Max Boyce - Early Life

Early Life

Max Boyce was born in Glynneath. He has always lived there, but his family were originally from Ynyshir in the Rhondda Valley. A month preceding Boyce's birth, his father died in an explosion in the coal pit where he was working. At the age of fifteen, Boyce left school, went to live with his grandfather, and followed his father's footsteps by working in a colliery "for nearly eight years". In his early twenties, he managed to find work in a factory instead, but his earlier mining experiences were to influence his music considerably in later years.

Boyce first learned to play the guitar as a young man, but he showed no particular flair for the instrument, nor an actual desire to become a performer. In his own words: " 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." 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 that Boyce played at the Dyffryn Lliw eisteddfod in 1967.

In the early 1970s Boyce undertook a mining engineering degree at the Glamorgan School of Mines in Trefforest (now the University of Glamorgan), 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.