This was so true, so sad and left a deep impression on me how powerful simple words could be in colouring a memory and painting a picture. A true wordsmith who ‘carved words like jewels’ and was an early influence. Your moving poem ‘When Just the Tide Went Out’ has been uploaded millions of times, tell us a little about how you came about writing it …

Live at Treorchy is a live album by Welsh comedian and singer Max Boyce, first issued in 1974. It was his third album and his first for a major label, EMI Records. The album contains a mixture of comedic songs and poems along with Boyce's interactions with the crowd at Treorchy Rugby Club. The album was an unexpected success going gold and was Boyce's break through recording, helping make him a household name in Wales and beyond. The song could have been one of many penned by Max Boyce, but it might well have been ‘Duw It’s Hard,’ a portrait of a town, in this case Ebbw Vale, where the colliery is shut down and the ‘pithead baths are a supermarket now.’ The chorus runs: Top Selling Albums For 1975" (PDF). Music Week. 27 December 1975. p.10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 March 2021 . Retrieved 30 November 2021– via worldradiohistory.com. There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching my village side Glynneath play on a Saturday afternoon and soaking up the banter and the ‘craic’ in the bar afterwards when the referee is blamed for everything from petrol shortage to global warming.New version of Hymns and Arias for Swans home game". Wales Online. 19 August 2011 . Retrieved 12 July 2017. From such a wealth of material you’ve produced over the years, how did you go about choosing which stories, songs and poems to include in the book? Max followed up Live at Treorchy with his second album We All Had Doctors Papers, which went on to top the charts – a feat that earned Max a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the only comedy album to ever achieve that coveted position. Maxwell Boyce, MBE (born 27 September 1943) is a Welsh comedian, singer and entertainer. He rose to fame in the mid-1970s with an act that combined musical comedy with his passion for rugby union and his origins in a South Wales mining community. Boyce's We All Had Doctors' Papers (1975) remains the only comedy album to have topped the UK Albums Chart and he has sold more than two million albums in a career spanning four decades.

In 1999, he was awarded an MBE by Prince Charles and in 2013 he received the Freedom of the Borough of Neath and Port Talbot, following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Burton and Sir Anthony Hopkins. In 2022, there are plans to unveil a bronze lifesize statue of Max in his hometown – a fitting and deserved tribute to a modern-day folk hero whose poems, songs and stories have become part of Welsh legend.Ar hyd y nos means all through the night and Max Boyce's lyrics refer to the traditional Welsh hymn of the same name. As Boyce's popularity became established across Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom, he became involved in many side projects, including three books, several television series and televised concerts, and three multi-part television specials produced by Opix Films. [ citation needed] His spoken and sung poetry was first collected in Max Boyce: His Songs and Poems in 1976, with an introduction by Barry John. The comic illustrations that accompany the poems were drawn by his friend Gren Jones of the South Wales Echo (who had also illustrated the cover of We All Had Doctors' Papers). This publication was followed up with a similar collection, I Was There!, in 1980. [ citation needed]

His 70th birthday was celebrated with an hour-long programme [18] shown on BBC One Wales on 25 September 2013, recorded in front of a live celebrity audience. [ citation needed] The entertainer from Glynneath is a guest on Face to Face with Adrian Masters on Thursday (November 25).In 2014, Boyce was diagnosed with heart problems and underwent a quadruple heart bypass. [24] Discography [ edit ] Albums [ edit ] In 1982, Boyce went to the United States to be filmed participating at a training camp held by the Dallas Cowboys in California. The resulting four-part series, Max Boyce Meets The Dallas Cowboys was screened by Channel 4 in November that year. He returned to America in early 1984 to try his hand at being a cowboy in the rodeos of the Midwestern United States. The result of his bull riding and rodeo clown antics was Boyce Goes West, which also became a four-part series that was broadcast in June 1984. Max Boyce, a comedian much beloved in the clubs of the English-speaking and industrialized south, appeared at a Royal Command variety performance in London in 1981, and when he ended his bubbling hilarious act with a song of compasionate lyricism about the sadness of the mining valleys, the audience seemed to respond with baffled, if not affronted, dismay.’ a b c d e f g h i j McLaren, James (24 February 2011). "Max Boyce: Live At Treorchy". BBC Wales . Retrieved 6 March 2011. My earliest influences in songwriting were Ewan MacColl and Pete Seeger, who wrote and/or performed ‘songs of the working man’, such as ‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, ‘The Shoals of Herring’ and ‘The Big Hewer’. These songs were a great influence on me and still are.