116. Stereophonics
The O2 Arena
16 December 2015
It never fails to slightly boggle the mind that Kelly Jones and his band of Welsh stalwarts are still pulling in stadium-sized crowds all these years later. Not that the Stereophonics don’t have the credentials: Jones possesses that whisky-soaked, Marlboro-honed voice of a generation, and they’ve penned more than their fair share of plastic pint-lifting anthems. But twenty thousand of us? Here we all are, a sea of middle-aged heads nodding to the familiar churn of nineties nostalgia, as if Loaded magazine had reanimated itself in human form and booked a night out.
They’ve always occupied that curious space in British rock, not quite as sneering as Oasis, not as laddishly philosophical as The Verve, just dependable, straightforward, and as solidly built as a valley’s pithead. And yet, the Stereophonics have endured. Their then-latest record, Keep the Village Alive, had gone platinum, an achievement in the post-download age akin to alchemy, and the world tour that followed was less a victory lap and more a rolling reunion of people who peaked culturally around the time TFI Friday was still considered edgy.
This was, in every way that mattered, a greatest hits tour in everything but name. They’d even sprung for a small orchestra, safely parked stage-left like a classical pit crew, and an arsenal of towering video backdrops, ensuring that the relatively tiny Jones could loom over us all in IMAX-sized grandeur.
And fair play to them, when they rolled out “Have A Nice Day”, any residual cynicism evaporated faster than the head off a stadium pint. The place was instantly on its feet, a swaying, tuneless chorus of beery voices, unified in that misty-eyed recollection of package holidays, festival summers, and simpler times when your main worry was whether you'd set the VCR to record Friends.
There was “Graffiti on the Train”, a mournful lament soaked in cinematic melancholy, and of course their well-worn cover of “Handbags and Gladrags”, the unofficial national anthem of every office worker. Every song landed like a gut-punch to your twenties, a reminder of when we were all thinner, drunker, and worse at texting.
Then, in case it wasn’t Welsh enough, out totters Rob Brydon for the encore, delivering some end-of-pier patter and a passable Tom Jones impression on “Mama Told Me Not to Come”. It was pantomime, but nobody seemed to mind, this was not a night for ground-breaking art. This was a well-oiled crowd-pleasing machine, a reminder that while the Nineties might be long gone, the soundtrack still fills a stadium.