Back with a Bang? Stereophonics

“You can’t forget the day you walk into the dole office and say, ‘Future Occupation?’ And you can write down ‘ROCKSTAR’.” Kelly Jones is feeling nostalgic. “It was quite a good moment,” he adds, wistfully smiling. It was August 1st 1996 when Jones officially signed up to his new career as the frontman of Stereophonics in his local dole office in a town deep in the Welsh valleys. For Jones, every time that date comes around it becomes more and more poignant. Take August 1st 2006, for instance. On the tenth anniversary of that landmark occasion, Stereophonics were in another remote location - this time in Ireland, recording the album which now, a year on, they’re preparing to release.

“We didn’t get a lot done that day,” reveals Javier Weyler, the band’s South American drummer. “We didn’t get a lot done that day and it went through to the next day but it was well worth the celebration,” adds Kelly. While the pair exchange a smile as they try to recall the finer details of the inebriated forty eight hour period, Stereophonics’ bassist Richard Jones sits looking fairly placid – as if he’s still recovering from the hangover. “You’re not going to forget that,” says Kelly, more seriously. “We’d worked along time to get a record deal – I’d been in bands for ten years before I got a record deal so when we actually got it we didn’t let it go to our heads, we always saw it as an opportunity really to show people what we could do and from there on we kind of got a bit giddy.”

Giddy, it transpires, is Kelly’s rather inconspicuous word for describing his band’s journey over the last ten years. One that has taken them from Cwmaman – a former pit village in South Wales – to the top of the charts with every album that they’ve released since their 1997 debut, ‘Word Gets Around,’  which still managed to peak at number six. While band’s that broke through with them have faded into insignificance, it’s Stereophonics who have remained a prominent fixture in British music, even despite lineup changes (founding member and Kelly’s best friend Stuart Cable was sacked in 2003 because of his lack of commitment) and sporadic fallouts with, and unforgiving appearances in, the media. 

Of the latest incident with the latter, Kelly is still carrying the evidence, or rather, injury. Today, sat with the rest of his band in their record label’s headquarters in South London, Kelly’s usual rock star chic of a faded grey t-shirt, jeans and black shoes has gained the unfortunate accessory of a forearm long support bandage on his right arm. Under it hides a five-day-old cut that required two operations and almost cost him his career. The incident happened in the early hours after a doorman brought his night to a premature end after he was discovered in the ladies toilet apparently looking for his girlfriend. Understandably, Kelly doesn’t talk in too much detail about the injury; except to quip that it’s “happened before but not as bad.”

Not known for their love of interviews, when we meet Stereophonics are amiably reflective. Kelly particularly is in good spirits – with his enigmatic dry remarks interwoven with scrupulous analysis of how Stereophonics have developed as a band and as people. It’s a similar balance to the one shown on the band’s sixth studio album, ‘Pull The Pin.’ At that stage in their career where most bands creative minds are running on empty and the record label is muttering the term ‘best of,’ Stereophonics have returned with their most definitive album to date, one that has wrapped up all the experience of their previous five in twelve tracks.

“We kind of recognised after we’d done it,” explains Kelly, “there’s definitely parts of the first three records on there but I think it’s better in a way, it’s kind of bigger and better and more confident and the tunes are massive and the melodies are really big but it’s got that energy of the first couple of albums – quite a lot I think.”

He continues: “And the delicate stuff like, ‘Bright Red Star,’ could have been on the ‘JEEP’ (‘Just Enough Education To Perform’) record, its good man, I think it’s a good combination of stuff. If we’d have tried to do that we probably would have fucked it up massively but it was just a good time in the studio.”

Recorded at Grouse Lodge Studios in Ireland, as well as tying together the band’s sound spectrum - from the frenetic opener ‘Soldiers Make Good Targets’ to the more minimal ‘My Friends’ – ‘Pull The Pin’ is a return for Kelly to his storytelling heritage. ‘I Could Lose You,’ for instance, tells a “tongue in cheek” tale “about getting your hand up a girls jumper,” while ‘Daisy Lane’ – written about a child who was murdered for his mobile phone - and ‘It Means Nothing’ are perhaps the most touching sentiments of his career. Unusually, Kelly reveals the lyrics of both songs ended up dictating the raw melody of the music that they’re now sung to.

“Songs like that, the words always come first. ‘It Means Nothing,’ ‘Daisy Lane,’ the lyrics came first and the music came after. 90% of things I write - melody, music first and then you fill in the blanks, so you know when the ones are the ones if you know what I mean? The ones that have got the words first are usually the ones coming from somewhere in your head when you want to say something,” says Kelly, sincerely. “It’s just the sentiment of those things really that affected me first hand as opposed to flicking through a newspaper and finding something topical and thinking, ‘Well OK, lets write about that.’ I want to write something if it affects me and that’s just a couple of the stuff that came up in this period I guess.”