Their third year here. Before that: Painted Chariot, Hendre Hall, and the Byd Mawr nights that brought Eat Static, System 7 and The Mighty Diamonds to north Wales.
Stevie Bear and DJ Fflyffilyfbybl play Dreamboat on Wednesday 19 August, from 6pm, with live vocals from Belinda. It is their third year here, which by the standards of a van that has only been doing this a few summers makes them practically part of the furniture.
Here is the thing worth knowing about them, and it took a bit of digging to stand it up.
A listing survives from 2007 for Painted Chariot’s annual Red Cross benefit — a members-only party up at Nant Gwynant, in the hills, the sort of thing you had to know somebody to get to. On the bill: “DJ fflyffilyfbybl and Stevie Bear”. The same two names, in the same order, nineteen years ago.
They met running the backroom at parties like that one and at Fright Night, the Halloween fancy-dress night at Hendre Hall — a five-hundred-capacity converted farm building at Talybont, just outside Bangor, with three rooms going at once. Hendre is where they were regulars.
Then they helped set up Byd Mawr. Big World.
If you were anywhere near Gwynedd in the second half of the 2000s you will remember it, and if you weren’t, the line-up speaks for itself. Byd Mawr brought The Mighty Diamonds, the Jamaican vocal trio, and Johnny Clarke. Together with Fright Night it brought System 7 and Eat Static — the Eat Static show was the Halloween night, 27 October, at Hendre. It brought Nuru Kane from Senegal, Etran Finatawa from Niger, Kasai Masai from the Congo, and Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara. And one night in February 2008 it put Alex Paterson of The Orb behind the decks at Hendre Hall playing a reggae set.
That is a serious booking record for a non-profit run out of a converted farm building in a Gwynedd village. Fflyffilyfbybl was one of the resident DJs. Tickets were a tenner, from Cob Records in Bangor.
Global beats and rave culture is where they come from; reggae, funk and music from all over is what they love. In their own words it’s “a unique selection played with groove, from the heart”, and having read the twenty years of history behind that sentence, we’re inclined to take them at their word.
Over the top of it, Belinda singing live.
Two decades on from a members-only field in Snowdonia, they’re playing a 1968 Mercedes pizza van on a beach on Anglesey. We think that’s a good trajectory.
Free entry, no tickets. Bar open, sourdough pizza out of the oven all evening. Sunset is at 20:38. You can hear DJ Fflyffilyfbybl on Mixcloud.
28 days only. Open every day to 31 August at Porth Tyn Tywyn, Rhosneigr.
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