Stereophonics Interview

Welsh rockers, Stereophonics, are returning to the album charts with ‘Keep The Village Alive’. Due for release on 11th September, the quartet’s ninth studio album will follow the success of ‘Just Enough Education To Perform’, ‘You Gotta Go There To Come Back’ and ‘Language. Sex. Violence. Other?’, which gave us singalong hits, ‘Have A Nice Day’, ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ and ‘Dakota’ respectively. Here, frontman, Kelly Jones, reveals all on ‘Keep The Village Alive’, Welsh banter and crowd favourites.
So Kelly, ninth studio album – do you still have the same passion for music as you did back in your ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ days?
Making music is something I’ve been doing since I was 12 years old so the passion doesn’t really change; the challenge is to do the touring and promoting. To make the music and be in a band where we can all still go for a beer, everything’s in a pretty good state.
You’re such a storyteller in your songwriting; what influences did you have for ‘Keep The Village Alive’?
There’s never a running theme with our albums, but I think the main spirit of ‘Keep The Village Alive’ is the statement of the title. It used to be said in the old villages back in Wales when I was kid, which basically means keep your spirits up and have a good time when times are tough. I actually found it in the sleeve notes of our first album, and it reminded me of a certain time. There’s lots of small towns all over the world that have been trodden on by the big cities, so I think people in those places do need a little bit of encouragement and support.

Do you get to go home much?
Yeah, I’m going back on Sunday to see my family. I go back as much as I can, but I’ve been living in London for 15 years. We just bounce back and forth whenever we can.
Is there anything you miss about it when you’ve been away?
The main thing I miss about it is how fast the banter is, the sarcasm and the back and forth. Living in London, you can have characters in pubs, but it’s not the same because [in Wales] everyone’s constantly taking the piss out of each other and I could drop five one-liners in a pub in London and it would probably go over everybody’s heads! Back home, everyone picks up on every single one.
You’re as smart, charged and gritty as ever, and you have a knack for making cool rock ballads; do you guys actively do anything to make sure you stay fresh or do you just do you?
The main thing for us is we’ve never boxed ourselves on with the music we listen to. We’ve never cared about what’s fashionable or what’s cool. If the music sounds good, then it sounds good. Whether we listen to Tom Waits one week or The Vaccines the next week, it doesn’t make much difference. The style of our music has been influenced by the collection of music that we tend to freely listen to. Our audience is very 50/50 male/female and it spans from 15-year-old kids to people in their 40s and 50s who have been watching us since 1997. It’s a very varied collection of songs after nine albums, and you can only write what you feel at the time. Plus I’m a Gemini so maybe it bounces back and forth between two characters!
With the new album you’ve also returned to the stage; is this where you guys feel most at home?
It goes hand-in-hand; we’ve been a touring band for almost 20 years so we finished touring about 18 months ago, came home and went straight back into the studio and we started playing live shows in April and it’s been great. We did the Royal Albert Hall and T In The Park in Scotland; we’re about to do V Festival and festivals in Berlin and Paris… We love playing live and it gets better and better because you can dip in and out of nine albums’ worth of material and change the set list every night.
Is there an album tour planned?
We’re piecing that together now; we’ve got the European stuff booked in and the UK in October through December, and then from January and February we might do some shows in Asia and Australia.
Is there a song that gets the biggest reaction from the crowd?
I guess ‘Dakota’ gets a very big reaction; it was a number one single and it transcended in most countries we’ve ever played in – I don’t know why or how – if I had the recipe I’d do it every week! But some songs just connect with people, and whether we play it at a festival or in a club, it just goes off.

Stereophonics was born during an influx of British rock bands like Oasis, Travis, Feeder, Snow Patrol… What do you make of up-and-coming UK rock bands? Do you keep your eye on new faces and sounds?
There are some good bands coming out; the last record I bought that I really liked was by Catfish & The Bottlemen, which is a great new record. They came to watch us in Scotland on the last run, and I’d never met them before I weirdly bought their record a couple of weeks before… The new Vaccines record is really good – there’s a lot of good up-and-coming bands, but there’s a lot of pop market going on, less and less rock & roll bands in the UK. The quality of song writing is getting better, especially in the pop world because before it was all about the image and not so much about the content.
What advice would you give to new bands today? Did you offer any to Catfish & The Bottlemen?
Well, Van turned out to be a massive fan of what we were doing and he’d watched a lot of our documentaries. The advice I’d give to any band is to focus on song writing and stay true to what you believe in. There’s a lot of temptation and pressure to fit into a mould of what record companies think they can sell. From my experience, sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t, but what does tell the test of time is, whether you’ve been around as long as The Who, as long as us or for 10 days, if you stick people in a field with 500 other bands, the only reason they’re gonna stay and watch you is if the song’s good. For me, it will always come back to that.
By Charlotte Mellor
@cmellor_03