105 for 30 #002 - Stereophonics 'Local Boy in the Photograph’

Getting it wrong about the band from Cwmaman. A seismic night at The Filling Station, Newport.

It’s a tiny room. More a broom cupboard than an actual backstage. The lad with the big brown eyes and hair as dark as coal is sat on his haunches, intent on some handwritten sheets of paper. I think they’re lyrics but in the split second between me walking in and him noticing I’m there, I realise he’s studying his between song asides.

“Have a good gig,” I say, and back out of the room.

“Thanks.”

He looks nervous. And no wonder. Tonight’s gig is obviously a big deal. Three coach loads of kids have filled the venue to busting point with Valleys’ accents and early summer high spirits.

Our manager - Alan Jones, formerly of 60’s hit machine Amen Corner… and previously the manager of LA Guns (one of the precursors to Guns ’n’ Roses) and 60ft Dolls (he paid for the sessions that produced their first demo) - owns the venue, The Filling Station in Newport.

This - then - should be our gig, our big moment. But it most definitely is not that.

Quick aside: Alan wanted to manage us because we were called The Immediate. Amen Corner had been on the Immediate record label, founded by Andrew Loog Oldham (The Rolling Stones’ first manager, Svengali and producer.) My friend Richard Holland’s compilation tapes had been strewn with genius released on that label… by The Small Faces most notably, for me; but also great songs by PP Arnold and Amen Corner. I was definitely paying tribute to the label when I named our band. And here we were, being managed by one of the artists on the label. It’s funny how these things work out, sometimes.

Alan was - still is - Mr Rock ’n’ Roll showbiz. He’d spent the 70’s and 80’s running an influential clothing boutique in Los Angeles and managing bands who were instrumental in that city’s rock scene. He brought some of that fake leopard skin glamour to Newport. The Filling Station’s DJ booth is situated in the cab of an authentic Yank wagon that Alan has had shipped over.

Christ knows how much that might have cost.

Alan’s famous amongst local gig-goers, not just because of his 60’s heyday and commitment to supporting local bands, but because of his teeth. Alan was the first man I’d ever seen with whitened teeth. Heaven couldn’t be whiter than his gnashers. He made high season Val D’Isere look like Goths on Hallowe’en.

He’s a good man and absolutely dedicated to his music. His enthusiasm and money deserved better than us. I talked a good talk but all of that talk didn’t manifest itself as much more than a handful of pretty half-arsed songs.

We should have worked harder.

Had we done so, we maybe possibly could potentially have been contenders.

Alan gets to cherry pick the nights we play at his venue. There’s a buzz about this new band from Cwmaman. They have a great singer, by all accounts.

A couple of weeks before the gig, but with their name still fresh in my mind after Alan tells me we’ll be supporting them when they play The Filling Station, Huw (Pooh Stick) Williams - the Minister for Cool Welsh Pop - brings their demo in and plays it in his weekly slot on my radio show.

To the very best of my knowledge, that’s the first time Stereophonics are played on the radio.

It’s a great song called ‘A Thousand Trees’ with a lyrical conceit as concise and hooky as the melody. They’re clearly a good band and their songwriter, if he has much more like this up his sleeve, is potentially a great writer.

As well as the coach loads of kids squeezed into The Filling Station that night, we know that the likes of Geoff Travis - head of Rough Trade - is there as well. Back in ’96 bands could still spark bidding wars. If there was a buzz about a band, A&R people from all of the major indies and the alleged indie arms of the majors would sharpen their chequebooks.

They were all desperate for the next Oasis.

I remember how good his voice was at soundcheck… bruised and soulful. Great voices are so rare, and no amount of practising or application is going to earn you a great voice. Might as well try and squint yourself into being a super model.

His larynx is blessed… it sounds great when he pushes it, and his accent - his speaking voice and his roots - are in there too. A Valleys’ John Fogerty.

I’m jealous. We’re coming to the end of our thing. We’ve been making little headway hiding in studios in Blaenau Ffestiniog and Chester, over-thinking and under-doing. Our rehearsal room on the Brymau Industrial Estate in Saltney is damp, riddled with asbestos, mouldy and depresses the hell out of us. Writing songs in there is like passing kidney stones.

We’ve forgotten who and how we want to be, and arrive to play a gig with a band who are absolutely content in their knowledge of both.

Stereophonics couldn’t be more Stereophonics.

And I say that despite the fact that their set is littered with cover versions. ‘I Love Rock n Roll’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’… some DC. Of course there’s some DC.

At that point I was unaware of the spiritual and symbiotic connection much of the Valleys felt with classic rock. I’d grown up in a very different part of Wales… rural and in the process of having its cultural identity and traditions hollowed out by those of us moving in from England.

My dad was an electrician: a reformed Teddy Boy who had stalked Chuck Berry, The Stones and Led Zep, but who listened - mostly when I was growing up - to Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder and JJ Cale.

I think the record collections in the houses zig zagging up the steep terraces in the Valleys were different: lots of AC/DC, Queen, Deep Purple, Creedence Clearwater Revival and - a little later - Guns ’n’ Roses.

Rock - whether it was classic rock or heavy metal - inspired so many Valleys’ bands who went on to international renown: the Manics, Funeral For A Friend, Bullet For My Valentine, Kids In Glass Houses, Skindred (Dub War, even).

And it continues to do so, with Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons, Florence Black, Those Damn Crows and James and the Cold Gun all reaching the upper strata of the UK album charts, as I write this in September 2023.

Stereophonics had Creedence and DC in their DNA, especially, and the covers they played that night celebrated the fact with a rare integrity and lack of self consciousness. At the time I didn’t get that at all. Covers - to me - meant a cabaret band, conveniently forgetting that almost all of my favourite bands - including my own - had served apprenticeships playing dive bars and clubs as covers bands. At least Stereophonics were up front about it.

Someone from Richard Branson’s then new label, V2 Records, signed Stereophonics that night. After the show, long after the other bands and punters had traipsed home, I stood in the same back stage room in which Kelly had been going over his asides, and stared at myself in the mirror. Watching them and their audience, I started to realise that maybe we weren’t good enough, that our efforts were nothing more than a contrivance and a distraction from having to get ‘proper’ jobs. That night was the start of my not being able to lie to myself anymore. The first fundamental fatal crack in our dream.

My radio show had quite a lot to do with Stereophonics in the early days. I played songs from ‘Word Gets Around’ a lot and I liked them, despite an undertow of jealousy and resentment. Especially Local Boy In The Photograph, A Thousand Trees and Traffic. I interviewed them when they played at The Tivoli in Buckley (May ’97) and they were really good to me, very polite and accommodating. Their only crime was to not be 60ft Dolls and to become very successful very quickly indeed.

They became Welsh music’s hottest ticket, commercially-speaking… they just never received the kudos or the critical acclaim of the Manics, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s or Catatonia.

Like the Manics, though, they had an uncommon ability to write songs that filtered up to everyday life and people. It’s the rarest ability. I appreciate that now, but I didn’t then.

My Stereophonics nadir was doing a live show from their first Cardiff Castle gig in 1998. I didn’t understand the chants, the flags, the patriotism. I had adopted Ian Brown’s borrowed credo of it not being about where you’re from but where you’re at.

The flag-waving jingoism, the explosion of Welsh pride (so many articles in the aftermath, so many mentions of ‘C**L C*M*U’)… it was pride in a particular kind of Welshness that was alien to me.

And no wonder, really. I was - technically still am - English. I’ve never woken up and thanked anyone for the location of my birth. Nationalism was anathema to me, until I learnt better and became less ignorant about some of the history that had fermented this pride, after many centuries of exploitation, subjugation and wilful misunderstanding.

I feel more affinity with ‘Welshness’ now, as a national identity, but that’s down to the mathematics of how long I’ve worked and / or lived in Wales, and the music, of course. I don’t stand for any national anthem, though, but respect anyone who chooses to.

Apart from John Redwood.

Stereophonics’ second album - and songs like ‘Mr Writer’ - curdled them further for me. I put ‘Performance and Cocktails’ on the other morning and it’s far better than I credited it for at the time. Arctic Monkeys would mine a more brittle, arch and knowing seam of galloping rockish eloquence a decade later to more acclaim, but Stereophonics were at least as good, to my hindsight-powered ears.

Some of my antipathy towards them was because of the legions of bands… I mean, hundreds and hundreds of them… who then sprang up in Wales and sounded like clones of their heroes. And who could blame them?

I couldn’t open a jiffy bag without yet another Del Boy ‘Phonics dropping out. It used to drive me up the wall. But - again, in retrospect - what an incredible effect to have on so many people? To inspire them to form bands; be creative; fill their homes and hometowns with music.

No other band had this effect, to this extent, in Wales during my thirty years making Welsh-music shaped radio. Not the Manics, Super Furry Animals; not Catfish and the Bottlemen, Funeral For A Friend or Neck Deep.

Stereophonics quickly passed well beyond my sphere of lack of influence. They went to arenas and Jools Holland seemingly effortlessly, but without much in the way of critical praise. They’ve never been shortlisted for the Welsh Music Prize, for example, which is something of a travesty and rather demonstrates the gulf between critical thought and what people actually like.

Kelly was a special guest on Janice’s show a few years’ ago (2020). As with everything, Janice didn’t let critical consensus or straightjacket notions of what other people thought was cool have any effect on her tastes. She was bullish and always true to herself and the artists she played.

She loved Stereophonics and Kelly’s solo live album.

Kelly was a brilliant guest. He talked with great candour about challenges his family had faced over the years. There was no pretension or affectation. In essence, despite everything that he and his band had experienced over the years - including the tragic, untimely loss of his childhood friend and bandmate, Stuart Cable - Kelly was still - at his core - the thoroughly decent, hard-working and diligent soul - with a spark of genius - that he had been in that backstage broom cupboard at The Filling Station in 1996.

A great man who transcends the esteem - or lack of it - he’s been held in by those of us alleged tastemakers who got it significantly wrong about him and his music.

Respect.

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of my first programme on BBC Radio Wales (3rd October 1993), I will broadcast two special programmes, on the 7th October 2023 and the 14th October 2023, celebrating one hundred and five pieces of Welsh music I’ve been privileged to play over that period.

The piece above is one in a series covering some of those life-changing recordings and the stories attendant to them.

They’re instinctively written and not supposed to be Google accurate or fodder for AI scraping. Misfiring memories are part of the fun.