Boyce's greatest musical success in recent years was his 2003 tour of Australia, coinciding with the Rugby World Cup which was being hosted there at the time. He held concerts in Adelaide and Melbourne, but the highlight was his sold-out performance at the Sydney Opera House, which was later released on DVD as Max Boyce: Down Under. [ citation needed] Despite the counter-attraction of televised rugby and soccer matches, there is no substitute for live Saturday afternoon sport, not even off the bench… Max Boyce’s career has enjoyed a resurgence since the late 1990s. At Christmas time in 1998, BBC Wales screened An Evening With Max Boyce, which broke Welsh viewing records. [1] The following year, in 1999, he performed at the opening ceremonies of the 1999 Rugby World Cup in the Millennium Stadium, and of the Welsh Assembly. Not long after, Boyce was included on the 2000 New Year Honours list, and received an MBE from Prince Charles in a ceremony at Cardiff Castle on 15 March that year. According to Boyce, "He (the Prince) said he was surprised it took them so long" to accord him this honour. [15] 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. I’ve sung this at countless weddings and funerals… but its status as unofficial rugby anthem always means people belt out the “bread of heaven/feed me til I want no more, want no more” refrain as passionately as it gets sung at the rugby. Here it is sung by the legendary Michael Ball at Wales Millennium Stadium at the opening of the Rugby World Cup in 1999.

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. Wales take on France in the Six Nations tonight; it’s St David’s Day on Tuesday. I’m feeling pretty Welsh right now. The rugby is on too late for my children tonight. I’ve promised them they can watch it in the morning but in the meantime, we’ve been having a mini-disco filled with glorious Welsh songs, both pop and traditional. Here are some of our favourites. Are there any you’d add to my list? As the debate rages on about whether Delilah should be sung at Welsh rugby games due to its violent and abusive lyrics, I’ll choose another Tom Jones song instead – Green Green Grass of Home. It evokes that Welsh word hiraeth, which has no exact English translation but describes that special longing for home. This version sees Tom singing live in Cardiff in 2001 and even has on-screen lyrics so you can join in too. Boyce continues to make headlines in the British press. On 29 May 2006, Max Boyce headlined at a concert in Pontypridd to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Welsh national anthem, " Hen Wlad fy Nhadau". [16] In August 2006, he hit out against the stereotypical use of the word " boyo" in the media, following its resurgence in reference to Welsh Big Brother contestant Glyn Wise. [17]In the early 1970s, Boyce undertook a mining engineering degree at the Glamorgan School of Mines in Trefforest (now the University of South Wales), [5] during which he began to pen tunes about life in the mining communities of South Wales. He started out performing in local sports clubs and folk clubs around 1970, where his original set began to take on a humorous element, interspersed by anecdotes of Welsh community life and of the national sport, rugby union. [1] Music career [ edit ] Following the programme, which Laurie Lee had listened to, we met up in Cardiff, and I was overwhelmed to share a glass of red wine with him and listen to him tell of his reminiscences of the Aberfan disaster, ‘When a Village Lost Its Children’, and hear him read the first few lines of his beautifully crafted essay ‘The Firstborn’, which every new parent should read. After releasing two records on a small Welsh label, in 1973 he recorded his iconic breakthrough album, Live at Treorchy, which went on to sell over half a million copies. Several gold and silver records followed, including We All Had Doctors’ Papers, which went to number one in the UK Albums Chart and is still the only comedy album to attain this feat. He has since toured the world, playing sell-out concerts in some of the world’s great venues, including the London Palladium, Sydney Opera House and the Royal Albert Hall. They saw education as a means to escape the inevitability of working in the pits, where men were robbed of daylight and turned to song and religion.

a b c Robert, Trefor (1 February 2007). "Max Boyce's 35 years as a Welsh icon". Neath Guardian . Retrieved 6 March 2011. Honorary Fellowship for Legendary Entertainer Max Boyce". University of Wales Trinity Saint David. 16 July 2014 . Retrieved 5 August 2019. Max Boyce recovering after a quadruple heart bypass". BBC News. 22 June 2014 . Retrieved 22 June 2014.

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Hymns & Arias includes some of my favourite songs, such as ‘Rhondda Grey’ and ‘Duw! It’s Hard’, as well as some unpublished poems, such as ‘Is God in His Paint Shop’, ‘Aberfan’ and ‘With a Whistle in His Hand’. Tarleton, Alice. "University of Glamorgan". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 17 May 2007 . Retrieved 27 June 2007. Boyce first learned to play the guitar as a young man, but he showed no particular flair for the instrument, [4] nor an actual desire to become a performer. In his own words: "[I had] no desire at all to be anything. I had a love of poetry, and eventually started writing songs without any ambition to build a career. It just happened. I started writing songs about local things and it evolved." [1] Nevertheless, in time he became competent enough to perform at local eisteddfodau, one of the earliest known recordings of his work being " O Na Le", a folk tune in Welsh which he played at the Dyffryn Lliw eisteddfod in 1967. [ citation needed]

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? Boyce has a wife and children, who live away from the public eye in his hometown of Glynneath, in South Wales. [20] He continues to play an active role within this community, having been the president of Glynneath RFC in recent years [21] and the Club President of Glynneath Golf Club, where the "Max Boyce Classic" is held every two or three years. [22]

New version of Hymns and Arias for Swans home game". Wales Online. 19 August 2011 . Retrieved 12 July 2017. Introduction to "Duw It's Hard" – Live at Treorchy album (Speech). Treorchy, Wales. 23 November 1973. It means a great deal because it is poignant and it's one of the best things I've written and I've not written anything as good as that in a long time. Max Boyce Max Boyce, singer-songwriter, poet and entertainer, was born in the village of Glynneath, south Wales, where he still lives with his wife, Jean. Despite the fact that his father was killed in a mining explosion a month before Max was born, Max went on to work underground in the local colliery at the age of sixteen – a profession he remained in for over a decade. 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.