198. Stereophonics
The O2 Arena
5 March 2020
It was the last weekend before the world shut its doors, though we didn’t know that yet. We were still shaking hands, standing shoulder to shoulder, shouting lyrics into strangers’ faces, and pretending that nothing as dull as a global pandemic could ever get between us and a night out. And in the middle of all that optimism, Stereophonics strode onto the O₂ stage and reminded us what unvarnished, unembarrassed British rock still sounds like when it’s done properly.
I was there with my friends, each of us in need of some uncomplicated noise. But for one, this one mattered more than most since, growing up gay in the granite heart of 1990s Manchester, where swagger was a religion and tenderness a liability, the Stereophonics became a sort of musical lifeline. Their songs were a kind of code, a comfort. The small-town melancholy of “Local Boy in the Photograph”, the defiance of “Just Looking”, the quiet ache beneath “Dakota”: “they said, you can get out, you can make it, you’re allowed to feel things”. So here we were, decades later, and he was finally standing in front of the band who’d unknowingly kept him alive.
Kelly Jones, still looking like the world’s most handsome mechanic, walked out with that easy, unflappable confidence: part soul singer, part bricklayer. The lights dimmed, the crowd roared, and then that opening guitar line from “C’est la Vie” cracked through the air like a starter pistol. From the first chord, it was a masterclass in no-bullshit showmanship.
Jones’s voice, rasping, wounded, indestructible, still sounds like it’s been marinated in whiskey and Welsh weather. Behind him Adam Zindani flung out guitar lines like confetti, Jamie Morrison pounded the drums like they were an English land-baron, and the whole thing propelled forward by a sense of purpose that you don’t often see in bands this far into their career.
The setlist was a glorious sprawl across twenty years of anthems and attitude: “Maybe Tomorrow,” “Have a Nice Day,” “Graffiti on the Train,” “A Thousand Trees”, each one greeted like a national holiday. When “Local Boy in the Photograph” hit, my friend had closed his eyes. I watched him mouth every word, smiling but somewhere far away, that grin just hiding the lump in his throat.
Jones dedicated “Mr and Mrs Smith” to “the lovers and the fighters” and, just for a second, it felt like the band were speaking directly to him. A reminder that, for all the blokey swagger, Stereophonics have always been about empathy, about heart, about finding light in small towns and dark corners.
The visuals were slick but restrained bursts of colour that felt both cinematic and grounded, images punching the screen behind them, a love letter to where they’d come from. There were no gimmicks, no ego, no “we’re legends” posturing, just four men on a stage doing what they do best.
And then came “Dakota.” You could feel it before you heard it, the arena readying itself. The first chords rang out, and the crowd were back in their twenties, singing at the top of their lungs, drunk on nostalgia and possibility. For a few minutes, the whole world, even the incoming storm of what was to shortly arrive on all our doorsteps, disappeared.
Stereophonics might never be the critics’ darlings, but nights like this make you realise that they’ve written the soundtrack to millions of very real lives: the fights, the escapes, the redemptions and the small victories that matter most.