|
|
 |
Stereophonics.
 The biggest news for Stereophonics since their last record 'You Gotta Go There To Come Back' was the shock dropping of drummer Stuart Cable in September 2003, just months after that album's release. There were dark mutterings among the fans, but bassist Richard Jones simply explains his focus had started to move away from the band after having a child.
"You know, he wouldn't come to Australia, he wouldn't come to Japan, he wouldn't come to various shows here there and everywhere because he had things on," says Jones in a slanted Welsh accent. "And when you're in this environment, you do need to have a full band to be able to perform. There's no point in us doing a festival somewhere if we're doing it as some two piece acoustic thing.
"We were letting it happen, as well. Because we were saying to him, okay, we'll do it acoustic, if you don't want to come. Where we should have said 'no, we've gotta do this, because we're going to end up with nothing otherwise. We can't just keep fobbing people off, doing it half-hearted. So for the band to move on and forward, changes had to be made."
As recently as January it was reported that Cable "vanished" after seeing singer Kelly Jones backstage at a Welsh tsunami benefit concert, so it seems that wounds haven't yet healed. "I think it probably is still like that," admits Jones. "It was bitter, what happened. I think he was more bitter about the way it happened. We all talked on the phone and we decided that it was the best thing to do. But the way it was released, in a press statement... You know, like when you break up with a girlfriend, or a friendship goes sour you've always got this rosy picture in your head of how you're going to let it go. But it never happens like that, it always turns into something else."
A replacement was found about a year ago, as the band was about to record the new album 'Language. Sex. Violence. Other?'. "We were doing the demos in the studio where Javier [Weyler], who drums with us now, worked in the studio," explains Jones. "He helped us on the last album, doing percussion work and he was doing the same thing for the demos on this album. It was just turning into an annoying, long process, programming the drums, so Javier had this kit there and said 'how about I save you a bit of time, and I'll just play through some stuff rather than programming the drums?' Our new drummer was just standing there, staring us right in the face. This fella that we'd known for three or four years, it just felt really natural, as soon as we started playing together."
There's also their satisfaction with the record itself. 'We decided to release it three months early," Jones reveals. "We were going to wait til May or June but we thought 'sod it, let's get it out early'. Not a lot of other bands are releasing music in the UK right now, so it was a perfect time for us to just hit hard. And because it's sort of a new sound for the band, we get maximum exposure, so it's really cool."
The 'new' sound Jones is on about is an attempt by the band to strip their sound back. Even the song titles on 'Language. Sex. Violence. Other?' are all one word. "We wanted to have one word titles because people's attention spans are shorter now," says Jones, who anticipates a full Australian tour in June or July. "What happens these days is you can get 80 minutes of emptiness on a CD. That kind of comes from last year, when we were doing a lot of supports with David Bowie. We had 45 minutes to prove our point on those gigs, and we were just banging the songs out and they were all near enough three minute songs. Less of the acoustic stuff and more of the rock stuff."
The band took that mindset straight into the studio. "It kind of goes back to the first and second album, the high energy, and just trying to grab people's attention," explains Jones. "All those bands we listened to as teenagers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana. They're all on there somewhere; the energy rather than the sound. When we were listening to those bands they just had an edge to them, which we wanted to try and get on this album."
Eddie Chan
 | 'Language. Sex. Violence. Other?' is out now through FMR. |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
