavia, N.Italy,  I visited Sofia (my Italian friend from Tubingen) in her home up in the hills, near a pretty town called St Sebastian. Amazing food, amazing place! After a day or so here, I went to Antonio's flat in Stradella to record a version of Easy to Be Happy which will come out on my debut CD (its been NEARLY finished for nearly a year now...it just keeps growing bigger). Then I took a trip to Bologna, where I bumped into an Italian girl who I know from London, then to Rome to stay with an old uni friend, Cristiano.
After a few exhausting but interesting days here, I travelled on an overnight train from there to Munich, then to Dusseldorf to see Gaurav Sinha, my friend from the architecture office where I worked in New Delhi.

Then soon enough it was summer, and I was volunteering on Ethno England. My volunteering mainly involved making a nice painting for the tour poster, which we then neglected to finish in time to advertise the wales part of the show. But, we succeded in taking Ethno England on tour to Neuadd Ogwen in Bethesda (where I stayed with my parents), then Cobalt Studios in Newcastle (where I stayed with my Uncle and Aunty) and in Edinburgh (we stayed in a hostel, but I stayed on a few days with my Scottish ethno friends, and of course bumped into people I know, new and old, as happens whereever I go in this surprisingly small world).

Soon after this my brother and I went by bus to Ethno Catalonia in Banyoles, where we taught a kickass welsh song and tune that always got the crowd going. The best bit was when two of the Algerians, Hamza and Medhi, would jump up and play their Quarkaboe's whilst dancing.

After this we went onto Ethno Portugal. We thought it couldn't get any better, but it did! Portugal was great, I was surrounded by amazing musicans, dancers and all round lovely people...I remember at somepoint getting down because I couldn't pull anyone, and other people seemed to be coping off with each other fairly easily... I thought "how can I be in folk music and dance camp surrounded by beautiful women, yet not manage to 'get lucky'.?"...but the problem was that I was walking around with a big "desperate" sign on my forehead, so after I realised this I felt my luck changing, and I became attractive once again.
Ethno Portugal ended with an epic folk dancing festival in the searing heat. It was the hottest place I've been, up there with South India (I was in Delhi during Autumn and Winter, and left in spring just as it was starting to get hot, so I was spared that experience)

We love playing in Gadz Cafe, Finsbury Park. One time, we met a famous politician who we greatly admire. The Italian band members hadn't heard of him. We requested "Guantanamera" for his wife, as it's her favourite song. Hussain the cafe ower, the regular, our fans and the leader of the opposition and his wife put arms over each overs shoulders and danced around the band, singing along.

Its been a busy time for me in London since my last blog post, which was well over a year ago. Updating the blog part of the website has slipped down my list of priorites.

So, in June last year I went on an amazing and life changing intercultural music exchange: Ethnoengland, which took place in Oxford. These summer camps for 16-30 year olds started in Sweden in the 90s and now happen all over the world, check them out: ethno-world.org.
The England edition was organised by Lauren Spicely and the Tandem Collective, a group of amazing people who are also talented musicains with an environmental & social mission. One of the main focuses of the Tandem Collective is reducing food waste and this came into the ethno as well: most of the food we ate was the stuff that shops, restaurants and bakeries weren't able to sell and had given to the food bank. Obviously the food bank is for people who can't afford to feed themselves and their families, bur we were not taking from them; a lot perishable goods get donated so we took the excess. We were also given fresh curry food everyday from a delicious Indian restaurant whose owner loved the project so gave us food for free (left over from his buffet). Curry every day was amazing for me as I love Indian food.
The festival also looked at mental health issues and the moeny raised went to Mind and other local charities.

This year I went back to ethnoengland, which happened on a farm in Ramsden, in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside.
The Tandem festival was much bigger than last year, with amazing bands such as Moulettes (alternative rock), Kourelou (greek music), Akervinda (vocal group singing Swedish folk songs), Zlabya (epic bafolk), and many more, including our friends Jay Sunaway, Yakez, Steph West, Sophie-janna. And of course there was the Ethnoband, which I was part of. The best of all was this cracking new band from London called Worldwide Welshman & Beyond. They are of course my brand new band! (and by no means the best, but we were warmly welcomed and had a great time, and we went down very well).

The newest lineup started in February with a charity gig in The Others followed by one the day after in The Hive. The band consists of my Italian jamming buddies Carry & Nicholas on guitars, Elliot on bass (who I met in a mad hatter's ball in West London), Hugo on drums (from Paris), Semra on darbuka (Turkish lady I met in Jamboree), Anna on backing vocals (we worked together in the music department at Linden Lodge school so she joined the band) and, occasionally, New Yorker-tunred-Londoner Benjamin on Trombone and Giusy Cancellara on Violin. A month or so later, on our way to play at the Community Garden in Elephant & Castle, my brother Sion and I met another brass player, Hywel, and invited him to join us in the gig, and he has since become our 7th band member, my brother and Ben being part-time members, and Giusy having left the electirc lineup and joined the acoustic spin-off project (you can catch us on Sundays on the book barge by Granary Square, Regents Canal).

Our biggest and best show so far was when we played in front of thousands of people in the Lambeth Country Show, Brockwell park. The next big show will be in HOOTERNANYS on September the 23rd, which we are understandably very excited about, it being a major venue on the world, funk, indie and gypsy scenes in London.

As well as building the band, I've been working on recordings with a lot of help from Carry, the guitarist from "& Beyond", who is an excellent sound engineer and my co-producer for the upcoming album.
To fund all this, I've been working as a teaching assistant, and for a few months as a supply music teacher, and teaching music classes on the weekend. And we're getting more and more paid gigs which is exciting.

What's next?
In a few days I'll be heading to Ethnoflanders in Oonstend, and playing 3 shows with them including Dranouter festival on 6th of August! https://www.festivaldranouter.be/
After this I'm heading to Toulouse to join my band in Hugo's aunty's house for a week of music making and busking!
Then on August 20th I'm playing a set of mainly Jewish songs in Selig Court, for my grandmother and neighbours & carers. That evening I'll get the train to Edinburgh to join the Transglobal Troubadours (a spinoff of the Ethnoengland band), and we'll be there from 21st til 24th. And after that I'll be going on the Rila Music Exchange; travelling around the mountains of Bulgaria learning Bulgarian & Roma folk songs, meeting local people, eating goats cheese, jamming, drinking rakia...its going to be amazing!
Thanks for reading!
Liam

"Serendipities and New Age Hippies"
The Adventures of Worldwide Welshman in London, Kent, Madrid and Birmingham, August 2015 to January 2016

Small World Festival

After a summer of renting a room in a fairly decent house in Lewisham with great housemates, at what was a low price for London (about £420 with bills), the time came when I had to move out. The lad who's room I was renting was returning from Camp America. But before I get to that bit I must tell you about what I got up too before I moved out, continuing roughly from where my last blog entry finished...

On the last weekend of August, Timestealers played at Small World festival in Hedstone, Kent! Well, I'm exaggerating somewhat…Paul Murray and I played on the open-mic stages. We weren't on the bill. And it wasn't the full band; Nick the bass player was busy with exams and Adam the drummer was busy working and soon going back to Nottingham for his final year of architecture.
Steve Broe the busker, who was helping promote me and getting me a few gigs, said I would love it at Small World, so he put me in touch with Stacey Cohen, who put my in touch with Gaia Knight on facebook, who invited me to do “impromptu jamming” in her Tribal Voices campfire area. Gaia got us in for free on her guest list!

In July I'd supported Stacey Cohen in the Silver Bullet, Finsbury park in a gig organised by Steve. As it happens, I'd already met her and I played on the same bill with when she was living in North Wales, and she also happens to be friends with my cousin.

Paul and I travelled to the festival in Paul's family's small car. The festival's website was terrible, so we had no idea what sort of event it it would be; some hippies in a field getting high around a campfire, a village fête type thing, or a 'proper' festival? Turned out to be the best festival in the world, ever! (the best that we've been too so far at least).
There were a few people getting off their heads on drugs too, but that did not hinder our enjoyment, and it was a better atmosphere than it would have been had everyone been pissed (we did not partake in the drugs however).

We pitched our tent next to these two gorgeous girls, Amber and Lily who turned out to be great festival buddies. We met a chap called Martin who was our other festival friend, also camped nearby.

The music was varied and fun, and very much to my tastes! There was a lot of gypsy-esque (or gypsy-ska-reggae-klezmer-balkan-festival) music from bands such as Mamajerk & the Ladyfingers, Mr T & the Minions, Razzamo, Duncan Disorderly & the Scallywags & La Vera (who is a gorgeous Spanish lady with a beautiful voice who I was lucky enough to end up in the nudist sauna with at one point). I'd say that Timestealers falls into this category. And there were some great violin based pop-rock-folk-world bands such Aelfen, People's String Foundation, The Unsaid Hand (?), contemporary folk bands with Celtic fiddle music like Snuffkin (these were on a lot, on all the stages, with a few different line-ups), some darker, intense string music from My Octopus Mind, some virtuoso Kora playing and West-African songs from Mosi Conde (who I bumped intoin January in Passing Clouds, and who remembered me from dancing to his music at Small World!), some funk-soul-catchy-pop from Fabulous Red Diesel and Corners of The Earth, some contemporary, original & amazingly tight jazz-rock from Thidius, American & English style folk with beautiful harmonies from Him & Her (we had THE BEST jam with these guys outside their camper-van), and political reggae from the amazing Undercover Hippy (famous in North Wales, but surprisingly not famous in the rest of the country). The list of great bands could go on and on. A lot of the bands were from Bristol and Brighton, which seem to have large gypsy-esque/ new-age traveller/ hippy scenes.

Almost everyone we met was a musician. People walked around with clarinets and violins. Paul's trumpet went down very well!

I remember particularly Larry's Lounge which was always full of musicians playing board games, drinking, smoking, and once eating a chicken curry (at a mostly veggie festival) from a dirty oven that sat outside at the back of the tent. There was a piano which I played, and Larry, a New-Zealander who looks like John Lennon, joined on bass sax or bass guitar, along with whoever was about. It wasn't such a good jam actually as most people there were off their heads and hadn't slept for the whole festival. I remember meeting a pretty girl there who played clarinet and had lots of jewels on her face, looking like an Indian gypsy, but white and blonde. That is my image of the festival.

Oddly, it was mainly White British people, and no visibly Roma people as far as I could tell despite lots of gypsy and Balkan influenced music. There could have been people with Romany heritage but I wouldn't know. The bands sung mainly in English, but there was a bit of Spanish and French singing too, and West African languages from Mosi Konde (so there's lots of space for me to add something different with my multi-lingual set when I get on the bill one day!).

My thoughts on the lack of Roma people in the festival were only solidified afterwards when I got chatting to another teaching assistant called Anna Lowenstein at Linden Lodge, a school I worked at for a while. She plays violin in Tell Tale Tusk, and she also plays some Klezmer. In our conversation I discovered that she was familiar with, or part of, the Small World, new-age, hippy scene (Small World is a genius name, right?). She did her dissertation on festival gypsy music and its connection, or lack thereof, to real gypsy music. She emailed it to me but I haven't read it yet.

I bumped into her again in January at the Bucumis Trio gig in Jam in Jar. They played Bulgarian folk music, but most of the band members were not Bulgarian, but they'd studied Bulgarian music in Plovdiv, in a music school which is right next to the Roman amphitheatre that Paul, Swinn and I visited in our Balkan backpacking holiday back in 2013.

One of my personal highlights from the festival was a jam on the Tee-pee Village stage. The stage had no pre-booked acts, but instead was like an open mic for music and poetry, and bands would come on and play surprise warm-up sets there before going to the main stages. The guy who ran it played bass. I asked “can I do something and you guys back me up?” and then not long afterwards, after eating some dinner, I was on stage backed with a drum kit, bass, trumpet, violin and dijeridoo! I sang my usual gypsy-pop covers – Amaritzi Amari, Misirlou, Chi'lett la Yeni, Volare, Llorando se fue, and then Paul arrived and we did another one I've been doing for years, Can't Get You Out of My Head. My voice was knackered already; it became so after the first night (before this I'd been doing a lot of singing in London). I remember singing a very cracked & hoarse but energetic & cool sounding rendition of the Algerian song Chi'lett La Yeni, sitting on a straw bail in the cider tent with Steve Broe, Paul and our festival buddies.

Madrid
Early in September I went to Madrid for five days with Beccy Swinn to visit Rebe, JP and their friendly bohemian crew.

Beccy & JP filmed me performing my song "Waltz with me Darling" in a pretty town just outside Madrid. Unfortunately my voice was a bit nackered.

Refugee Solidarity March

Discovering the world music and the hippy/new age scenes in London

In September & October I had a full time position as a teaching assistant at Linden Lodge and I went to gigs pretty much weekly. On the 20th of September while the long summer was still going strong, I performed for the second time in Grow Elephant, the Elephant & Castle community garden on New Kent Road. I also did a mural for them with help from some Korean artists I'd met recently and some local children. After it went dark we watched a captivating storytelling band who used shadow puppets in their performance. The pianist and songwriter sang inventive, surreal, tragicomedy songs.

At the start of October I invited one of the Korean artists, Haein, to come with me and see a Chilean Tango singer called Valentina in Bolivar Hall, the Venezuelan embassy (Simon Bolivar is also the person “Bolivia” is named after). I was invited by one of Rae's activist friends who I'd met at the refugee march. It was a brilliant concert, and entirely, miraculously free! (I took with me a pretty Korean video artist called Haein).
The organisers gave out a flyer for an event the following week which looked interesting. It was an anti-colonialist event held at the School of Oriental and African Studies called “1492 Resistance Continues” (this is the date when the Europeans started colonising South America). On the day of the event, I went to Artworks to meet a friend from ICS and we met Mauritian poet and thinker called Khal Torabully who was giving a talk. It was very interesting, also about colonialism, so it fitted with the event I went to afterwards at SOAS.

At the event, I met people from the anti-colonialist movement, which became another recurring theme in my adventures in London, and heard some interesting and challenging perspectives. I have to say that the best part for me was the dancing at the end; although compelling and important I sometimes find 'politics' is too much for me and makes me a bit stressed by filling up my mind with confusion and uncertainty. People are so certain, yet everything is grey and nothing is certain, and what's right for one is wrong for someone else. But this is a topic for another blog entry.

In the SOAS Students Union I saw a lot of posters for exciting gigs. I chose to see “Varldens Band”, who I'd never heard of, and Transglobal Underground with Fanfare Tirana, who I was already a fan of. Both gigs were in Shoreditch.

Varldens Band describe their music as "transglobal roots fusion". The a collaboration between a Swedish folk-pop band of guitars and fiddles,  an classical singer from India, a Kora player and singer from Senegal, some British folk boys playing accordion and guitar, a French girl on the bagpipes and flutes and some percussionists. Some of them had decorated themselves with feathers and jewels, and had dreads and exuberant clothing, in the hippie or new-age traveller style. The theme was “no borders” and “peace and love” two other regularly recurring themes in my life. The event was organised by “Celebrate Life” who are followers of Prem Rewat, one of the guru's I'd heard about in India.

A weekend in Birmingham
The Transglobal Underground gig was on a Sunday. On the Friday and Saturday of that weekend I went to Birmingham to see my friend Swinn, and we went to Digbeth.

On 21st October I played my first Starry Starry Nights show in The Star-By-Hackney-Downs, on the same bill as Kerttu Sorumen, Steve Broe (the busker and promoter) and Rosie Sky. I was headlining and it went very well. I met Steve's friend & lodger Arianna Italiana, and we soon became good friends.

On the Sunday of that week I went with Paul, Sion, Kirsty, Rae, Margarita and Tamarugo Jarrold (violin virtuoso) to see the début UK show of Chico Trujio, a brilliant Cumbia/Ska band from Chile that I was introduced to by Guillermo, the architecture tutor who took us to Cuba when I was in first year. I saw a lot of people from the SOAS event too. The promoter of this event was Movimientos, and I think they had something to do with the SOAS event and the Tango event (maybe they were all organised by the same people).

After this I went home for a few weeks and did some busking with my sister in Bangor to help her with her fundraising.

I returned to London on the 6th November to attend Nick Allen's birthday jam/mini-festival in rural Kent. It was quite an adventure. A friendly local offered Paul and me a lift from the station to the part, but as we didn't have an exact address we were dropped off on a verge in the dark, with me carrying a heavy Lidl bag of stuff that I'd ended up not needing but still had to lug around everywhere for the next few days. I'd invited some friends and I was a bit worried about how they'd get there, because I hadn't realised the type of event it was. But Arianna, Steve the busker, and his girlfriend arrived at the same time as Tamarugo, both having hitched lifts from the station. People in Kent are very friendly. We stayed up all night jamming and dancing and caught the early train back to London at around 6am. After catching a few hours kip on Tamarugo's sofa, I went to the Artworks to help run the Easles Art Market while Jos Azawala was in Ghana.

That evening I went to what turned out to be one of the absolute best gigs: Undercover Hippy in The Magic Garden, Battersea (part of the Small World scene). People recognised me from the festival and said hello (my poncho, thick hair, beard, dancing and performing make me quite memorable), and I got dancing with someone I recognised from the Movimientos events. Paul and my new friend Arianna came too.

Arianna and I left really late and I ended up staying on her sofa in Beckenham (which was actually Steve the busker's sofa because she was his lodger). On the Sunday I went out busking on South Bank with Kerttu the Finnish singer I met at the Silver Bullet in summer, also through Steve. After being moved on twice, we set up on the Millennium Bridge at sunset, looking over at St Paul's. It was beautiful.

On Wednesday that same week we went to see some other people we'd met at Small World, The Lyrical Nomads, in a hidden venue called Fox & Phoenix in Finsbury Park. It was a lovely atmosphere and they were good. I met a girl there called Joie De Winter who I crossed paths with again on January 1st in a new-age, tribal, shamanic style jam night in the Ritzy, Brixton. (I was invited there to accompany a Moroccan Gnawa musician called Youness who I met in December). At the Ritzy I made a lot of good connections, including meeting poet Jiten Patel and bamboo flautist Buddhenath who I went on to perform with at the 1st Annual Homeless Benefit Gig.

Street Jam in Camden
I met Javi Perez at the end of September when I was walking past Tottenham Court Road station. He'd just finished busking. He's a long haired, friendly, free-spirited Spanish dude. We chatted and exchanged numbers. He told me about his busking collective, Undergrooveland, and invited me to jam with them sometime.

That time finally came on November 21st, when Javi invited me to a protest in Camden against the council banning his band and other buskers from playing outside the station. He'd gathered together a welcoming bohemian group of musicians, dancers and artists. Rico (from my old band Naughty Magic Simon) was visiting from North Wales so I took him too. When Paul, Rico and I arrived everyone was drawing posters and standing with the instruments in a silent protest. Then at some point Faisal and Muti started singing “we want to sing good music” and Javi added “but the council won’t let” us, and this grew into a choral acappela piece. A crowd started forming and I picked up my guitar and added some Cm, Gm and Fm chords with a reggae rhythm, then soon the drums, bass and trumpets joined in, and we had a street party.
When I'd taken a break and started filming the jam, a girl came up to me in surprised recognition. It took a few seconds for me to figure it out, but then I recognised her and remembered her name (Kenza)! She was a girl I'd met in the computer room in my department at uni and then bumped into again when she happened to move into Rebeca Ortega's old house (I'd tried to ask her out actually but she cleverly escaped that).

People's March for Climate, Justice & Jobs, 29th November
There was a march coming up which we were both planning on attending. Kenza, the freind from uni, invited me to steward with her, so I went to a briefing session with Avaaz in the Christian Aid building in Waterloo, and a few days later I donned one of those green flourecent jackets and stewared at the march.

The decolonisation activists and speakers who I'd met at the SOAS event pushed to the front of the march chanting “we are the wretched of the earth!” and other slogans. I didn't understand at first and found their slogans a bit aggressive, but by the end of the march I understood. They were leading the march on behalf indigenous peoples around the world because these are the people worst effected by climate change and least responsible for it. The speaker from Friends Of The Earth talked a lot about this too. One of their points was that indigenous voices are too often buried and ignored, and even in this event they felt they were not being listened to because they said they'd been promised the front of the march, but Avaaz wanted their block at the front. There was some negotiating, and at one point the SOAS group all lay on the ground in protest. They were very effective campaigners. The most recognisable from this group, who I first saw at the SOAS event, is a stunning Aymara or Quechua lady who dresses stylishly in the traditional Andean Cholita outfit that was so common in La Paz. I never actually got to speak to her; she seemed to be one of the organisers and was always very busy.

I got to see all this happening because Kenza and I were lucky enough to be among the stewards brought right to the front of the march, at the head of a tens-of-thousands strong crowd! My close friends Paul and Swinn were there too, but I only found them at the end.

This was also the first day I went to Passing Clouds in Dalston, the best discovery of them all! It was the Sunday jam and this week it was being hosted by Kanti Quena, a Peruvian, his Bolivian wife, Janet, and their band, Lokandes, the band who supported Chico Trujio! At the start of the jam they praised “pacha mama” (mother-earth), and played some beautiful spiritual music with their five year old son on the drums. It tied in beautifully with the rest of the day. And to make it even more perfect, the Sami singers from Scandinavia who were right at the front of the march singing a traditional chant about mother-earth came to the jam arrived sang on stage!

The serendipity doesn't end there: Lokandes's pan-pipe player, Janet (who I'm sure I remembered from the SOAS event), was actually a student of Adrian Villanueva, the well-regarded Bolivian musician who built my Charango, which I purchased from the man himself in his workshop. Kanti Quena told me recently that Janet is famous in Bolivia too (I've been a few times to the Sunday Jam now so I'm getting to know the regulars).

The jam happens every Sunday hosted by different people and before the live music starts the DJ plays a brilliant global mix which is right up my street, the sort of thing I enjoy listening to on World on 3.
That first night I also met Juan Marcelo, a Chilean musician specialising in Andean music and Spanish rock who'd just moved to London from Spain, and we became friends.

Balkan relief gig at Goldsmiths with Sion, Rae, Margarita, and some cool and gorgeous Germans
On the last day of November I played at a “no borders” event in Goldsmiths raising funds for Balkan Relief, which is a cause I am passionate about. The set was with my brother, as Naughty Magic Simon. An anti-colonialist poet from the group “Sorry We Made You Feel Uncomfortable” raised some interesting points which made me question my beliefs and ideas, and yet again I became confused and worried that I might be guilty of cultural appropriation by singing in different languages and wearing clothes from different cultures...but I spoke to another poet who knows about this and she said I need not worry, the criticisms of “middle class white” ideas that prompted my thoughts were not directed at people like me. Still, my brother decided to pull the “Pub” from the set because he sings that with a Jamaican accent and we were worried we'd be accused of being racist. But we use the Jamaican accent for that song because it is in the Sean Paul style and we like the sound. People sing blues and rock with American accents, so for us it is the same as that.

December: Spaniards & Italians, and selling art in Trafalgar Square
An eventful month: Tuesday 1st of December, I went busking with Javi the guitar genius and another Spaniard called Mario outside Spaghetti House, where Stafano works (he was my housemate at the time, Arianna's boyfriend). Afterwards I stayed and danced to gypsy jazz from Gyps 'n' Progress with some gorgeous Italian Students who'd filmed us for their website. And I had a nice dance with mysterious stranger (as seen in the video below). I remember sitting on the pavement with Arianna and Steffano, and meeting this interesting French-Moroccan guy who liked my 'spiritual' aura and hippy clothes and beard. In November and December I met a lot of students who included me in their documentaries or photography projects about buskers, and so did Javi.

I cut down on working as a teaching assistant and instead tried to be a commercial artist & busker.
Using Unit 2 (The Trunk) in Artworks as my studio in which to mount prints and make paper bags from newspapers, I sold prints and Christmas cards on Trafalgar Square (for a donation, because technically you can't sell things on the street without a street vendor's licence). One of the nicest people I met there was Freddy, an Italian who does big chalk pictures on the floor. https://www.facebook.com/freddystreetartist

When Steve came back from his travels I moved out from Beckenham into a flat in Canary Wharf as a property guardian.

My friends JP and Rebe visited from Madrid on Thursday 17th, and on Friday we went to the Welcome Collection by Euston and experienced a great installation about consciousness (a room full of multi-coloured mist which meant you could only see a meter in front of you) and an exhibition on Buddhism. Rebe and I decided to learnt about Mindfulness and become more spiritual to solve our problems (which seem to be similar). We were stuck about what to do in the evening, but last minute I remembered the “Contact Jam” I'd been told about at the Varldens Band gig, which happens every Friday in in “The Place” - it was very nearby as we were in Euston. We improvised music for the dancers and had a go ourselves. Later on the street in Camden, I bumped into Ipek Ergin from uni! She was in London for a few days for her graduation. Small world.

On the 19th Gareth came down from Sheffield and we saw Star Wars!! it was brilliant.

On Wednesday 23rd I discovered the Elephant's Head, the best pub in Camden: my friend Santi (part of Rebe & JP's friendship group who I went on holiday with last year) was visiting from Spain and Arianna's younger sister was visiting from Italy too, so I arranged to meet everyone in Camden. Just to complicate things, I arranged to go busking with Marcelo too. To complicate it even more, I was in complete silence on the instructions of my singing teacher. Obviously I got quite frustrated and finally gave up on the silence at 4pm, after a day a half.

After some unsuccessful busking, Marcelo, Santi and I went to the Elephants Head to join the Italian girls and Steve the busker. We met lots of other Spaniards and South Americans too. My set with Marcelo went well and we got everyone dancing. We inspired an Andalucian called Al de Luna to perform some of his original Andalucian Reggae songs where were great. We also met Youness and Zacharias, Moroccan Gnawa musicians. https://www.facebook.com/ElephantsHeadCamden/
Here's us all dancing, if the link works...

On the December 30th, after a lovely Christmas in Hemel Hempstead, I went back to London and met my childhood friend Rob and his girlfriend Sally who were visiting from North Wales. At night we went to Camden and I played along with Youness at the Elephant's Head and came up and sang “Volare” and “Habibi” with me in my set, with drums and panpipes too. We got the party started. But straight afterwards I had to rush back to Spiritual Bar where I had a gig with Paul and Sion.
The gigs, busking, jamming, coincidences and fun continue in 2016…

I moved to Lewisham, London in June, and much has happened since then.

I got job as a supply teaching assistant with vibe. Then term ended. But luckily I got a part-time job as a courtyard curator at The Artworks UK, Elephant & Castle. This job and busking help me offset my financial losses and keep me going until September when I'll star teaching again. Its still a net loss in savings, since I've been rather lazy when it comes to buksing, and I only worl Friday and Saturday night, but, I'm suriving somehow.

The Artworls is a great place to work, and sometimes I get to do a few tunes on the stage or serenade people at their tables. Who could ask for a nicer job? Shame its Friday and Saturday nights when I want to be doing gigs.

I also started displaying my artwork in the Easles Art Market  every Saturday at the Artworks.

I met a proffessional busker and promoter called Steve Broe, and he's lent me his busking amp and given me a lot of support, including getting me some gigs in the Silver Bullet, Finsbury park, The Old Dispensary and a few other places. We've had good days busking in Shoreditch, Bromley and elsewere.
Somewhere I have a photo of us jamming at a Somwereto party in the Grow Elephant Community Garden, but I can't find it!

Another great person and abolutely world class musician I've me is Shem Jarrold, aka Tamarugo, a violinist who is also learning Indian classical on the zaringy. He came to the first Worldwide Welshman Guerilla Street Jam on South Bank which happened this summer (in July?).

The best thing about being in London has been getting back with my old band, Timestealers. We got together again to prepare for the wedding of our friends Dave and Emma, for which we prepared a multi-lingual, transglobal, two hour set of popular covers and our own Timestealers 'classics' from our uni days. The wedding, in a beautiful family home in the countryside near Towbridge, went really well! Here is a picture of us shaking it like a polaroid picture, in a polaroid picture.
Clockwise from top right: Nick Wood - bass, Jess Rubio - flute, Beccy Swinn - vocals, Paul Murray - vocals, trumpet, guitar, Liam Rickard - vocals, guitar, keyboard, Adam Brown - drums

Just over a week later (last Tuesday night, 18th August) Paul, Nick, Adam and I played a cracking set in Cafe 1001, Brick Lane, as a "featured artist" in the Plugged in Switched On open mic.

Then on August 22nd Paul organised a jam/gig in Hyde Park and we invited lots of friends, including the newlyweds Dave & Emma!! The music and crowd drew passers by too. The other musicians were my regular bandmates and collaborators Paul, Sion and Nick, and Paul's new friends Fraser (cahon) and Simon (beatbox).

Another memorable music moment was when the Timestealers and I went back to Nottingham for a gig supporting Cheshire & the Cat. The gig was good and the crowd reacted very positively, and Cheshire and the Cat were excellent too! But the best part was after the gig when I walked past a Roma accordion player. He was brilliant! He was playing Lambada a.k.a Llorando Se Fue which is one of my standards. I passed him again after eating a kebab with Nick and Paul, and he started playing Hava Nagila, so I had to get out my guitar and join in. He was very welcoming and invited me to plug into his PA, and we got a bit of a crowd. Paul joined us on trumpet. We did a lot of great gypsy pop classics. He's called Sebasitain, check him out if you go to Nottingham High Street. Lovely guy, great musician.

So that's just a few highlights of the life of Worldwide Welshman. Now I'm going off with Paul Murray to the Small World Festival in Kent to play in the Tribal Voices area. Exciting times ahead!

Day 3. 13th Jan 2015
This morning, I went to the Teleferico with Myles and Joe. We were flowed by some friendly street dogs. Myles said that they look like "proper dogs"....they´re such mongrels that they are the most efficient and sensibly shaped dogs you can get. I agree, all dogs should be mongrels, all that breeding nonsense is inhumane. Yeah, they look cool and have useful skills, but they also get all sorts of genetic diseases because they are products of a small gene pool!

Street wise dogs! They know how to cross the road.

On the green line of "Mi Teleferico". I love it. It connects the generally poorer El Alto with the wealthier Zona Sur. The majority of El Alto´s population are the indeginous Aymara people - "indios" - who previously tended to be poorer, and in Zona Sur there are more people classed as "blancos" or "mixtos" who are generally more wealthy. It would have previously taken hours to travel from El Alto to Zona Sur (across La Paz) but on the cable car it is about 45 mins (I think, I haven´t yet travelled the full length of it).
        Its a shame, but not unsurprising, to learn that there has historically been a divide between majority indeginous peoples and the mixed and white population in Bolivia. Of course it was the Spanish collonisers and their decendents who had the most wealth, and the Aymara, Quechua and other indeginous people who suffered racial discrimination (like in North America, Australia & NZ, Israel, the Western Chinese provinces, and plenty of other places).
         President Evo Morales, the first American president of indeginous decent, has made it illegal to discriminate against the indeginous people, and now there is a growing class of more well off and empowered indegionus people. The teleferico has allowed the poorer people of El Alto access to the fancy middle class mall in the south (obviously I think the Mall is horrible....but I guess if I was Bolivian I´d see it as a modern, interesting, international, sophisticated, North American style place; and it provides jobs too). This has caused some people (probably an angry minority) to get annoyed that their fancy, middle-class bit of sophistication is now being invaded by dirty, unsophisticated, uneducated poor people. But the prejudice isn´t one sided. I´m told that the indegionus people are racist against the people of white and mixed discent, and some of them now have the power to act on their racism and negatively discriminate!           In conclusion, all racisim is totally frustrating and unwelcome in the world, and even putting people into racial groups and social classes (which even I do) is a lot of unhelpful, arbitrary nonsense.
     
    To me, the teleferico is a great idea, because it´s a sustainable and energy-efficient way to get around the city (although I haven´t looked at the maths), and because it allows the ´poor´ and ´rich´areas to mix. But the criticisms are thus:
1. Pres. Morales spend all that money on this shiny, andvery visible, infrastructure project that will win a lot of votes,  but the average Bolivian still doesn´t have access to decent state health care (apparently, you have to go private if you want to live, and that´s very expensive). Similar with the schools, so I´m told.
2. You can see into people´s yards and houses. Especially in the rich district. There is a modernist glass and concrete mansion whose occupants had to put curtains on all of their enormous floor to roof windows, because you could see through the whole house from the teleferico. I know it must have been awful for that family, but on the whole, I´m with benefiting the majority at the exense of a few wealthy people´s abundance of natural light, view and privacy. Because they have that house I assume that they must generally be lucky in life and live comfortably, so a bit of bad luck which meant they had to always have the curtains down in their house isn´t going to do them too much harm.

Hey, what do I know? I am speculating based on only snippets of information! Make your own minds up.

This day we went on a city tour with the Bolivian volunteers in our group. It was good fun. They thought it would be funny to see us feed the pigeons. It was.

Day 4
Cultural day & ´treasure hunt´ in the city! It was a race to arrive at different places, do challenges and get back to the office. My team came last actually, haha! This was a super fun day.
       Had a kind of a date (but not quite, just kind of a few mates at a viewpoint really) with a beautiful young woman UK volunteer! I felt a bit like, "oh what should I say, I need to get her to talk" which is the sort of thing I might think on a date, so that´s why I say it was kind of a date. But she might disagree, who knows! And there were actually 4 of us. OK, I am using wishful thinking to stretch the definition of date. Hmmm I don´t think I should include this bit in the blog, what if she reads it!!! Or any other women for that matter. But all you lads out there will find it funny I hope.

Lots of the volunteers started going to the clinic with altitude sickness of other things! This is when we started dropping like flies. One lovely fella from South Wales had a mysterious leg infection, and his roommate (who I´ve already mentioned) had appendixitis! They live in my district, Bolognia. Eveyone in our district has been ill and in the clinic except my roomate, Joe.
        Today I ate Salteneas (pasties) for lunch with my team. My host family told me on Friday when I was ill "oh, salteneas, oh no!!" cos apparently they can make you ill (if eaten after midday).

Day 6, Friday 16th Jan 2015
Had a very inspiring and interesting talk from an Oxford educated Bolivian Jounralist who spoke English with a perfect English accent. He taught us about hunting for a good story, and using that for your blog, and using yourself as one of the characters. I am certainly one of the characters in my blog, but he did say that simply writting a daily journal of what you´ve done isn´t going to get you noticed. So, I need a story! He said that you could get interviews with seemly hard to get people if you are confident and ask in a certain way. Today I decided I would interview Evo Morales.
         At lunch time I met some local people in the Plaza Espana. The first was the shoe shiner who came up and started doing my shoes, although I didn´t ask him too. He asked for "diez dollares" which was nonsense. I gave him 10Bs. Then the street-seller lady on her break said "solo es 1 Boliviano" and she said he was a bad man, and God would judge him. She told me to take care. She said it was the Puruvians who were the badly behaved ones that rob you (hahaha, people, eh!). And we conversed in Spanish, and I got the gist of it more or less!! My Spanish is coming on well.

On the telifrico, got sick into a bag. After arriving home, went to the clinic. Had a painful injection into my backside. We get very good treatment with out Health Insurance paid for by the UK government. Thanks everyone.



Day 7, Saturday

I felt better, so I went with the others to the city centre and we walked through a super cool veg market!!
We met some of the other volunteers by Iglise San Fransisco. We were brousing touristy shops and I ended up buying a nice alpaca hoodie for 100BS (ten quid...probably should have bargained that one down a bit). Had a spot of lunch. Only rice for me, sadly, to help my recovering stomach.
After lunch I got out my guitar, of course, and played "VOLARE, OH OH" (the Gypsy Kings version).

We met a friendly world-trotting Hungarian and played music with him, loudly, with the help of Myles on drums and Ellie on maracas, and everyone else on backing vocals (but I think it was mainly me singing, in Spanish and Welsh). He sells bracelettes, charms and things like that on the street. And he had just started learning to play the charango. I will get one of them for sure.

In the evening, myslef and the Bolognia crew met our host families and went shopping for costume´s to hire for our performance the following day.
It took ages but we had a good laugh. I ended up playing my guitar on the street again and we all sang "Valerie" by the Zuttons. We went for dinner in the megacentre, and my poor host family had to cope with me winging about it (not badly winging, but I did mention a few times that I´m not keen on eating junk food in overpriced mall-type places). Hey, the food was fine, and we had a lot of fun!


Day 8, Sunday, the family induction day
A really fun day where we met all the other host families, ate nice food, chatted, filled in a few forms, heard some important lectures and saw performances from each family. The best bit for me, of course, was when we did our dance! After we´d repeated the only two steps we´s learnt for about half the song, I decided we should branch out and improvise a bit, so we got into a circle, and I signalled to Myles to throw his hat in the air. He thought I meant "dance in the middle" so he did a bit of freestyle in the centre of the circle. Then I threw my hat to him and we all started throwing hats. I guess some people thought it was all planned. Man, that was a tiring dance at such high altitude!!

I stayed well within my character and got out my guitar after lunch (I got it out after the midmorning snack too). I pretended to be a local musician called Pedri and played a Puruvian and a Bolivian song. Then we went outside and did spanish Kareoke with a whole host of polular latin billboard hits from yesteryear!

WEEK 2
Now finally we start the work that I was sent here to do! Induction and settling in was important and fun, but we´re actually here to help International Service carry out its mission of building a better world by "capacity building" i.e. empowering people with various social projects. Sustainable development.
Of course before we could really get into it there were some flippin´ risk assessments to fill in, and a fun icebreaker where we all got to tell a brief version of our life story. And we met out new Bolivian team member!
          There was a public holiday coming up on Thursday, and we had Friday off because of the family induction day on Sunday, so we all arranged to go to the salt flats. That meant two days of work, Tuesday and Wednesday, then off for a three day tour of Salar de Uyuni and the surrounding deserts, mountains, lagoons and flamingos. I will do a post about this at some point. But I assure you that now we are in week 3 and the projects are taking shape.
            My group (3 of us from the Childhood and Youth Empowerment project) will have part one of our musical puppet show about nutrition and sport for 4-6 yr olds ready in time to perfrom it this coming Monday in our centre, Las Lomas. And we have all 5 lessons planned out for the 4-6, 8-12 and 15-18 yr olds. We aim to work towards a sports day and teach them about nutrition and healthy living along the way, with a lot of songs and games.
           As well as designing and delivering these classes (the others are doing the same for two more centres), we must try to package our lessons and previous lessons into easily repeatable material that can be delivered yearly by the permenant staff.
     So lots to be getting on with! My next blog entry will be for the official Int.Service page, and it will be about a topic rather than just "what I did". Maybe I'll interview Evo (not realistic) or go to La Paz's mosque and find out about the small Muslim community here (could be done). Or maybe I'll just write about our puppet show. Good night from La Paz!
              Thanks for reading,
                                                           Liam    29/01/2015, 12.23a.m


All views are the views of the author, not of ICS or International Service. This is a personal blog and has not been accredited or supported by ICS or International Service. All photos are by Liam Rickard except the photos of him, which were taken from facebook.

Sunday, 11/01/2015
The 11th cohort of International Citizen Service volunteers arrives in El Alto, a city which is connected to the capitol of Bolivia, La Paz. We had arrived in Santa Cruz after a long-haul overnight flight from Madrid.
El Alto looks completely different to La Paz. It is completely flat. There are many shaby and unfinished buildings, and it seemed quiet (it was  a Sunday morning). We were met at the airport by the head of the ICS programme at Servicio International Britanico and one of the Bolivian volunteers.

We stopped to look at the view and I picked up a 20 Boliviano note from the floor! (about 2quid)

We arrived at the office, met everyone, had coca tea, then were met by our host families. Joe and I went by car with our host mother to her home in Bolognia. There we met the rest of the family; her husband, their three sons, 17, 12 and 5, and their 2 dogs and 2 cats. We all went round the corner for dinner in our host father´s mother´s house where our fellow volunteers, Lloyd, Myles, Jules and Taylor live. We met cousins, aunties and uncles. The food was good too. Pasta, rice, potatos, some new root veg, plantain, chicken and a small amount of veg. The qunatity of veg in meals has since gone up. It was low at the start because the host families had been told we should avoid fruit and veg for the first 2 weeks. Despite following all the advice, I still got ill in the first week and was in the clinic on Friday! Most of the other volunteers got ill too. My roommate Joe is the only volunteer in Bolognia, our little area, not to get ill! Our mate Myles got appendixitis of all things and was in the clinic for 3 days!!!
But I´m jumping ahead...

Day 2, Monday

We had an intense day. Some rather heavy intro stuff about why we´re here and what there is to do. To me Bolivia looked pretty sorted on paper, but there are infact a lot of problems (unsuprisingly, why else would we be here?) I realised that the problems here and elsewhere in the world were mainly the result of human ineptitude. This is not a fact, it´s just how it seems to me. And it´s quite annoying to me to think that if only people were thoughtful and considerate, then the world would be a much better place. We had a cracking lunch of chicken, rice, potato and plantain, then more important training and induction stuff. After leaving the office we went to the Blueberries cafe. I sat outside and sketched with Myles and a beggar came and asked us for money. I said I´d give him money if he´d let me sketch him. He kept trying to look at the sketch, which made it hard. So I asked to photograph him. But as soon as I gave him the money he ran off. Cheeky bugger. I gave him a wopping great 20Bs. (I was still thinging in British money, and I had picked up 20 the other day, so what goes around comes around. He needed it more than me.)

Bolivian smoking outside Blueberries Café

It had gotten late, and the rain caused the teleferico to stop. So we had to find another way home. Raquel and Eric from the office helped us to get the right bus. After waiting for a while for a Bolognia bus I remembered Adri´s instructions that actually a direct bus was rare and we had to change. After I remembered that I managed to lead out group home.