Max Boyce: Hymns & Arias: The Selected Poems, Songs and Stories

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The song could have been one of many penned by Max Boyce, but it might well have been ‘Duw It’s Hard,’ a portrait of a town, in this case Ebbw Vale, where the colliery is shut down and the ‘pithead baths are a supermarket now.’ The chorus runs: Much of my work is based on personal experience, born of a truth that gives me the credence to tell my stories and sing my songs. a b c d e f g h i j McLaren, James (24 February 2011). "Max Boyce: Live At Treorchy". BBC Wales . Retrieved 6 March 2011. Boyce has a wife and children, who live away from the public eye in his hometown of Glynneath, in South Wales. [20] He continues to play an active role within this community, having been the president of Glynneath RFC in recent years [21] and the Club President of Glynneath Golf Club, where the "Max Boyce Classic" is held every two or three years. [22] Choosing what to include wasn’t easy but I sincerely hope it is a collection that is representative of my writing over the years.

Max Boyce was born in Glynneath. His family was originally from Ynyshir in the Rhondda Valley. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Harries. A month preceding Boyce's birth, his father, Leonard Boyce, died in an explosion in the coal pit where he worked. [1] At the age of fifteen, Boyce left school, went to live with his grandfather, and worked in a colliery "for nearly eight years". [2] In his early twenties, he managed to find alternative work in the Metal Box factory, Melin, Neath, as an electrician's apprentice, but his earlier mining experiences were to influence his music considerably in later years. [3] After releasing two records on a small Welsh label, in 1973 he recorded his iconic breakthrough album, Live at Treorchy, which went on to sell over half a million copies. Several gold and silver records followed, including We All Had Doctors’ Papers, which went to number one in the UK Albums Chart and is still the only comedy album to attain this feat. He has since toured the world, playing sell-out concerts in some of the world’s great venues, including the London Palladium, Sydney Opera House and the Royal Albert Hall. Maxwell Boyce, MBE (born 27 September 1943) is a Welsh comedian, singer and entertainer. He rose to fame in the mid-1970s with an act that combined musical comedy with his passion for rugby union and his origins in a South Wales mining community. Boyce's We All Had Doctors' Papers (1975) remains the only comedy album to have topped the UK Albums Chart and he has sold more than two million albums in a career spanning four decades. I’m sure many people will recognise themselves in the lyrics, for they have walked the same path and travelled the same journey. They have experienced the same joys and endured the same disappointments. Max Boyce, a comedian much beloved in the clubs of the English-speaking and industrialized south, appeared at a Royal Command variety performance in London in 1981, and when he ended his bubbling hilarious act with a song of compasionate lyricism about the sadness of the mining valleys, the audience seemed to respond with baffled, if not affronted, dismay.’

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In 1982, Boyce went to the United States to be filmed participating at a training camp held by the Dallas Cowboys in California. The resulting four-part series, Max Boyce Meets The Dallas Cowboys was screened by Channel 4 in November that year. He returned to America in early 1984 to try his hand at being a cowboy in the rodeos of the Midwestern United States. The result of his bull riding and rodeo clown antics was Boyce Goes West, which also became a four-part series that was broadcast in June 1984. Rhondda Grey’ and ‘Duw! It’s Hard’ in particular mean so much to me, for they are songs of personal experience, having worked underground from the age of sixteen for ten years and experienced the love/hate relationship the miners had with their workplace… ‘where they emptied all the hills to warm the world’. His 70th birthday was celebrated with an hour-long programme [18] shown on BBC One Wales on 25 September 2013, recorded in front of a live celebrity audience. [ citation needed] Ar hyd y nos means all through the night and Max Boyce's lyrics refer to the traditional Welsh hymn of the same name. New version of Hymns and Arias for Swans home game". Wales Online. 19 August 2011 . Retrieved 12 July 2017.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching my village side Glynneath play on a Saturday afternoon and soaking up the banter and the ‘craic’ in the bar afterwards when the referee is blamed for everything from petrol shortage to global warming. Davies, John; Jenkins, Nigel; Menna, Baines; Lynch, Peredur I., eds. (2008). The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p.388. ISBN 978-0-7083-1953-6. a b c Robert, Trefor (1 February 2007). "Max Boyce's 35 years as a Welsh icon". Neath Guardian . Retrieved 6 March 2011. In my early childhood we lived near the miner’s institute in Glynneath. The Welfare Hall was built and paid for by the miners at a penny a week. Max jokes that the poem has "reignited" his career and was the reason he was approached to write his new book, Hymns and Arias, his first collection of poems and stories in over thirty years.Top Selling Albums For 1975" (PDF). Music Week. 27 December 1975. p.10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 March 2021 . Retrieved 30 November 2021– via worldradiohistory.com. This early pinnacle in Boyce's career coincided with the dominance of the Welsh rugby team in the Five Nations Championship during the 1970s. His songs and poems were real-time reflections on this unfolding history, often invoking the names of Welsh rugby greats such as Barry John, Gareth Edwards and Dai Morris. Songs such as "Hymns and Arias" soon became popular with rugby crowds, a fact which has played a significant part in his ongoing popularity. When Swansea City were promoted to the English Premier League in 2011, Boyce was asked to perform for their first game and produced a special version of "Hymns and Arias" for the occasion. [10]