Last time this band appeared in these essays, I talked a little about how you have to accept that the acts you love will change. Some will change more than others, though. Some will age better.
In hindsight, my love affair with Stereophonics was doomed from the start. Their first album remains one of my favourite debuts I've heard, but it relies on an alchemical process almost impossible to repeat. The recipe is simple enough - two parts classic rock delivered by a frontman whose tonsils have the density and range of quasars, one part muddled melancholy as you watch the tiny community which offered you nothing as you grew up in it continue to die by degrees.
The first trick is in actually mixing those ingredients. Sad-gossip-garage-rock? Are you, like, entirely fucking sure? But it works. Or at least, it did in the context of the '90s, when British mainstream rock was crying out for a band that was willing to look past their own dicks. Or, for that matter, to not steal all their good riffs (including a Stereophonics one, actually.)
The second trick, though, is even tougher. The problem isn't in identifying or combining your ingredients; it's in finding them. The band took a while to hit, but when they did, it was with the force of a collapsing coalmine. Catapulted into a world of stadium gigs, Tom Jones collaborations, and backstage shenanigans with Noel Gallagher (which he presumably went into wired for sound), Stereophonics found themselves in a situation where bittersweet songs about backwater bar dramas might be tough to sell, and, more critically, were impossible to source. The lead single from Word Gets Around was about a homeless man who remembers his past just well enough to seek it out, but not well enough to remember where to find it. The lead single from Performance And Cocktails was about a sly deal between a bartender watching who gets most drunk, and a thief who steals from those identified as least likely to notice. The lead single from Just Enough Education To Perform? A tuneless whine about how the music press had been mean to the band. It's almost too perfect that "Mr Writer" was (at the time) by some distance not just the worst Stereophonics single, but their worst recorded song.
Maybe you have to have a certain amount of bombastic self-regard in order to play the kind of stages the band suddenly graduated to. How would I know? All I can tell you is that without that strange, bittersweet taste of nostalgia for something you'd always resented, you may as well be listening to fucking Oasis anyway (though Jones' riffs are still better than Gallagher's).
"Not Up To You" isn't the best song on Word Gets Around, but it's likely the strongest distillation of what makes the album work so well (It's not quite true that there are more truly great songs on Word Gets Around than on their subsequent eleven albums, but I did have to crunch the numbers to check). It's too melodic to be a dirge, (just) too high-tempo to be mopey, but the song's simple structure and heavy haze still recalls shoegaze, only - and this is critical - we're staring at the shoes of other people. Kelly Jones is one of those musicians whose lyrical quality is inversely proportional to his lyrical precision, and "Not Up To You" is a triumph of smudged thumbnail sketches of lives no-one else was in a position to even notice.
Maybe it's just that simple The songs on Word Gets Around are always about other people, even if Jones' memories are our way in. An accused paedophile, a wedding barely holding itself together, two - maybe three - suicides, one drunk high-functioning, one very much not. And the characters in "Not Up To You" don't even reach those levels of local notoriety. Not even stories, just butts of cruel jokes in low lighting. All they're doing is living and lying and loving and lusting in a village that, save for Stereophonics, we probably would never have heard of. Even though there's an unknown village in all of us.
"Who's to know", indeed. "Who's to know; whatever".
B-Side
