UTR - The Stereophonics

“You know, we went on tour with people like the Chili Peppers and The Black Crowes, and played festivals with people like Beck or Iggy Pop or whoever. We did lots and lots of gigs over a two-year period promoting Performance and Cocktails and we just felt in a way we were kind of bluffing our musicianship. We could work well as a three piece, but I think there were lots of sides to the band that nobody had seen yet and I think it was time to put that to tape really, and show people there’s another side to us. Not so much experimenting in a way that nobody had ever experimented before, but in a way that we’d never experimented before. And we tried to make a record that had a lot more depth, a lot more dynamics and a lot more musical instruments basically. You know, before it was guitar, bass, drums.” So says The Stereophonics short but striking lead singer/guitarist Kelly Jones.

I sat down with Kelly Jones and bassist Richard Jones (no relation) in the Hollywood House of Blues members only Foundation Room, while drummer Stuart Cable finished soundchecking downstairs. Kelly proves to be the talkative one, with Richard mainly chiming in on agreement. The first thing I ask them is which questions they are asked most frequently in interviews. “Um, what are your influences and you come from Wales,” Kelly responds. Journalists ask if the band comes from Wales? “No, they say, ‘you come from Wales,’ with a question mark, you see,” Kelly clarifies before Richard adds, “then they ask, how do spell the village that we come from.” As I try to stray away from questions that you can easily find the answers to with a tiny bit of internet research, I promise them that I won’t ask any of those.

Research reveals that the band formed in Cwmaman, South Wales, in the mid ‘90s. Wales is a Principality of the United Kingdom, is located on 8,015 square miles of Britain’s Western peninsula and has a population of 2,798,200. Twenty percent of that population speaks Welsh, as well as English, a language indigenous to Wales. When you travel there (I once went on a camping trip to Wales with my half brother and sister when I was about eight), the first thing you notice is that all the signs are in both English and Welsh. Originally the band performed under the unfortunate name Tragic Love Company, which they got by combining the names of three of their favorite bands: The Tragically Hip, Mother Love Bone, and Bad Company. Other influences include AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. In 1996 the band wisely changed their name to The Stereophonics, taking it from an inscription on an ancient gramophone that belonged to Stuart’s grandmother. Only a month later they signed to Richard Branson’s then-brand-new V2 label. The Stereophonics’ first single was also V2’s inaugural release. It didn’t take long for the British public to embrace the band as their debut album, Word Gets Around, entered the charts at number six. Fast forward to the present and The Stereophonics have remained one of the UK’s biggest selling acts for the last six years, even though they’ve barely made a dent in the American market.

Their latest and third album, Just Enough Education to Perform (still V2), is certainly their strongest effort. It’s pretty much everything that Kelly Jones indicated he wanted it to be, as the band add other instruments to an overall more melodic sound. Musically, the band’s first two albums often sounded a little stale, as if made by forty or fifty-something aging rockers, even though Kelly’s slice-of-life lyrics sometimes shined through the dull mix. Kelly’s ‘Rod Stewart with a hangover’ vocals have improved on their latest effort also, they are no longer grating. You can hear it on the slight gospel choir of rocking album opener “Vegas Two Times.” It’s heard in the slide guitar of “Step On My Own Size Nines” and the infectious pop of “Have a Nice Day,” the Stereophonics are trying a little harder. They are never going to be accused of altering the creative currents of rock music, nor do they profess to be doing that. The Stereophonics seem to know their place in rock. The first real question I ask the Joneses is if the title Just Enough Education to Perform is meant to be a dig at themselves and their old sound, or at other bands.
“I think it’s a dig at everybody. I think everybody in life generally learns just enough to get by. I think we’re all capable of pushing ourselves a lot further than we do. I think we get complacent and lazy, whether you’re a musician, a race car driver, or whatever walk of life. Especially British people,” Kelly says. “When you go to Europe everybody can speak pretty much two or three languages and I think in Britain we expect everybody to speak the way we speak. When we travel a lot you kind of pick up on that quite a bit. So it’s to do with us and to do with the music industry.”

In the past, music critics and many indie rock fans have easily dismissed The Stereophonics as dull pub and stadium rock. Still, it’s apparent that the band really tried to reach new heights with the new record. Has the critical reaction to the album reflected all the work they put into it?

“Well, we hoped that it would be the most critically acclaimed record that we would make, because we all felt it was probably the most different lyrically. I think it was quite sentimental, quite romantic, quite nostalgic, quite rock ‘n’ roll, I think it crosses lots of boundaries for one piece of work. But we released a single called ‘Mr. Writer’ first, and every journalist in the country assumed it was about them, so the reviews were terrible,” Kelly laments. “So we felt very proud about it and then when the album came out it kind of spoke for itself, and sold as many as it sold, and it went to number one. The people on the street were into it, so it didn’t really matter. It was slightly frustrating that we didn’t get credit where I think credit was due on this record. If you compare it to other band’s reviews and stuff, you could take it personally, but we’ve kind of gotten to the state now where we were happy with it. I’m into criticism if it’s like good criticism, but (not) if it’s an article that’s personally slagging a personal member of the band off and not mentioning one song on the album.”

So was “Mr. Writer” directed at us music writers? (Well, hopefully not all us music writers). Kelly explains: “You probably know as well as I do, that you’re in venues like this every day of your life, some bigger ones, some smaller ones, and surrounded by people in the industry. You’re in after show situations where there are cling-ons and people pretending to be friends of so-and-so. They’re doing certain drugs to fit in or they come with certain women to fit in, and it’s just a constant ‘I’m important’ kind of feeling. And you get that very much in London; you probably get that extremely a lot here. So it’s a song which is about, ‘your face fits, and if it doesn’t then you pretend it does,’ kind of song. That’s what the song’s about. You know, we had reviews about shows the band never played. Just by coincidence, we were supposed to play a show in New York and we couldn’t go because Stuart was ill, and we got reviewed on a show we never played. And I think it’s quite a sarcastic, funny song. It’s very dark the way that it sounds, but the lyric is supposed to be like, ‘you’re a fucking idiot.’ And if you took the song personally then you are the guy in the song, and if you didn’t then you know who did. You know people like that. But it seemed like everybody who wrote reviews on the album took it personally.”

“Which was quite an interesting fact,” Richard adds. It’s almost hard to believe that legitimate journalists would cover shows they weren’t even at. “Well it’s happened quite a few times. Our press agency will invite reviewers along to a show, they give their tickets to their friends, and they still write a review for the show, even though they didn’t go to the place,” says Richard.

Kelly is keen to point out that there are lots of very good journalists in the UK, but they’ve never quite known what to do with The Stereophonics. “We’ve never fitted into any trend, which was our downfall, but for our longevity I think it’s going to be to our advantage,” Kelly hopes.

Richard concurs, “It’s like our influences didn’t fit in with what they wanted our influences to be. They always say The Smiths are cool, and like, we don’t own a Smiths record between us. It’s not that we don’t like them, it’s just that we haven’t got a record. [The UK press] don’t slag us off, but they kind of make fun that we like bands like AC/DC and stuff like that.”

Kelly further laments when I ask him if he thinks the band are often a whipping post for critics and other bands that want to bemoan the state of British rock. “We’ve even got a phrase now, ‘it’s very Stereophonics,’ because everything usually goes fucking completely against us all the way along. And it makes us work harder. Like, the Brit Awards is a perfect example. And I’m not bothered by the Brit Awards, you know, we won Best Newcomer years ago and that’s all we needed to get us where we’re going. It’s irrelevant, but I think we were the top five selling artist in the UK last year. We sold more tickets than U2 in the country, and I think we got nominated for one award and people like Travis or Dido in the UK get five nominations for videos, singles, album, best band. It’s because they’re on a big label and we’re on a tiny label, so we suffer from stuff like that. On that side of the whipping thing, yeah it does happen. But it’s never really bothered us, to be honest. We can laugh at it more than we get angry about it, because it’s like we’re expecting it. And it’s just come to the point where we’re like, ‘whatever.’”

As Kelly just pointed out, the band really isn’t doing so badly. So they don’t have the critical respect they deserve or a bunch of awards to put over the fireplace, but they probably each have a really big fireplace, meaning that the band have sold tons of records and made plenty of money. Just the week before I sit down with the band, for example, their album has just gone back into the number one position in the UK charts, many months after it was originally released. That was partly because their surprisingly delicate cover of “Handbags and Gladbags,” a song that Rod Stewart made famous, was also a top five hit at the time. Kelly admits that the band is doing fine in the ears of Britain’s record buyers.

“ What happens is that if it’s directly from the people on the street, if it’s voted by the public, listeners, readers, we usually win,” Kelly explains. “And I don’t mean winning awards; I mean feedback. So when we put tickets on sale, we sell lots of tickets. We put records on sale, we sell lots of records. So we do something right for the people on the street. The people at the cool magazines don’t understand why the people on the street like us, and we don’t understand. I don’t think any band understands why somebody likes you, it’s impossible, if you think about it your fuckin’ head’s gonna fry.” When I point out that perhaps the people on the street are who really count anyway, Richard agrees: “They’re the only ones that buy the records anyway; everyone else gets them for free.”

Success has had its perks too. For example, they got to record a version of Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” with Wales’ biggest musical legend, Tom Jones (once again no relation — is everybody in Wales named Jones?!). The song was for Tom Jones’s 1999 Reload album, which also featured collaborations with The Divine Comedy, The Cardigans and Portishead, among many others.

“ Critically, he’s probably not as cool as people like Beck and all that kind of thing,” Kelly says of working with the great Welsh crooner, “but we were like, fuck it, let’s have a laugh and enjoy it. And to see the amount of women and the amount of restaurants that would just open like the President has just landed in town in every fucking country in Europe, and the women that just gather around him. It was a fuckin’ eye opener. It was just like, this guy’s a living legend. He’s been in Elvis’s house. He’s been over to dinner with Frank Sinatra and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. It’s just like, ‘What the fuck can I say?’ He’s like a friend now, because where he was born and where we were born is like twelve miles apart in two little mining villages, so the sense of humor is very similar. And it came to the point where it felt like he was just one of the boys from back home. And he wasn’t Tom Jones, he was just Tom from Pontypridd.” Tom even asked Kelly to write a song for his new album. “I wrote a song,” Kelly explains, “and liked it too much. Which is a song which might be used on the next record, so I never gave it to him.”

The band also got the honor of opening for U2 on part of their recent US tour, fulfilling the dream of many a rock musician: performing at Madison Square Gardens. Kelly has nothing but praise for Bono and co., even when I challenge him that perhaps U2 doesn’t make vital music anymore. “I’ve never known four people in one unit to be as united as they are, and want the same goal, and work as hard as each other, and try to get to the same place, even though they’ve achieved it time after time after time. They’re still hungry and still going forward,” Kelly praises.

Kelly is also optimistic about The Stereophonics own chances in America. “It’s probably the furthest we’ve got in regards to radio and television and stuff like that. We’re playing bigger shows as well.” They play to a sold out House of Blues crowd that night, although you can’t help but wonder how many in the audience are simply anglophiles. Still, the band got to play Letterman and they show no signs of consigning defeat when it comes to American success. “We are just going to keep on pushing and pushing. The expectation from what we want is very high, so if we can keep going that way we’d be very happy and eventually maybe one day we’ll get there.”

On the new album, a lot of the lyrics center on America. On “Nice To Be Out,” for example, Kelly sings about a visit to Dallas, Texas: “The library, the place they ended Kennedy/We stood where Oswald took his shot/In my opinion there was a bigger plot/Costner’s back and to the left.” And that’s not the only song that references movies. Kelly’s lyrics also often put him in a storyteller mode and his songs are often more like short stories than a vehicle for Kelly to pour his heart out. “Everyday I Think of Money,” also off of the new album, is about a bank armored van driver/security guard who continually dreams of robbing the cash he’s supposed to be guarding and what he could do with the money. It’s not too much of a surprise, then, to learn that for the past two years Kelly’s been working on a screenplay about Britain’s last ever hangman. If he’s got a script, then he’s hit the right town.

Kelly agrees: “I was doing quite a lot of work on it last night; I had a night in last night. I’ve been kind of on and off this script for two years. It’s about a hangman. Somehow at one of those U2 shows, we ended up sitting next to Kevin Huvane, [a leading agent at] CAA. I don’t know how — I was just having this conversation with this guy for like an hour and a half and I didn’t have a clue who he was. He was with Demi Moore and Sandra Bullock, so we were just all star struck that Demi Moore and Sandra Bullock were there. And he told me to give him a call next time I come into town. So I thought I’d do this treatment ready, so I was working on that last night. If I’m going to get it produced I think I’ll find out within the next week, because I’ll probably sneak a copy in his bag tonight. I like doing it, it’s a nice break from the music, your head goes somewhere else.”

Ideally Kelly would like people like Anthony Hopkins (also Welsh) and Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting, The Full Monty) to star. He’s also talked about the project to fellow Welshman Rhys Ifans, who was Hugh Grant’s wacky roommate in Noting Hill and was once briefly in fantastic Welsh indie-rockers Super Furry Animals.

If his script ever does get made, then perhaps Kelly Jones will get the respect he might now finally deserve. Certainly Kelly’s fellow countrymen don’t always get full respect in the rest of the British Isles. Kelly tells me of how Weakest Link host Anne Robinson, who’s been a TV personality in the UK for over a decade, managed to insult the entire Welsh nation on national TV.

“ There’s a program called Room 101. What happens is that you basically put three things in a dust bin” Kelly explains, “what you’d like to get rid of, and she did Welsh people one week. And the whole nation went fucking crazy thinking that if she did Pakistani people, or something, then it would’ve been racist, but Welsh people just get walked over. Obviously she did it as a gag, but a lot of people took it personally. I didn’t really take it that seriously. What she did as a payback was have a completely Welsh Weakest Link episode. It was a bit of a chance for us to get a comeback, but of course the Welsh failed fucking miserably, and didn’t get many questions right and it made them look even more stupid.”