In the glamorous confines of a tiny back room in her record company’s office, her chair wedged between boxes of CDs, Gwenno Saunders is expounding on the joy of singing in a language that only 600 people in the world are supposed to be fluent in. “Tonally,” she says, “Cornish is a dark language, very close to Breton, a lot more Zs and Ks and Vs, which gives it a very different texture. It probably reflects the harsh landscape of Cornwall. And it’s almost like an emotional shield. Singing in Cornish, I thought, ‘Wow, no one understands me!’ I can get lost, and everyone else has to get lost, because what else can they do? It allows me to escape and find freedom in music. There’s something magical about that.”

To that end, Saunders has just recorded her second solo album entirely in Cornish, the language she learned as a child. The follow-up to Welsh-language Y Dydd Olaf (2014), which won the Welsh Music prize, Le Kov would be a fantastic album whatever it was sung in – spacey, strange and richly melodic – but there’s no doubt that the language gives it an added sense of purpose. Without wishing to make any rash claims, it seems likely that it’s the first ever Cornish electronic psych-pop concept album.

Gwenno: Le Kov review – Cornish identity in full-colour psychedelia Read more

Indeed, it seems likely it’s the first ever Cornish rock album full stop. There has been a vibrant Cornish-language folk scene for decades. The late singer and poet Brenda Wootton was its best-known exemplar, while Saunders has a soft spot for a band called Bucca, who released a solitary album, An Tol Yn Pen An Telynyor, in 1980. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how few native speakers there are, it never crossed over into pop.

The website Kernow Beat has assembled an exhaustive database of wildly obscure bands from Cornwall, pulling back the curtain on a vibrant regional music scene: who knew punk took such a grip on Penzance in the late 1970s? But, alas, not one of the frequently mind-boggling names it lists (Constable Zippo’s Electric Commode Band, Furry Vermin, Big Dick and the Deviants) seems to have used Cornish. Its solitary appearance in something approaching pop was on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album Drukqs, the track listing of which contains a few Cornish titles, albeit frequently misspelt and easy to miss among the titles comprising entirely made-up words.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Eus keus?’ … Saunders at the Caught By the River Thames festival in 2016. Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Redferns

Aphex Twin actually turns up on Le Kov, one of an array of real-life figures who haunt the album’s songs. They are the inhabitants of the titular imaginary city “where Cornish is spoken by everybody”: Peter Lanyon, a painter of abstract landscapes from St Ives who died after crashing the glider that he flew to “get a more complete knowledge of the landscape”; Michael An Gof, commander of the doomed Cornish rebellion of 1497; and Georg Sauerwein, a 19th-century German linguist who was the first person to write a letter in Cornish for a century, the words of which inspired the song Koweth Ker.

As the cast list suggests, Le Kov is an album teeming with ideas. As she discusses it, Saunders flits from Brexit to JG Ballard, from Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch artist who imagined an anti-capitalist utopia where no one had to work, to cheese. (One of the few surviving traditional sayings in the Cornish language is “Eus keus?” or “Is there cheese?”)

There is also a preponderance of the lost, sunken cities that pepper Cornish mythology: Lyonesse, reputed to be the home of King Arthur, and Langarrow, “which I thought was more interesting, because the people there really went for it and had a good time. It was built by convicted criminals, who then mixed with the natives and it all went wrong. It became like the Cornish Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From left … Saunders with fellow Pipettes Rose Dougall and Rebecca Stephens. Photograph: Martin Philbey/Redferns

Saunders says the album was partly inspired by the government’s decision to cut its meagre funding for the Cornish language in 2016. “There’s that argument that I think is really stupid: why do you have to learn Cornish or Welsh, why don’t you learn Mandarin? It’s like everything you do has to have monetary value. I think you have to find the non-monetary value in things.” But mostly it’s rooted in something more personal: her desire to “accept what I actually am – and my upbringing, which always felt slightly at odds with other people’s”.

It certainly sounds unconventional. Saunders is the child of a Cornish poet and a Welsh language activist who was imprisoned “a couple of times for vandalising the Welsh Office”. She elaborates: “My mum was always complaining about being in the house and having to look after the kids, so I think she really quite looked forward to going to prison, just to get a break.” In her house, Anglo-American culture and the English language were forbidden, the TV was turned down if S4C wasn’t broadcasting, and everyone spoke Cornish, a language that virtually died out in 1770, before undergoing a minor – but ongoing – revival 150 years later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It was just insane’ … Saunders on the cover of the Las Vegas guide. Photograph: I Love Las Vegas

“It was like living in a sort of cult of four people, in Riverside in Cardiff,” she says. “I had no idea about popular culture. Years later, I said to my mum, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about David Bowie or people like that?’ And she said that it was all just around, that I was always going to find out about that stuff myself. But it was really annoying for a while, because I’d meet people and have no idea what they were talking about – you know, ‘Who are Pavement?’”

More peculiar still, she left school at 16 and – thanks to her talents as an Irish dancer (“another aspect of the very strong Celtic element of my childhood”) – got a job with Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance show and moved to Las Vegas, which unsurprisingly came as something of a culture shock. “It was utterly bizarre. Obviously, it was the antithesis of Wales in terms of landscape and driving factors in the economy. It was just insane.”

On her return, she elected to start making music that attempted to meld the two extremes of her life experience. “I’d got really into electronic music in Las Vegas – going out to clubs and dancing all night was my only release. Trance music was really big at the time, so I thought doing that was a good idea, with vocals in Cornish and Welsh. I was doing a quite Kylie-type thing, with sparkly outfits, because I’d been in Vegas where everyone was covered in sequins and wearing wigs. I ended up doing tours of schools and pubs in Cornwall, doing choreographed dance moves in a sparkly top.”

She released a couple of EPs on the Welsh-language label Crai, home to a pre-fame Catatonia and John Peel favourites Anhrefn. But for some reason, the public didn’t take to a Kylie-esque teenager singing trance-influenced pop in a language that Unesco had declared extinct. “The reaction was just like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, I have no idea.’” Saunders moved on, joining acclaimed latterday girl group the Pipettes before embarking on an acclaimed second solo career as a purveyor of synthy psychedelia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Can you see Sodom and Gomorrah? … the rugged coast of Cornwall. Photograph: Alamy

But the idea of singing in Cornish continued “itching away”. At the end of her solo debut album, she slipped in a song called Amser, its lyrics a poem in Cornish written by her father. “Otherwise it was just going to be this thing that was my parents’ interest that I carry around for the rest of my life. I was like, ‘You made me learn this thing that’s quite uncommon, so I’m going to own it.’”

She doesn’t know whether she’s going to make another Cornish album – “I just follow my nose” – but it seems likely. After all, there’s a reason beyond her childhood memories. “When you have minoritised cultures,” she says, “there’s this real desire to keep creating in them. Because no one’s going to do it for you, which is a really nice motivation to have.”

• Le Kov by Gwenno is out now on Heavenly.