Stereophonics' Kelly Jones: 'No one thinks about this band more than I do'

Kelly Jones’s studio is like the Tardis.

You walk through a normal-looking set of doors off a quiet street in west London and into an office.

Past that, there’s a sitting area with a record player, a coffee table and a comfortable sofa. Walking through another doorway there’s a recording area, down some steps to a room with a baby grand piano, another room with a piano, a mixing room...

The Stereophonics frontman barely seems to have aged since the release of their 1997 debut Word Gets Around. And 20 years later, on their new record, Scream Above The Sounds, his voice sounds as good as ever.

Their latest single, “Caught By The Wind”, is a rousing rock anthem inspired in part by the Bataclan massacre of 2015, where the lyrics urge the listener to embrace life to the full and live without fear and inspire a strange kind of euphoria, despite the song’s darker context.

“We played at the Bataclan during our first record, and I guess the attack was the first time anything like that came into our environment,” Jones says. “You get to the chorus and I’m talking about people losing their innocence. It’s weird, the whole record went down that angle: ‘Let’s have it, go for life more’. You can quite easily drift into the anxiety and intrusion in people’s lives.

“Going back to ‘Local Boy in the Photograph’ on the first record... it’s strange when you see people celebrating these songs. They know the context of the song but it’s almost doing the opposite to the story. I guess there’s a journey and then an uplift. I think what this all highlights is how much people need to have a release from all of this, to have a good time, whether it’s a football match or a concert or a film at the cinema. You can’t stop doing that.”

Elsewhere on the record you can hear Jones dealing with common issues of anxiety and a sense of claustrophobia that seems to come from the intrusions of social media, of feeling as though you have no space to yourself – physically or mentally. Jones never had that issue growing up in the tiny village of Cwmaman, Wales, but it’s something he seems to notice now.

“I was in a small town with a dead-end street,” he nods. “I had all this freedom, all this time to… think of nothing, really. I had older brothers and my dad was in clubs singing so I was always the guy in the corner listening to all these stories. I don’t see people having that much space anymore, they’re very consumed with something all the time. I guess that’s what Scream Above The Sounds means for me, really.”

In all of Stereophonics’ albums you can hear that observational power that Jones wields. It’s also refreshing that, despite the current climate, he’s chosen to avoid using the band to make any sweeping political statement.

“I’ve never really written things from a political standpoint,” he says. “It can become pretentious, a bit preachy, and I think people deserve more than that. What can I say about Theresa May or Donald Trump that isn’t in the paper every day?

“There’s so much information,” he continues. “It’s hard to be a political musician. You could have made comments in the Sixties because you were informing people. Now, I’d rather write something from my perspective or the people I know and love.”

open image in gallery

Jones has had the studio since 2012’s Graffiti on the Train. With that came more freedom and less pressure to produce records under label deadlines: “Where you could do something great or bend under pressure,” Jones says. “There was always a clock ticking.”

Now he takes his three daughters to school before coming here to write. There was no singular sound he stuck to: one day the songs would be very orchestral, the next day they were more punk-rock.

“The only way you can achieve longevity from our standing point is that you put the hours in,” he says. “You try to make the show better, look after yourself. But ultimately if the songs aren’t good the band will fall away.”

Jones’s instincts with the band are often proven right more often than not. Releasing Keep The Village Alive on their own record label in 2015 saw them score their sixth No 1 album. They’re now on course to achieve that feat for a seventh time with Scream Above The Sounds, released via Parlophone.

“I like to take advice from people but I think the minute we were signed the first time, we knew what the album cover was going to look like, how the album would sound… and not in an overly controlling way. But more like… nobody thinks about this band more than I do,” he says. “It’s about the commitment to the work you wanna do. A bit how it was with Tom Petty – no drama.”

open image in gallery

He smiles at the suggestion that this ongoing assumption that young people no longer listen to albums is bulls***t.

“It’s weird you say that, my dad just said that to me at breakfast,” he says. “He said, ‘I think it’s bulls***t, that it’s just about one track.’” He pauses. “There is too much f***ing choice though sometimes.”

“Before Anyone Knew Our Name” is a track at the heart of the new album. Featuring the piano in the next room (“it’s dying but it sounds real, you know?”), it’s a sound that Stereophonics fans will be less familiar with: a steady, moving piano ballad that remembers the band’s late drummer Stuart Cable.

“I grew up with Stuart all my life, he left the band in 2003, we were still best mates in 2004, and then he died in 2010,” he says, clearing his throat a few times as he explains. “Seven years ago, but I kept thinking about him a lot.

“Obviously doing the songs you think about him. But taking my kids to Wales and seeing all the places we used to hang out… I was experiencing a lot of this ‘boyhood to adulthood’ sort of thing, it was coming back to me.

“We used to walk up and down those streets and dream about… kind of what we’ve achieved, really. I wrote loads of pages but I didn’t think it was going to be a song. It was very personal, but very real,” he adds, clearing his throat gently again. “I didn’t even structure it, really, I just read what was on the page. It was definitely an outpouring, it all happened in 24 hours.”

‘Scream Above The Sounds’, the new album from Stereophonics, is out now