Tylorstown Welfare Hall is still adorned with red banners and the Football Association of Wales' iconic red dragon crest, from when Rhondda boy Rob Page returned to his hometown to announce the Cymru squad for the World Cup. In November, thousands of Welsh fans travelled to Qatar, and the world heard them in full song, whether it was Yma o Hyd or Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.
But this reputation for song didn't appear out of thin air, and the traditions behind it are alive and well - perhaps nowhere more than in the Rhondda Valley, where the choristers of Pendyrus Male Choir are keeping an institution going.
The choir rehearses in the Welfare Hall, and is fast approaching its 100th anniversary in 2024. In a century of its history, the choir has travelled to the Kremlin and the White House, performed on the pitch before rugby internationals and at celebrations for the Royal Family - and several of those who remember it are still regular performers.
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"It's my life," one chorister says. He clarifies: "It's not my life, I've got a family, but actually it is a big part of my life."
This is Stanley Davies - aged 84, he's been in the choir since 1958 and gone on various tours from the USA to Russia. He's seen the choir go downhill and lift itself up again, and witnessed plenty of other choristers come and go.
Why does he think there's such a proud tradition of choral singing in south Wales? "I couldn't really tell you," he says.
He continues: "If you go across the world, everybody says the Welsh are [uniquely] superb singers - which is not true! There are other people in the world who are superb singers as well, and so many choirs, but most people say they love listening to the Welsh, particularly to male voice choirs."
As we're chatting, the hall fills up with identically-dressed choristers. The room starts to buzz as chattering voices ready themselves to sing - calmly watched over by accompanist Gavin Parry, who this year will celebrate a remarkable 50 years with the choir, a record for any musician with Pendyrus.
His longevity with the choir is rivalled only by a small handful of choristers, with Stanley among their numbers. Although he says his years in the choir blur into one, he remembers the trip to Russia in 1979 when the choir performed in the Kremlin during the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev. Stanley recalls: "The Kremlin was absolutely incredible… we spent quite a bit of time just walking around Red Square. What impressed a lot of us was how clean it was."
But, he says: "My outstanding remembrance about Russia was the difference in class and poverty… we were staying in Moscow and there were people who would queue all day just to get some bread."
He may have been surprised by what he saw in Russia, but recalls the Russians actually being surprised at the Welsh: "Everybody knows how good the Russian army choir was, but I don’t think they realised how good we were. We did a full concert in a holiday camp where the children were sent annually, and we performed at the Kremlin but it wasn't a full concert."
Stanley's been around long enough to recall the bad years as well as the good. He remembers: "The choir did go downhill. We were normally about 70 or 75 [choristers] but we went down to under 50 for one radio show in Cardiff, and at that time it was looking pretty ropey to be honest. But then [musical director] Glynne Jones was introduced and within a couple of months we picked back up, we had people joining from everywhere and it was fantastic."
The choir originated when two out-of-work miners in Tylorstown, Ben Jones and Emlyn Drew, decided to mirror neighbouring valleys and make a choir of their own. Nearly 100 years on, we visit the choir on a drizzly, dim March evening. Once the hall is full, the choir prepares for a performance of Myfanwy for us to capture on camera.
After some brief announcements and a few words from musical director Ieuan Jones, they get going. The choir sail through the classics - Men of Harlech a particular, rousing example - before settling on Myfanwy for their taped performance.
It's uninventive to say the sound fills the space, but that's the truth of it. Like a liquid or gas, the choir's music permeates through the entire hall; every inch of it, right the way to the stacked boxes of crisps and rows of bottled spirits at the back, vibrates along to the crisp tones of the tenors and countertenors, and the deep tremors of the bass and baritones. Not one gap, and not one voice out of step or out of pitch with the others.
What strikes me is the effortlessness, which I'm sure isn't actually effortlessness but the outcome of tireless practice by those who've made this choir their life's work. Either way, it sounds perfect. The third verse ends, and Ieuan looks up. "We'll do that again," he says, "it was a bit flat."
What do I know? Or rather, how dizzyingly fantastic are the choristers' standards that I, having grown up around musicians and played the piano since I was a toddler, wouldn't have even begun to notice them being a touch out of tune?
Well, Ieuan knows his stuff. The 34-year-old took over as the choir's musical director in January 2020. Things started off "disjointed" for Ieuan as national lockdowns immediately came in.
"We didn't know what to do," he admits. "After a bit we realised we needed to do something, so we worked on doing all those Zoom rehearsals. It was basically me singing to the boys, but I couldn’t hear them back because you can’t have everyone unmuted.
"We came back to rehearsals where we could only have 20 in this hall. We’d learned new pieces, but it was a bit odd because we did the process of learning but separately."
But things soon picked up, and the choir has since performed at the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations, at local concerts, and at Llandaff Cathedral with the Cory Band at Christmas and St David's Day.
Ieuan describes the choir as "an ever-present thing", but always changing, adding: "We’ve got to adapt to keep relevant, a lot of choirs are struggling at the moment and we can’t just stick to what it’s always been. We try and learn new songs, different styles et cetera and try to keep it going and attract new members.
"We’ve had a few recently [join us]. We sang on the pitch for Wales v England and of course that brings a bit of interest in - a few new people. We’ve got a trip next year to Normandy to sing at the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings… that will again attract new members to come because it’s a great trip and a privilege to sing for it."
There have been many of these great trips over the years, and one most fondly remembered was the 1984 tour of the USA, including a performance in the White House gardens which saw the choir receive a certificate of appreciation from President Ronald Reagan. Pendyrus' performances in the States "blew people away" according to Barrie Evans, 75, who went on the tour seven years after joining the choir in 1977.
He remembers: "We first went down to Baltimore, where the Brits came over and took a thrashing - the Star Spangled Banner was written there by Francis Key. It was a poem, then, that was of course picked up by some music and sung.
"So our illustrious musical director Glynne Jones done an arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner. Well, it just blew them away when we done that. They opened the flag up on the dockside - brilliant."
When the tour took the group to the White House, Welsh connections started popping up everywhere. "During the tour," Barrie says, "one of the curators was talking about the dome.
"I said: ‘Do you know where the steel come from, on the dome?’ So he looked at me and said: ‘What do you mean?’ So I said: ‘The structure was made in Swansea and shipped out to America, then they built it from there.’
"Then we sung in the grounds of the White House… it’s quite a large grounds, with the [Washington Monument]l at one end. Around the 5th stone, it was written in there: ‘Cymry am Byth.’
But it was a baseball game - in the World Series between the Baltimore Orioles and the White Sox - where the choir got a truly "phenomenal" reception. "When we sung the Star Spangled Banner it just blew them away," says Barrie.
"I’ve never heard anything like it - they wouldn’t let us off the pitch. It was really terrific, they were in awe. Afterwards we had one or two beers with the guys there, and as you can imagine, everyone wants to shake your hand… that was absolutely fabulous."
Eventually, the choir ended up in New York. Almost inevitably, Barrie bumped into someone with a connection to his home in Wales: "A lady came up to me during the concert and said: ‘Anybody from the Rhondda Valley?’ So I said I was. She asked what part of the Rhondda Valley, so I told her Ynyshir.
"She said: ‘What part of Ynyshir?’ So I said where I was living. She said: ‘You might know my brother - John Jones.’ I told her the only John Jones I knew was the secretary of the club I went to. ‘That’s my brother,’ she said."
These little links to Wales, these "superb" responses the world over - they all feed into a feeling of hiraeth. "You get a tear just streaming down your face, performing on stage," Barrie says. "It just won't let you go... we get this hiraeth anywhere... I got it on the train coming up from Cardiff."
The choir will be off to Normandy in June 2024, and has contributed music to a celebration of the life of Paul Robeson, the American singer with an unbreakable bond with Wales' mining communities. But far from only looking to the past, the choir is actively trying to build for the future.
General secretary Graham Clarke says Ieuan's musical direction has "rejuvenated" the group, adding: "Our profile is ageing, like all choirs - we understand that. We welcome new choristers, and we've had six this year, aged around 40 to 60 - our youngest is about 24.
"We don’t charge students to come and join, and we kit them out because we know they can’t afford [the jackets and ties]. Then they go off, but maybe three or four of them come back, and that’s a good return."
The choir now pulls its membership from further afield than the Rhondda Valley, with choristers travelling from Torfaen, Newport, Blaenavon and Morriston - and further still, from Carmarthen and across the border in Almondsbury.
Nothing is certain, but even five minutes in the choir's company would be enough to convince anyone of the need for it to continue for another hundred years.
The choir's next concert is at the Lyric Theatre in Carmarthen on April 1. You can buy tickets here, and go to the Pendyrus website for more information on the choir's concerts.
If you're interested in joining, you can email Graham Clarke on commsouser@aol.com or find out more information here.
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