ABSTRACT
A mainstream marketing technique was created in order to categorize a particular trend in 'Welsh' popular music. Welsh-language popular music, though adapting and translating Anglo-American styles, followed its own trajectory, intersecting at certain points with Anglo-American popular music, but generally developing at a different cultural pace. It was a chronological coincidence that the mainstream success of the bilingual bands Catatonia and Super Furry Animals coincided with that of Anglo-Welsh bands Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics. Nevertheless the Anglo-American marketing machine needed to explain it and control it, and the term 'Cool Cymru' found its way into the press as an umbrella image describing the sudden and almost simultaneous emergence of four popular bands from Wales. Though perhaps biased, the Welsh-language press viewed Y Cyrff as the source of hope for a struggling Welsh pop scene, and their recordings were generally heralded as landmarks in Welsh cultural production.
