Katell Keineg
Katell Keineg (born February 1965) is a Breton-Welsh singer-songwriter, based in Wales. Early life Born in Brittany and raised first there and later in the Rhymney Valley, Katell Keineg is the second child and only daughter of Breton poet and playwright Paol Keineg and his then wife, Judith Pritchard (née Gurney), a Welsh political activist. Both parents were active in their nations' respective autonomy movements, Judith with Plaid Cymru, Paol with the UDB. The family moved to Wales where, exposed to Breton and Welsh folk music, Katell began singing, mainly in choirs and eisteddfodau. Early influences included The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. She has cited the film, The Song Remains the Same as influential; she watched it in the same year she began busking in Cardiff, which led to travels around the United Kingdom and Ireland playing at ad hoc gigs and festivals. Around 1988–90, she appeared in a number of episodes of the Welsh language soap-opera "Pobol Y Cwm", produced by BBC Wales for the Welsh fourth television channel, S4C. Her character, a Breton, instigated the twinning of the fictional Welsh village of "Cwmderi" with a town in Brittany. After taking a law degree at the London School of Economics, she lived briefly in Cardiff and, at age 24, moved to Dublin. From the early 1990s onwards, Keineg travelled back and forth between Dublin and New York, where she made her first two albums for Elektra Records. She is now based in Wales. Ô Seasons Ô Castles In the early 1990s she lived in New York for a time. A live appearance in Times Square was recorded by Irish TV in the summer of 1992, by which time she had become one of a number of regular performers at the, now defunct, Sin-é in lower Manhattan. Her first release was a seven-inch single called "Hestia" on SOL, an independent label co-owned by musicians Bob Mould and Nicholas Hill. She was signed by Elektra in 1993 and in 1994 her debut album, Ô Seasons Ô Castles was released. One of the songs, "The Gulf of Araby", was played regularly by Natalie Merchant at concerts for several years and is featured on her live album Live in Concert, New York City – June 13th 1999. Merchant also invited Keineg to sing on her debut album, Tigerlily, on the song Carnival. In 1993, Keineg sang on "Mixin' The Colors" from Iggy Pop's American Caesar album. For the next two years she continued to gig regularly at festivals such as Roskilde, Crossing Border and Lilith Fair. Jet Her second album, Jet, featured a biographical song about bisexual Argentine surrealist painter Leonor Fini. In the same year, her friend Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River at age thirty. Katell sang at his memorial service. Following disappointing sales of Jet and a change of management at Elektra, Keineg endured a number of unhappy years at Elektra during which time she released no new music. Eventually she was able to secure a release from her