Can it REALLY be 20 years ago?
The album that put the boys from Cwmaman on the world stage:
BEFORE them, the only sound of Cwmaman had been that of car wheels hitting pot-holes in the pockmarked, Swiss cheese-asphalt of the village’s one road in and out.
Indeed, pre-Stereophonics, this cuckoo-spit glob of terraced houses nestled amongst dense hilly forestry had all but been forgotten, with even the dilapidated pit works that once gave the village life long lost beneath unkempt and ever-growing crowns of ferns.
Yet thanks to the success of the band this neglected, post-industrial backwater – described by one resident, shortly after 9/11, as a great place to live because “at least al-Qaeda won’t find us” – became, for a while, a Llareggub for the post-Brit Pop generation.
And that’s largely due to Kelly Jones’ lyrics on their 1997 debut album Word Gets Around which, like Dylan Thomas with decibels, chronicled the minutiae of the working-class culture in the ex-mining community.
Here the endless cycle of slaving all week to earn a crust, spending it all on Saturday night, sleeping through Sunday and starting all over again on Monday morning was writ large, and loud.
“A great but tough place to grow up,” is how Jones has described his childhood there, witnessing first hand how his home became blighted by the kind of everyday problems – drink, drugs, unemployment – that oft raise their ugly heads whenever hope is at a premium.
His ear for a phrase or knack for a snapshot of local colour came from growing up among the many flock-wallpapered drinking dens which, every few hundred yards, punctuated the workers’ walk home from the local factories.
There Jones would listen to the older men’s conversations amid the games of dominoes and mouthfuls of draught and take it all in, later spilling it back out onto the page when he came to writing his own lyrics.
Early tracks like Goldfish Bowl vividly recreated those sticky carpets, the fug of Woodbine smoke and the “same long faces in the workman’s hall”.
That Stereophonics exist at all is in no small part down to the fact keen amateur fighter Kelly’s urge to turn pro ended one night in an almighty blaze.
But music would always be the driving force in the young Jones’ life, especially loud guitar music.
Having two older AC/ DC-worshipping brothers, meant there was little doubt over what musical genre he would choose as the perfect vehicle for earthy tales of those souls who lived for the weekend and cared for little beyond knocking-off time on a Friday.
“Ten minutes flat after that day at the factory and I’m drinking like a dog in the sun,” he growled on Last Of The Big Time Drinkers, chronicling those habitual propperuppers whose ever-presence at the bar had earned them that ultimate soak’s accolade – a silver tankard with their name inscribed on it.
Elsewhere the urgent bounce of More Life In A Tramp’s Vest inverted the slow pace of life from behind the fruit and vegetable market stall where Jones worked for years.
Everything you never thought you needed was there, so it seemed.
Knock-down birthday cards bought in bulk, crates of dog-eared Acker Bilk records, rows of hunched pensioners gossiping over their faggots and peas, using little wooden tridents to row the gravy in its polystyrene trays.
The savoury smells from the kitchen cafe competed with the acrid aroma of the open sacks of bird food in the pet shop window, the hungry chirp of caged budgies inside – “going cheep!” said the sign – not forgetting the wellrehearsed patter of whitecoated butchers who wore their hearts on their sleeve and wiped their hands on their trousers.
The first time they saw Cwmaman the band’s Kiwi producers Steve Bush and Marshall Bird remarked incredulously: “Geez fellas, they should charge admission for this place.”
I’m still not entirely sure what they meant by that, but it’s why Word Gets Around still means the most to the band’s Welsh fans – because it’s about them.
It’s about that place we all wanted to escape but are always happy to gravitate back towards; that place that you’d change if you could but still wouldn’t have any other way.
As a result, Word Gets Around could never have existed without Cwmaman and, without Word Gets Around, Cwmaman could have only dreamt of one day appearing in the NME.
And, unlike the Stereophonics, who went on to become one of the UK’s biggest selling bands, the village has channelled all its efforts into staying exactly the same ever since.