Press: Stereophonics @ WelshBands

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES - 24 JANUARY 1998 NEW MUISICAL EXPRESS (NME)

They're headlining the NME Brat Tour, their album shot into the Top Ten and they've been invited to parties at the Groucho with the likes of Jarvis and Robbie Williams. So has fame gone to the Stereophonics' heads? Has it bally hell! Hot gossip: Simon Williams (words), Roger Sargent (photos).

"NO PRESS WANTED TO TOUCH US. WERE NOT GOOD-LOOKING ENOUGH FOR ONE REASON. WE DON@T WEAR ENOUGH EYELINER FOR TWO. AND MAYBE WE HAVEN'T GOT ENOUGH THINGS PIERCED FOR THREE." - STUART

"ROBBIE WILLIAMS ASKED US FOR A LINE, DIDN'T HE? IT'S LIKE, DRUGS? WE'RE FROM FUCKING CWMAMAN!" - KELLY

"Man, that was some night," as the vicar undoubtedly said when he woke up next to the actress' pet aardvark. "One to remember for a long, long time - not necessarily for the good points, by any rubbery stretch of the imagination - but pretty damn unforgettable all the same."

It had started with a music industry kiss, as three extremely naive young men from the hairy sheep's arse end of South Wales finally signed their big bad major record deal in big bad London town. And then it had started to go manically downhill. Really, really fast.

Going to La Posho French restaurant was one thing: "There were about 94 fucking courses and 80 fucking pieces of cutlery," they growl, gushingly. "We were like, 'Where the f- do we start?!"' The £1,000 'pocket money' they were casually given by their new paymeisters was quite another: "That was the first time in my young life I'd ever seen a £50 note!" whispers bassist Richard Jones, as though still shell(suit)-shocked by the experience.

As for the later entertainment, let us just say that these people weren't simply fish out of water. They were camels doing backflips around the North fucking Pole.

"We were at this Kula Shaker party in Groucho's, which is a hip place, apparently," sniffs singing tyke Kelly Jones. "And Jarvis Cocker was in there, Bob Mortimer was in there and Robbie Williams was in there and we couldn't believe it! We hadn't experienced anything like it - we were totally starstruck!

"We talked to Jarvis for half-an-hour; he was totally down-to-earth, a really nice bloke. Robbie Williams talked to us on the stairs and I swear to this day he hasn't got any recollection of it at all, you could see he was off his tits. He asked us for a line, didn't he? It's like, 'Drugs? We're from fucking Cwmaman!"'

"You couldn't buy a drink at the bar with cash, either!" says a boggle-eyed Richard. "You had to use a credit card!"

"So of course we're going, `Oh, so our fucking money's not fucking good enough for you, is it?'," says Kelly with a tremendous mock sneer. "Then we got thrown out of the club by the bloke from Columbia Records, because he thought we were gonna sign to him but we signed to V2 instead!" The singer pauses. And then, with a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head, sighs: "It was a fucking strange night, that was."

The three crucial elements of Stereophonics are lazing about in the lounge of their superwanky double¬decker tourbus. Unfortunately, they are no longer allowed up on the roof of said mobile hotel after an incident in Vienna involving a naked roadie and a skylight. Fortunately, the weather is so utterly miserable even the most suicidally Smirnoff-addled guitar tech would surely baulk at the idea of exposing himself to the freezing, driving rain outside.

Over the road, through the darkness one can just make out the shape of the Red Box the venue for this the first night of the NME/Miller Genuine Draft Tour. At first glance, this is surely The Serious Tour: forget previous whackedout Bratbus crews like Fluffy, 3 Colours Red and 60Ft Dolls, 1998's line-up is, on first appearances at least, a strictly no pills'n'thrills stick-your-head-in-a-book affair. We have the mature pop articulacy of Theaudience. We have the deadpan guitar dronings of the Warm Jets. We have the intense politico rap rockings of Asian Dub Foundation. And, most pertinent of all, at the top of the pile we have the scowling, frowning Stereophonics, masters of the steely gaze and the gritty riff; purveyors of small-town mundanities and the grey poetic injustices. Happy, happy and, indeed, joy joy.

Yet, much like a silky-looking, suntanned Tottenham team at the start of the season, first appearances are always hopelessly inaccurate. In reality, Theaudience rock it up and earn bonus entertainment points a'plenty for having a teenage singer called Sophie Ellis, daughter of seminal Blue Peter-ite Janet and future star in her own right; the expanded five-piece Warm Jets line-up is cranked up to the point of mild agony and led by Zoe Ball's `Rock Star' boyfriend Louis Jones, as snapped by the tabloids `frolicking' on an exotic beach; Asian Dub Foundation are simply fantastically uplifting and are many tipsters' outside bet for taking the tour crown; and the 'Phonics... well, they turn out to be bloody good fun, actually.

Perhaps it's all down to timing. After all, just last week Stereophonics achieved their first national front cover. Admittedly, it was in the business section of a Sunday paper, and admittedly it was only used within the context of yet another bastard story about Richard Balloonbeard Branson Picklehead and his label, V2 Records, but a cover's a cover, right? Right! And here's another one in your paws right now, steaming outta the left-field London Mediawhorelands and probably saying 'Phonic For The Troops!' or something witty like that in big typeface.

Stereophonics have the decency to almost look impressed. As you may or may not expect from a band who've sold 60,000 albums in six months, which is quite literally 60,000 albums more than a few bands we could mention who've already hit the exalted heights of a music weekly front cover over the same timespan, leaving the Welsh threesome scratching their barnets and mulling over the possible reasons why the press persisted in passing over them.

"Nobody wanted to touch us," shrugs drummer Stuart Cable blithely. "We're not good-looking enough for one reason. We don't wear enough eyeliner for two. And maybe we haven't got enough things pierced for three.

"Image has never been a conscious thing of ours," the drummer continues ` airily. Which is convenient because his black silk-look shirt really is bloody horrible. "We just wanted to write good songs and we grew up listening to bands who didn't have an image, from Bob Dylan to AC/DC. There was no image there, just jeans and T-shirts."

"And boys in school uniform," deadpans Kelly.

"Yeah," grins Stuart, shirt gleaming slyly beneath the bus lights. "Exactly!" There is some sweet synchronicity about tonight's event, as this is only the second time Stereophonics have played in Dublin. Their first appearance here was in September 1996, nary a few weeks after what we shall now refer to as the aforementioned Groucho Experience, when they joined the hordes at the In The City fandango. Disqualified from the actual `Unsigned' competition by dint of the V2 deal, they nevertheless acquitted themselves raucously for the music publishing fraternity, warranting a gurgling 'stampeding success'-type quote from the NME indie crew.

Experts stroked their chinny-chin¬chins and marvelled at the way in which Stereophonics had somehow squeezed in between Manic Street Preachers' passion and 60Ft Dolls' fuzziness. Enthusiasts wibbled wildly about the Welsh resurgence and saw the 'Phonics as the next truly great export. And a year later Stereophonics had propelled their debut album, `Word Gets Around', into the Top Ten.

Don't tell us, 'Phonics: when you were in Dublin first time around your new employers said, `Relax lads, take it easy, we want to build you up really, really slowly and break you on the seventh album', right? Kelly's face registers a passing flicker of surprise. "No, they said they wanted to build it really quickly! They wanted us to go on the road a lot and they wanted each single to beat the last."

Yes. Just as we thought. By the end of 1997 Stereophonics had played 100 gigs. In London their venue-bulging capacity climbed logically and steadily from Camden Monarch to Highbury Garage to Mallet Street ULU and on to this week's Astoria bash. Their singles entered the charts at Numbers 51, 33, 22 and 20 respectively and the album shot in at Six, "Which shocked everybody," confesses Stuart.

"Especially me," mutters Kelly. "Every band has a plan they try to stick to, but we couldn't believe how tight ours went."
Fundamentally, 'Word Gets Around' is a sublime title because that is precisely how - Stereophonics built a fanbase. Bereft of the usual hyperfrenzied press outlets as the press struggled to find any mindblowing 'angle' or emotional tangle on three utterly normal-looking blokes who sang irascible - and occasionally incendiary - rough-edged pop tunes about normal people and their normal lives, the threesome hit - nay, clobbered - the wide-open road. They played with AC Acoustics, Kenickie, The Who, Skunk Anansie, the Manics and 3 Colours Red; they careered around virtually every festival site known to Gigkind; even when drummer Stuart fell ill during the summer, Kelly and Richard still managed an acoustic jaunt across America.

THE FIRST WEEK 'WORD GETS Around' came out it sold over 20,000 copies - twice as many as the `trendier' Super Furry Animals and a spanking three times more than their supposed nouveau indie rivals Travis, both out the same day. By the time the band rolled into Cardiff in December for gigs 99 and 100 of their brief career, the record company were lurking in the wings and stormtrooped the stage to present a gobsmacked band with silver discs for the album in front of their home crowd. Naff but nice, and a fine point for the band to stop and put their stage¬sore feet up for Christmas.

Stuart flew off to Grand Canaria to get a tan and grow an extraordinary pseudo¬perm: "I slept upside down in a Gro-bag and woke up with this on top of me," he froths, jovially. He flew back from holiday last night. He looks like Tom Baker. "Fucking great, isn't it?" Hmmmm. Richard, aka the tattooed, quiet one, decided to bleach his hair. And Kelly went to the pub in Cwmaman.

"The first week off was strange," he muses. "You'd been working for a year and all of a sudden you'd stopped and I didn't know what to do with myself - I was climbing the wall. Then a week after that you start to relax and then it's like, 'Oh, gotta get back on the bus now.' You don't get enough time on and off."Richard nods. Quietly. "We've had three weeks off but already it feels like we never went off tour."

"Mind you," says an encouraging Stuart, "it was nice to sit down and relax and think, 'I'm not going to do anything tonight except go out and fucking drink!"'

Good attitude! See, Stereophonics are men of intrinsically simple pleasures. They like their rock. They like their roll. They like their Carling Premier. And, most of all, they like keeping it real. Extremely real.

"We haven't changed that much," decides Kelly. "We haven't turned into rock stars overnight, so back home at Christmas we could still talk to people in the same way - we don't talk down to anybody. In fact, we talk up to people because we've got more respect for them than they've probably got for us! So you go down the club on Christmas morning, have a pint with people and they ask lots of questions and you're Terry Wogan for a while but then it gets back to normal and you find out what everyone else has been doing."

They got another, more feisty, homecoming in Cardiff as well: throwing a party in a nightclub, Kelly turned up at the door only for the bouncer to refuse to let the singer in. A few salient points later (see: "We've put a grand-and-a-half behind the bar, it's our party and so we're paying your fucking wages!") Kelly was still outside, but at least this time the queue had formed a small gathering known in the trade as 'a ruck'. "It was all on video and our manager watched it all down the police station," beams Kelly. "He's from Newbury and he couldn't believe he was seeing all these people being dragged off each other!"

Ha! Welcome home, boys. "Aye," nods the fierce-looking little fella. "It was a good crack."

TOO DOWN-TO-EARTH TO BE true? Quite possibly, but this is the Stereophonics' one way of life that is theit own, their own, etcetera. Their road crew consists of hometown mates, so it's as if they travel around with a microcosm of their comrnunity. Later on, one of them, Swampy the drum tech, will come into the coach lounge brandishing a mysterious pair of boxer shorts. Even later than that, Stuart will use said underwear to mop up a mug of coffee he's just spilt with a loud roar of "OH, WANKER STUART!" They have not become embroiled in slanging matches with their rivals / contemporaries. Their career has followed the path of the worker: steady, consistent, stubborn, avoiding sensationalism for sensationalism's sake. To get to a vague kind of point they are the anti-Embrace.

"I'm not trying to sound like a wanker, but there's not one band that's ever scared us," states a jaw-jutting Kelly. "When we first went to London we thought they were all going to be fucking phenomenal because everyone in Wales was really average, but they were even worse than the bands in Wales!"

Oh, alright - they're almost the anti-Embrace.

"It's just the way you're brought up," continues the singer, warming to the hardcore work ethic theme. "We practised at midday on Sunday for eight years, in a room this size," he gestures towards the door 2ft away at the other end of the lounge, "with the biggest fucking hangovers we've ever had in our fucking lives! It's not like living in Camden where you expect things to happen - we never expected any of this to happen.

"My mum and dad used to watch me opening letters from record companies saying 'F-off, you're not good enough' or whatever. We used to send out tapes when we were called Tragic Love Company and they were the same songs and nobody would give us the time of day. I had a letter back from PolyGram saying 'No, we don't like the tape', and we'd already signed the fucking deal!"

PolyGram is V2's parent company, by the way. Mind you, it could be sillier. Oh look! It is.

"Some journalist got Richard's name wrong once," says an increasingly disbelieving Kelly, nodding at the bassist. "Thing is, he's got his fucking name tattooed on his fucking neck!"

He has, too. And here's where the story bends. Because no matter how down-to-earth you stay, no matter how many of your closest acquaintances are snoring in the bunks around you, if
you're going to go gallivanting around the country slaying audiences night after night after bleedin' night then something is liable to crack. Stuart's '97 was marginally tarnished by doses of glandular fever and pneumonia, and after various disgruntled mumblings from the band vis-a-vis the 'dartboard' style of their tour organisation (see: haphazard, erratic, all-over-the-bastard-place) things came to a head at the start of the summer, when the band hit
Brighton for the Essential Festival, "Which wasn't that `essential', because we walked off after three songs," observes Kelly, logically.

"I couldn't sing properly because we'd played north of Newcastle and gone onstage at midnight and we had to be down in Brighton to go onstage at 1pm the following afternoon! And we'd been telling people and telling them and telling them it was just too much, 'You've got to plan it a bit more - we're prepared to put the work in, but unless you plan the tours better people are going to get f-ed up.' You hear about it so many times and they don't do anything about it until it's too late and we didn't want to go through all that shit, so we walked offstage. I didn't think anyone would give a f-. People have come up and said, 'Why did you walk off, then?' and I'm like, `We didn't think anyone was listening, to be honest!' But I think we made our point."

Quite. At least the Essential Festival provided them with sufficient punters to enable them to unwittingly piss off some sort of audience. Unlike their guest appearance at John Peel's birthday party at London's ICA.

"We're the only band in the world, right, that can be put onstage at 8pm when the doors don't open until 8.30pm," bristles Kelly. "We're live on the radio playing to nobody in an empty venue. We've been on tour all week playing 500-capacity venues and we've cancelled a gig to do this party and the only people there are our crew and Steve Lamacq, looking really embarrassed. It was a fucking nightmare."

And if that sounds unnervingly like a Spinal Tapism of the highest, hairiest order, then you are merely caressing the very tip of the Stereophonics' big rock iceberg. A quick scan of the packaging : for the new single, a revamped version ; of the squeezy `Local Boy In The Photograph', reveals cover versions of not just one but two old-school monster grooves. One is 'Who'll Stop The Rain' by Creedence Clearwater Revival, destined for the Channel 4 film The Girl With Her Brains In Her Feet. The other is `The Last Resort' by The Eagles.

You heard.

"Oh, God!" yelps Kelly. "When The Eagles played Wembley Stadium, Cwmaman was empty! 'Hotel California' is the anthem of the fucking town!"

Once again, the innocent passer-by is struck by the seethingly obvious fact that Stereophonics tend to wander a mite off the extremely beaten Britpop track. The years spent watching blues bands in the clubs of South Wales have served their pub quiz sensibilities so well that the whole concept of anyone not appreciating the history of music is simply gruesome to them.

Imagine their surprise, then, when a grown-up monthly mag recently invited their readers to vote for the greatest albums of all time. The winning record, it transpired, was released all the way back in time: in 1997, in fact. "That's not a record that's stood the test of time!" hisses an appalled Stuart, pseudo-perm wobbling. And he should know - he bought a Stevie Wonder CD a few weeks ago, and it originally came out before he was born. "It's incredible!" the hair quivers. "It really is! That's an achievement!"

So, in the general historical scheme of things, are you now a rock star, Kelly?
"I wouldn't say I was a rock star, no," he responds, pursing his lips. "I would say I was in a band. I could be a rock star if I wanted. But I wouldn't."

"It's all been done before, that's the thing," says Stuart, referring grumpily to his forefathers' habit of breaking things. "The telly's been thrown out of the window, the motorbikes have gone into the swimming pools with Keith Moon on the fuckers - everything you can think of has been done."

You sound tremendously disappointed, Stuart.

"I know, I know! Oh, to be in a house next to Steve McQueen and fucking build a ramp and fucking jump right over it! But that would be boring now, wouldn't it?"

Not entirely, no. But Stereophonics have understood one of the basic rules of the industry: with the honourable exception of Oasis, acting like a rock wanker makes great copy and sells absolutely f-all records. And because Stereophonics have about as much to do with rock wankery as Judith Chalmers has with dwarf-throwing, this is presumably why this is their first proper front cover feature even though they've already shifted shiteloads of units in a proper grown-up way, like.

By the way, Kelly Jones was on the brink of a breakthrough of a different kind in 1996: having studied scriptwriting on an unemployment course, he impressed the organisers so much that he ended up meeting the BBC and was finally - after years of frustration and dole gloom - offered money to further his dramatic ideas. A week later Stereophonics signed their record deal. Hmph, you could say.

Before that, back in Cwmaman, Kelly was like any other fucked-up kid. He experienced the immense drudgery of day-to-day existence, was half-crushed by the tedium of life and all it had to throw at him. Urban alienation? Hey, he knows all about it.

"I did animation for a short time," he shudders, "but it drove me fucking mental. How anyone can actually do that for a living and not go absolutely bonkers is beyond me; 24 drawings for one second of footage? Naaah. Let's go down the pub..."

Good attitude.