Having started going to gigs back in 2006, Minty expects he’s probably been to well over 1000 gigs in his time. He used to commute into Cardiff from his hometown of Blackwood in the South Wales Valleys (Manic Street Preachers country he notes), and found out about gigs he’d attend through Kerrang! and NME, when he was “very much in [my] emo phase”. Seeing bands like The Used, Rise Against and The Automatic all led up to a watershed moment when he went to see Foo Fighters on their Echoes of Silence tour in November 2007.

Queueing outside the Motorpoint Arena for hours after a shift at McDonald’s, he bonded with people in the queue who shared his passion for music. Describing it as “almost like therapy”, a similar experience when seeing Radiohead at Lancashire County Cricket Ground in June 2008 cemented the cathartic and central role of live music in his life – enjoying the fleeting moments he spent with new-found friends, who’d be all-but-gone from his life after the gig ended, thanks to a lack of social media at the time.

Taking his passion to university with him, he got involved with student radio at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Tapping up opportunities, he interviewed a number of then-small, now established, touring artists like The 1975, Daughter and CHVRCHES. After dropping out, a job opportunity from BBC Radio Wales kept his hand in the radio world, and volunteering with Welsh festivals like Sŵn Festival and FOCUS Wales further embedded him within the Welsh capital’s live music world. Approaching Radio Cardiff to get back onto the airwaves himself was what eventually gave rise to Minty’s Gig Guide – deciding to distil the city’s weekly live highlights into a short slot, he set out to share his passion and knowledge with people in the city, and that has now grown into the established entity that the Gig Guide is today.

Fast forwarding to 2022, in its longer-term form, Minty’s Gig Guide has taken on a community slant – making it an official mission to “get 100,000 people who live in, work in, or visit Wales to a gig that they otherwise might have missed” across a period of 5 years. It’s become a social enterprise, “with a vision and a mission to creatively convey event information in vivid and digestible ways”, wanting “to bring Wales’ cultural landscape to the front, making it fully accessible, visible and inclusive”.

From popular Tramshed and legendary Clwb Ifor Bach to newcomer Steam, there’s genuinely “no gig too big” and “no venue too small” to feature in Minty’s Gig Guide. It’s comprehensive and impassioned, wanting to help everyone find their place in the city. Bringing Minty’s Gig Guide’s collaboration with the 6 Music Festival and Fringe to the streets of Cardiff was the perfect way to welcome each event to the city.