‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ was a Christmas classic for more than half a century until people suddenly began to worry that it was about yuletide date rape. ‘It was because of the video Tom Jones and I made,’ says Cerys Matthews, in her smoky Welsh lilt. She recorded a cover with Jones in 1999. The video showed the craggy old Welsh crooner slip something in her drink that turns Cerys into a high camp vamp. ‘The song is really innocent and beautiful and fun — it’s got a huge heap of humour and wit and I love it. That song is not our enemy. That woman is a strong woman. She’s there because she wants to be! It’s cold outside. They’re making love. Come on!’
Cerys herself was exposed to explicitrecord content when she was a child. ‘Famine, religious persecution, genocide, injustice, political manoeuvrings.’ She makes a list. ‘I had a book of Irish ballads when I was about nine and it’s full of war songs where they’re maimed and they’re injured and they’re insane and they’re eyeless and legless and armless and they’re putting out a bowl to beg. All these songs — they’re full of life and there are no taboo subjects. This was a way of spreading news, a way of processing things, a way of trying to teach people and enlighten people. They’re wonderful songs.’
If you are, like me (and her other 700,000 listeners), addicted to Cerys’s BBC radio show, you may think she gets away with quite a lot already — no song is too esoteric, no sound too peculiar: ‘I’ve invited buskers on the show before, dulcimer players, zither players, glass harmonium players from Ukraine that I met in Venice… strange sounds like mating haddocks, whales speaking like men, elephants speaking like men, squeaking frogs.’
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