In his band’s recording studio in west London, Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones is recalling his last ever meeting with fellow Welshman Howard Marks. The former international cannabis smuggler, widely known as Mr Nice, passed away from bowel cancer just a few weeks ago.
“It was very sad because Howard came to our show in Leeds in December,” he muses in his lilting accent. “I saw him before the show and he was pretty much whacked up on the [cancer] drugs.”
Kelly had known Howard for almost 20 years. “I’d met Howard first in 1997 or ‘98 when he interviewed us for Loaded magazine,” he recalls. “They put us on the front cover and called us the ‘Taffia’. I’d go to his shows and we’d written a song called ‘An Audience With Mr. Nice’ around about 2000. So we were quite tight, me and Howard. He would text me whenever he wanted some friends on the guest-list and stuff. He sat next to my wife in Leeds in December. I was sad to see that he had passed. I know that he was in a lot of pain.”
“He was a very courageous man and an honourable man, really,” he continues. “When he was talking to us just before dying, he was very matter of fact about it all and still had a big smile on his face. Can’t knock the fella, really. He was never dwelling in any self-sort of pity and he was a gentleman till the end.”
Sadly, Howard Marks isn’t the only cultural icon to have passed away this year. Indeed,
the Grim Reaper has been alarmingly busy in 2016 – most especially in the music world.
“Yeah, it’s been a strange one,” Kelly sighs.
“I was a big Eagles fan, you know, Glenn Frey. We toured with David Bowie and we’d done festivals with Prince. Obviously with Lemmy, we had friends of friends. It’s a strange thing because we all had older brothers so all these people’s records were our kind of teaching really... our education. Then getting to know some of these people was amazing.
“It’s very sad and it felt like people were running out of time. Most of those people who died felt like they were on top of their game. They were still doing some amazing work.
It’s a bit of a wakeup call. Not to yourself, personally, but to people generally: you just generally run out of time. You’re still doing stuff so it gives you an incentive to get up in the morning and keep doing your shit. You don’t know when that day is coming.”
Kelly and his Stereophonics bandmates – the current line-up is Richard Jones, Adam Zindani and Jamie Morrison – obviously still have plenty to say for themselves. Having released their ninth studio album, Keep The Village Alive, last September, they’ve been touring on and off for the last seven months.
“Things are going really well right now,” enthuses Jones. “At the minute, I’m really buzzing off the band, and the album and the tour are doing great.”
Not much of a sonic departure from their trademark hard guitar/raspy vocals formula, Keep The Village Alive followed on from their 2013 concept album, Graffiti On The Train. When Hot Press spoke to Kelly around the time of its release, he mentioned that he’d written more than 40 songs. So how many of the tracks on the new album were leftovers from the Graffiti sessions?
“I think songs like ‘Sunny’, ‘Fight or Flight’ and ‘Hero’ were all within the Graffiti On The Train sessions,” he admits. “Like I said to you before, we don’t really record an album.
We just keep coming to the studio, do work, record stuff, and then it’s more of a case of compiling songs together that make the appropriate collection. They’re waiting for their place to step off the bench onto the pitch, really.”
Could Kelly summarise the new album?   
“Well, with Graffiti On The Train, it had a theme and it had a vehicle behind it - a screenplay and a story and stuff,” he explains. “Keep The Village Alive became much more of a collection of songs, almost like a mixtape. There was a lot of different types of songs on there. The majority were quite uplifting: good for playing gigs and good for the radio... hence the title Keep The Village Alive, which is quite a positive statement that used to get thrown around in the pubs when we were kids.
“It’s become a great record to play live. There’s been a lot of 14 or 15-year-old kids in
the front row. People love ‘C’est La Vie’, ‘I Wanna Get Lost With You’ and ‘White Lies’, and they’d never heard the band before. It’s really got a new group of people into the band.”  
Village is the first Stereophonics album to feature drummer Jamie Morrison as a fulltime member. How has that changed the dynamic?
“Well, Jamie’s great! He’s been a fan of the band for a long time. He’s played sporadically on and off for us on the last couple of records, on a song here or there. He’s very young
in mind, in the sense that he’s very positive and energetic, so he’s a lovely energy to have in the studio. He’s slightly crazy and he’s very eccentric and overall he’s a fucking brilliant drummer, he’s a brilliant song drummer. He’s got fucking drums in every room of his house. He’s a good guy to have in your corner.”
While most of the new album was recorded in London, some tracks were laid down in Brussels. What’s Kelly’s take on the recent terrorist attacks both there and in Paris?
“Well, we had to reschedule our Paris show because of what happened,” he says. “So we did the Olympia in January and it was amazing to go back and play there because we played the Bataclan. I was actually doing a reccy in the Bataclan a year before because the Graffiti on the Train screenplay was based in the Bataclan. That’s where we used to hang out when we were first on tour. So to go back over there and play the show in January was great. We sold more tickets after the event than we did previously so it goes to show people are not standing for it.
“It’s very moving and emotional but it’s also quite scary,” he continues. “We had my guitar tech, he used to work for the Eagles of Death Metal, so he knew the guy in the t-shirt stand that got killed. It’s a very small circle of people in this industry.”
Has touring become more of a fraught experience as a result?
“It’s fucking horrible, man,” he sighs. “The first few shows back, it’s a very edgy experience, and then after a while, like with all things, they sort of go back to the way things were. It’s a terrible thing for it to come into the entertainment industry, which is where people run away to escape and dream and get away from all this shit. We just have to keep on going.”
The first cut off the album was ‘C’est La Vie’, for which Kelly directed the rather wild and exuberant video.
“I got quite tight with a cinematographer friend of mine for the last bunch of videos. He did work for all sorts of movies like Fortitude and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We’ve done
quite a lot of good work together.”
Kelly had actually studied film in college in his early twenties. “Yeah, first of all I did graphics and sequential art, storyboards and stuff like that, but then I just liked writing the storyboards and writing the screenplay ideas. I did that for four or five years. Animation and filmmaking, yeah.”
Is that something that he’d like to do as a parallel career to Stereophonics? “I think songwriting is my style, really. I always have a lot of imagery, a lot of character sketches. That’s the kind of stuff I like writing, Tom Petty stuff. I mean, I’ve always liked imagery and storytelling within songs.
So maybe one day it’ll form into some sort of film idea. I’ve worked on a lot over the years, but it’s something you can do at any age.”
Does he see Stereophonics carrying on indefinitely?
“Well, as a bunch of kids we all had older brothers and we loved all the records they were playing. When we were growing up the magazine covers and the bands that we loved on the front they were those bands, you know, like U2, the Stones, Prince and David Bowie. They were the people that always challenged themselves, really, and we try to make small changes in every record to keep developing, and that’s all you can do really. I don’t have anybody telling me to do this. I get the craving to get in the studio and make a new record frequently so it’s what I love doing and I’ve been doing it since I was about 12 or 13. I’ve got no intention of stopping or doing anything because it’s who I am and what I do. So as long as people still come to the show, I’ll still be there.”
Does he write songs while he’s touring or does he have to be in studio to get those particular creative juices flowing?
“No, I like writing as I’m going,”
he explains. “The last four years is the only time I’ve ever had my own studio. Normally most of my ideas are just on a tape recorder or on a phone. I still try to write the lyrics in a book rather than typing on notebook on an iPhone, so I do like handwritten lyrics. I do that whenever I can really. Sometimes it’s a lot and sometimes I don’t do anything for a little while. So like I said, just try and keep the tap dripping and just try and keep taking shots at the goal, really.”
Stereophonics will be playing Dublin’s Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, on June 30th. Is he looking forward to the show?
“Oh yeah” he nods, enthusiastically. “Coming to Ireland was the first place that I remember us going when things started to take off. I remember Stuart [Cable, original drummer who died in 2010] and I had only ever gone on an aeroplane, when we all went to play some Temple Bar festival in like 1996, so we’ve always had very fond memories of coming there. From playing The Point to playing pubs in Temple Bar and playing Slane Castle.
“In everything I’ve done from 200 people to how many thousand, we’ve always had a good time and we’ve always had great people response. It’s changed on and off over the years because the record company system has changed quite a lot, and the radio system has changed quite a lot and the sales and everything, but the welcome we’ve had has always been really warm so we’re excited to come back over there and do some shows this summer. It’s gonna be great with The Vaccines along with us as well.”
Stereophonics will celebrate their twentieth anniversary next year. Any plans to mark that occasion?
“Yeah, everybody keeps saying ‘what are you gonna do?’ or ‘are you gonna bring out a compilation?’ and this that and the other. I don’t really wanna do that. I wanna bring out a really good 10th album and work on that now. We had a week last week doing some songs in the studio, and in an ideal world I’d love to get something out next summer. That would be amazing and we’ve some really good songs at the minute.”