FOCUS WALES 2025 - DAY ONE
Welcome To Wrexham
Every year at FOCUS Wales I end up blogging my experiences each day. This is partly to share some of the incredible artists that I catch along the way, but also to help me process a tsunami of information that comes in thick and fast over the course of the conference.
My blog has been neglected of late but Substack seems like the perfect place to pick this habit back up. So strap in for a few days at one of my favourite annual events in the calendar. I’ll try and stick to the highlights, though don’t judge me if I wander off course. I’m putting this together in snatched moments of a monster schedule.
Day 1 is relatively quiet on the music front, in fact I only really watched one artist, I’ll tell you about them in just a minute. But Wednesday here is mostly for people to acclimatise and for the delegates to catch up. One of the reasons I appreciate this place so much is the lovely people I get to see again from the years of coming here, or folks I’ve met at festivals and conferences around the world who find their way to this one eventually.
I have also grown really fond of Wrexham since I first visited. There’s a real comfort and familiarity now to returning. It’s the kind of town that obviously had a level of status at some point in history, the Georgian buildings here are beautiful, but without wishing to be rude at all, it has obviously been struggling to find its shine in recent times. That is slowly starting to shift though, to the point that they are in the final for City of Culture this year, their football team has risen from the fifth division to the second in record time and that journey has been documented by Disney in Welcome To Wrexham, bringing a lot of attention to the town. Then of course you have FOCUS Wales bringing in artists and industry representatives from South Korea to Canada, Norway to New Zealand.
It can be very overwhelming the first night. I do a lot of preparation before I come nowadays with folders on my phone of faces I should remember and intricate spreadsheets of the people I’ve met before, either in person or over email. However once dropped into the middle of it all, it can still be very hard for me to recall all of the information I need to. For years I’ve been stuffing the entirety of my memories into the spare draw in my head, rather than filing them away properly, so it’s a work in progress to try and change old habits. Still, Music Conferences are the one time I find it genuinely enjoyable to network and FOCUS Wales is less intense than most.
This is only my second sober FOCUS and I do eventually succumb to a mix of social anxiety and overstimulation, I opt for an early night but not before I get to watch local queer bilingual singer Talulah perform an acoustic set with her guitarist. It’s a lovely gentle welcome which is jazzy and soulful with just a touch of folk. Her vocal range is impressive and she makes good use of a pedal for harmonies. I’m now gutted I haven’t scheduled in her full live band set but I’m sure I'll catch them at some point.
Hopefully see you back here tomorrow for Day Two. It’s gonna be a busy one.