Two-Track Mind

It’s not often that a band playing Whelan's finds itself based down the road at the Clarence Hotel, yet the band filling this particular Saturday night slot aren’t your average club act. Indeed the last time the Stereophonics passed this way they were undertaking the not inconsiderable task of headlining Slane. For now, though, they’re playing a series of far, far smaller gigs as a way of introducing new album Sex, Violence, Language, Other? to the press and the handful of fans who've managed to win tickets.

They also serve as a means of making their interminable media duties more palatable and the three – Kelly Jones, Richard Jones and new drummer Javier Weyler – are certainly more than willing to chat over tea, especially when it comes to the difference in sound on the new album.
“We had a lot more fun in terms of just using more noises,” explains Kelly. “We’ve always been influenced by people like The Cure, Depeche Mode and U2. It’s quite easy to do and we touched on it on the last record so that’s where we were going. We didn’t want to do the acoustic thing again, we wanted to be a lot more compulsive and in your face. That was the main change."
He sees a lot of it as natural progression.
“On each record we’ve made there’s been something that we haven’t done before. The first album had no overdubs, the second one had a bigger sound, Just Enough Education To Perform had backing vocals and keyboards. You just find those little noises along the way. I think this one has got a very similar energy to the first couple. After that we went a lot more bluesy.”
“We just use what is necessary for the songs,” interjects Richard. “An album like this presented a lot more scope to add all these different sounds on top.”
So the guitars are louder, the songs faster and the keyboards more prominent – all of which leaves the Stereophonics dangerously close to Franz Ferdinand territory. Kelly smiles.
“I think a lot of it’s fantastic. It’s not just a sound, they’ve all got songs for once. It’s not just about the haircuts. It was weird for us because we finished the majority of the writing by last April and as we were making the album all these records were becoming really big."
Does he feel a kinship with any of the newer bands?
“As a fan, yeah. I’ve bought all those records. I love Kings Of Leon because I love Creedence Clearwater Revival. I buy anything that’s new and exciting – Modest Mouse, Kasabian, the Libertines – and I always have. People think that we just listen to Led Zeppelin II and Back In Black and that’s it but there’s a lot going on.”
Lyrically, the record sees Jones moving between topics and moods yet still some distance from the small town drama that made their first album such a breath of fresh air.
“When that came out people were comparing it to Dylan Thomas and the like. I didn’t even know that was going on, all I was doing was writing a few stories and putting them to music. I was eighteen. It was astonishing to see all these people in a field singing ‘A Thousand Trees’ back to you, it was ridiculous. I always thought there were far too many words in that song. Then people started criticising me because I never wrote about myself and that it was always other people but I hadn’t experienced a great deal. Then we started to grow up and the third person stuff became the first person. The characters are still there, they’ve just changed a bit. Word Gets Around is brilliant for what it is. It’s naïve as fuck but if I tried to repeat that it would come across as fake”.
He takes a look around.
“I’m in a different place now.”

Sex, Violence, Language, Other? is out on V2 at the end of March.