Kelly Jones

Kelly Jones: A Rock Star's Guide To Getting Lost In Music

You could call Kelly Jones a rock 'n' roll survivor. Since the release of Stereophonics' debut album in 1997, many of their contemporaries have come and gone. Meanwhile, Jones is about to release the band's ninth album, Keep The Village Alive, off the back of some 8 million record sales, sold-out arena tours and to a near-rabid fanbase. He has been on the stage for almost two decades. Below he explains the transformative, meditative power of music and why, when you want to lose yourself, you could do a lot worse than pick up an instrument.

When I was a kid, my old man – who was a musician – used to say: ‘If you play an instrument you’ll never be lonely’. I always thought that was a bit dramatic, and never really understood what he meant. But, the older I got, the more I realised that on rainy days, in hotel rooms or whatever it is, to pick up an instrument and be able to play something is an escape. It takes you off to a different place.

I remember being on our first ever tour – in ’96 or ’97 – sitting in the back of a Splitter van on some dire motorway run, with crap weather outside. Louis Armstrong's Wonderful World was playing, and I could see everyone gazing out the window, going a bit inward and thinking about things silently. Then My Generation by The Who came on. As soon as it started people were cracking tops off bottles, getting rowdy and just going f**king crazy. It’s amazing how much a song can flip you from one extreme emotion to another. I see it in our gigs – we have nine albums and many styles of stuff, so we can jump from one to another quite quickly. It’s powerful, man.

There have been songs used of ours in very moving ways. There was a song we recorded used at [Welsh football manager] Gary Speed’s funeral; other people have had our songs played in weddings. You bump into the occasional person on the street and it’s amazing how much a piece of music that took us about 10 or 15 minutes to do turns into this quite epic moment for them. I guess that’s the magic of it, as some of the classic songs I love probably didn’t take very long or a great deal of thought. It’s like the best jokes or greatest movie scenes – they probably ad-libbed it, yet it sticks in your memory.

Writing music is quite a strange process to articulate. One minute you could be in a hotel room with jetlag, pick up a guitar, drift off in the subconscious and, before you know it, there’s a song in the room. There’s definitely some kind of wall or barrier that comes down when you’re in a state of exhaustion where you feel a lot freer. For me, I’ve always kept the tap dripping on writing. I’ll leave the guitar in the corner of the room, pick it up and I’ll know within five or 10 minutes if something’s gonna come, from a composition point of view. Then, when I start recording, that’s when I get properly lost. I’ll go into work in the morning, and before you know it it’s 11 o’clock at night and I’ve just been consumed by this idea or melody. But you keep going until it solves itself, and other people in the room understand what it is you’re trying to do.

On this album, I Wanna Get Lost With You, was literally written in an Australian hotel room, in the middle of the morning. For C’est La Vie, I was doing overdubs for another song, but then stumbled across a little idea and the lyrics just fell out the end of a pen. So they can come from strange places, but I think there’s definitely a discipline that needs to be had as well. What I tend to do is start a routine where I’m doing it more regularly. The more ideas you lay down to a tape recorder, on your phone, wherever, you get all the crap out of the way so the good stuff can come through. It’s like going to training if you’re a boxer or a footballer. You keep at it until you stumble across your form.

There’s drama about streaming, but we’ll go to Kuala Lumpur and there’ll be 5,000 people singing the words – that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago, as people wouldn’t have had access to the music. It’s mind-blowing. Like I said, you could take an hour to write a song, then before you know it there’s 50,000 people singing back ‘You made me feel like the one’. That phrase [on the band's no.1 single Dakota] just came out the subconscious part of my brain – I didn’t even write it down on paper, it was only when I played the tape back that I heard the line, then had to piece together the song to make sense of it.

Personally, I like listening to Tom Waits, who has a very imaginative backdrop to his storytelling. He’s got this rough growl to his voice, but he’s always telling a very eerie, sarcastic or strange tale, while in the background there’s always some very interesting instruments you don’t really hear in contemporary music. And then I love listening to stuff I heard when I was kid – aged 10 or 11 with a big boombox in the park – bands like AC/DC. That really makes me feel great, as it triggers memories of being a kid; the sun shining, messing about, just listening to music.

Stereophonics’ new album, Keep The Village Alive, is released on 11 September

Kelly Jones was speaking to Sam Rowe