大象传媒

In a heart-warming new series for Radio 4, Kicking Back with The Cardiffians, Welsh singing legend Charlotte Church hosts intimate conversations with some of her closest friends and family, in the city she calls home.

They discuss belonging, working-class roots and the unbreakable bonds of family. They explore life lessons, from the secrets to a loving marriage, to overcoming adversity (along with a few tales of teens sneaking into clubs).

And as she passes the mic around her family tree, Charlotte demonstrates how to have an authentic and meaningful conversation. She also picks up some repartee-based wisdom from her guests along the way.

Charlotte isn’t afraid to ask her guests a probing question or two, to get to the good stuff. A favourite is, “Where do you feel like you most belong?”

For Charlotte’s Great Auntie Frances, it’s her home town: “Home and with family… Cardiff.”

If she’s ever away, she just wants to come back. “She went to Benidorm,” says Auntie Alison, Frances’s daughter. “First day on the phone, ‘I hate it.’ Second day, ‘I hate it even more.’ Third day, ‘Why did I go?!’”

For Charlotte’s friend Sara Huws, a sense of belonging comes from inside herself: “I belong in my body,” she states. By accident, she stumbled into power lifting and is now passionate about it: “Through learning to lift, learning to get really, really strong, learning to literally empower myself… I have found so much meaning, so much community, I now feel like I can go wherever.”

2. Embrace honesty

Charlotte’s own honesty provokes openness in her guests too.

“Sorry, I’ve got really hairy armpits, I’ve just recognised!” Charlotte says, laughing, as she sits with Great Auntie Frances and Auntie Alison. “I’ve stopped shaving.” Shocked, they’re not afraid to tell her it’s “proper grim” and that anyone else would have been sent packing.

“I knew I’d get it straight from you!” she laughs.

She’s open about the big stuff too, like breaking from her parents when she was younger. Deep in conversation with Paul Careless, the landlord of her family’s local, The Robin Hood, she admits that “it was such a violent tearing of the fabric of our relationship… It’s taking years to repair.”

Their lives were fully “intertwined, for longer than they probably should have been in a normal parent-child relationship,” says Charlotte. Her parents were travelling round the world with her and “deeply ingrained in all aspects” of her life – from her education, to her career, to her friendship groups – because it was “all so high octane and new” and because she’d become so famous. And as a teenager, it was the last thing she wanted! What she is able to see now is how scared they were about people taking advantage of her.

Half of having a conversation is listening – a skill that Paul says his job as landlord has really taught him.

Charlotte and Maria Church

“My grandad did tell me something about running a pub,” he says. “You’ve gotta have a lot of different ears for different problems. Some of them you take on board and some of them you don’t, and you’ve got to work out what is important.”

“I’ve spoken to people in here who’ve got problems – for them it’s a major problem – and you can talk them down a bit and say it’s not that bad, without offending them. And I listen, and if I can help somebody I will.”

On top of listening, it’s about “respect” – and recognising when to show compassion. At 2am on New Year’s Day, a punter was rudely demanding another drink. As a member of staff frogmarched him out of the building, Paul intervened and asked the youngster for a hug.

You could feel the anger just leave his body, Paul recounts. “I think aggression breeds aggression and love just brings love, so that’s a skill I’ve learnt over the years.”

4. Find your common ground

Charlotte talks to one of her oldest and dearest friends, Kyla.

“We’ve known each other since we were teenagers and over the years it’s been a privilege to grow with the ebb and flow of our friendship,” says the singer. “One of the defining factors about us,” she says, “is that we both became mothers in our early twenties.”

Even before that shared experience, the pair bonded over their relationships with their respective families. Charlotte had her struggles with her own parents; Kyla’s mum had her as a teenager, on her own (Kyla’s dad was married to someone else) and went on to suffer from psychosis.

“I can remember the conversation on my table in my house,” says Kyla, “and we were talking about our parents… I think we were talking about our upbringings.” The pair went on to become as thick as thieves.

“I would definitely say that we are chosen family,” says Charlotte.

5. Show empathy

Since their teenage years (when they were rebelling against their parents and sneaking into clubs), both Kyla and Charlotte have learnt to be more empathetic towards their families.

“Now I’m older and I’ve got my own children I see the struggle,” says Kyla. “My mother had her issues with the psychosis and partying… but I see it through a mum’s exhaustion. She had me really young; I see the pressure she was under to provide.” Kyla’s mum also faced judgment from her Somalian family and community for having a baby on her own. “I empathise with her more,” says Charlotte’s friend.

“For me,” says Charlotte, “part of my struggle with my relationship with my mum is, there’s just so much pain there… but in more recent times I’ve started to have so much more compassion.”

Charlotte’s Auntie Caroline is an all-round entertainer. Growing up, Charlotte would tag along to her gigs in pubs and clubs around Cardiff and calls Caroline her biggest musical inspiration.

Charlotte's microphone, complete with flower mandala.

She tells a cracking anecdote, about the near-death accident she had at school when she was 12. The bell had gone, and she sprinted down a path to catch up with her friends. A window was open and she went through it. “I was hung on the window by my neck,” states Caroline. “Blood just spurted out of my neck so they presumed I’d cut my jugular vein… All these teachers were all covered in blood.”

They packed the wound with cotton wool and rushed her to hospital. “You know when you see on Casualty, they burst through all the doors? That’s what they did,” says Charlotte’s aunt. “The stretcher just went bang, bang, bang… I’d missed the jugular vein by like a gnat’s pube.”

7. Use humour as an ice-breaker

Charlotte’s 86-year-old Bampy, Gary Cooper, is a true Cardiffian and he has seen it all. They talk about his ability to win others over with his surrealist humour, which is “threaded throughout” his whole personality and how it’s a way to disarm people when he meets them.

“I think my humour is my defence in a sense,” says Charlotte’s Bampy. “In the main I just try to throw a pun at people that will make them laugh, and as soon as they smiles, smiles all the way, not a frown… And then it’s just comfortable. It’s a way of just meeting people, and if you test them out on a little joke then you get the nature of the person.”

When Charlotte was performing at the Hollywood Bowl, she flew the whole family over to LA and her Bampy got invited into one of the boxes with some “really wealthy LA folk who were there to indulge in the arts.” They were from such different worlds but Bampy won them all over with his “absurdist” humour.

8. Revel in a shared vernacular

Charlotte and her guests bond over the numerous, fun turns of phrase used by Cardiffians.

Kyla’s favourite sayings are “lush, cwtch, and in a minute – because it never means in a minute, it means in about thirty, forty minutes!”

“My dad’s was, I’ll be there now in a minute,” says Charlotte. “Chopsy’s a great one,” she says, too. “She was chopsing off; don’t be chopsy.”

And there’s “not gonna lie,” which Kyla’s daughter now uses when she talks to her mum. “It’s been passed down,” says Kyla.

Bampy’s favourite Cardiff sayings include, “Can you come by next week?” and “alright our kids?”

“I love the way that lots of Cardiff people will put extra 's's on the end of things,” says Charlotte: “I loves it, I loves when I has a drink… The extra 's' for absolutely no purpose apart from just, Cardiff.”

Listen to Kicking Back with The Cardiffians on 大象传媒 Sounds