Rock star opens up on the secret torment that could have ended his glittering career
Kelly Jones had just finished touring the world with Stereophonics and was pondering what to do next. But a routine visit to his GP then cast doubt over the rest of his career, writes Nathan Bevan...
KELLY Jones can’t sing. It’s early 2019 and the Stereophonics’ singer is at home in London running through a selection of the songs upon which he’s built a multi-million selling international music career.
A Thousand Trees, Just Looking, Dakota – all tunes he’s been performing for decades and which he’s probably introduced from the stage more times than he’s spoken the names of his four children.
Yet, that voice – that open-throated rasp that’s soundtracked people’s lives, from beery Friday nights out to a bride and groom’s first dance at a Valleys wedding – well, it just isn’t there.
The notes once nailed so effortlessly are suddenly now beyond his reach, reducing him to a series of crackly coughs and strangulated yelps.
He films each aborted attempt on a mobile phone, propped on a nearby table, but each barely lasts a verse before his obvious frustration kicks in.
“Aww, f*** off,” he snarls, before snatching away the handset. “You f****** b*****d.”
In the other room there’s the faint beep of the answerphone – an unplayed message waiting to be heard.
“Hi Kelly, just calling to find out how you are, recuperating there in Wales,” starts the instantly recognisable voice on the other end of the line. It’s Sir Tom Jones, exuding the air of a worried uncle, calling to see how his friend’s doing.
“I hope you’re relaxed and everything’s going well. Just concerned, you know. Just checking in.”
Several months before, Kelly had been completing yet another major tour with Stereophonics, the band he formed with childhood friends Richard Jones and the late Stuart Cable in the trio’s home village of Cwmaman in the early-1990s.
He’d been away a while, travelling the globe promoting their Scream Above The Sounds album – the group’s 10th – and the 46-year-old had been looking forward to coming back home and some much-needed downtime.
But a routine visit to the GP – just a quick shufty under the bonnet to check the oil and water – would end up turning his world upside down.
A pea-like growth – a polyp, likely triggered by something as simple as a single big yell or cough – had been discovered on his vocal chords. His doctor told him it was something that could lead to his voice and its range being badly affected, particularly in the upper registers.
Worse still, there was no guarantee an operation to remove it would work either. In fact, such a procedure could end up wrecking his voice altogether. Yet, following a third and final examination on New Year’s Eve 2018, Kelly went under the knife, wondering – as he counted backwards from 10, the anaesthetic kicking in – if he’d ever be able to sing again.
Keeping the procedure secret from all but close friends and family, he returned to Cwm to recuperate, locking himself away in the house he’d built not far from the spot where he’d grown up – a house dwarfed on all sides by dense forestry, by now decked out in a winter plumage of auburns and browns.
“I felt like I was losing my mind a little bit,” he now admits, looking back at those months of uncertainty in early 2019. “I just kept thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to turn this around?’”
Under strict instructions not to speak for more than a few minutes a day, he’d found himself back where it all began, whilst simultaneously wrestling with the strong possibility that it could also be where it all ends.
“I was in isolation for two weeks on my own. I wasn’t even able to go out for a walk in case I bumped into anyone and they tried to start up a conversation.
“I was a virtual recluse, other than my parents popping round now and again. Even then my mother would start talking to me in a really loud voice, saying things like, ‘ DO YOU WANT SOME SOUP, KEL’?”
“I’d be like, ‘Mum, I can’t speak – I’ve not gone deaf,’” he laughs.
Kelly adds that, while going back to where he grew up always stirs up memories, this time it proved almost overwhelming.
“I was just left to my own devices, wandering around the house, looking in the attic and going through all the band’s old cuttings, posters and flyers, etc. It made me realise how long a journey it had been. So much so that, when I came off the last tour with the ‘Phonics I just wanted to stop, I didn’t want to do any more huge arena shows and all the rest of it.
“I’d been repeating the same ‘make an album, take it on the road’ routine for a long time – 22 years, in fact. That’s more than two decades of living on buses and in hotels and, even though it can be the best job in the world, I just felt done with it.”
But, ironically, the crisis with his voice had now re-lit a fire inside him.
“To have the thing you love most taken away from you, just at the point when you thought you wanted to walk away from it... it’s kind of an odd crossroads,” he says.
“I’d been getting excited about doing new stuff before I found out about the lump, which turned out to be benign, thankfully.
“Now, though, I realised I wanted to do a tour, just me, singing songs and telling stories – explaining the background to all the songs I’ve written over the years.
“I’d seen Rufus Wainwright do something similar in Chicago and I thought it was hilarious and a really interesting concept. It’s something I can’t really do at a big Stereophonics show.”
So, setting himself a target to work towards – “because just waiting for my voice to get better on its own could’ve taken months” – he ended up booking himself a load of solo shows.
And the result of that 12-date jaunt across the UK last summer can now be seen in a new film called Don’t Let The Devil Take Another Day, a fly-on-thewall road movie that also takes in the personal medical drama which led up to it.
In addition, a live album by the same name, reimagining a number of Kelly’s best-known tracks and recorded in a variety of locations, will be released to accompany the film.
“To be honest, I probably did rush the voice exercises,” says Kelly, referring to the film’s frank scenes where he turns the air blue at his inability to perform properly.
“I’d start singing at nine in the morning and wouldn’t stop. But, like a footballer or a dancer after an injury, I was just keen to get back to full strength.”
He also did something he’s never done before and sought the help of a voice coach, namely Joshua Alamu, who’s worked with the likes of Rita Ora and James Arthur. And, as befitting someone in that line of work, Alamu didn’t mince his words about the challenges Kelly’s case posed.
“The condition of his voice and how it sounded was a huge shock to me,” he says in the film. “I thought, ‘Boy, what have I let myself in for here?’
“When your voice is the tool you’ve built your whole life around – some
thing you feed yourself and your family with – anyone going into a situation like that is going to do so with a huge amount of fear.
“And I had certain impressions of him as a person beforehand – I thought he’d be like, ‘Mate, I’ve been smoking for years, I’ve never needed a vocal coach.’ But Kelly was one of the most disciplined singers I’ve ever met. I was very impressed by his approach.
“I’d closely monitored how things were progressing via the little videos he’d send me. That said, whenever he had a doubt I’d confirm it and say, ‘Yeah, you’re right – you’re in a lot of s**t, mate.’”
But, after months of practice, the damage was slowly repaired and, by the time the tour rolled around, Alamu says Kelly was “sounding better than he had before”.
And the singer hopes the film will go towards helping anyone who might be going through a similar situation and struggling with self-doubt.
“The funny thing is I didn’t even tell the director (Ben Lowe) about my voice problems until after the tour had happened and the film had been shot,” smiles Kelly. “Even then, he only really found out because he overheard me talking about it to someone else.
“He persuaded me to use the footage I’d shot in the film, all the stuff on my mobile, and to make that the crux of it.
“He wanted to show the version of me that he knew – Kelly the dad, the joker – and I think it turned out OK. Mind you, it was quite strange to watch it with an audience when it previewed at the British Film Institute in London recently – to see that whole period of anxiety play out on a big screen.
“It was scary, the idea of losing something which, while never taking it for granted, I’d been basing my life around since I was about 12.”
Indeed, even at that fledgling age Jones had begun embarking on his dream of becoming a rock star, sitting in his bedroom strumming the old nylon string guitar given to him by his dad, Arwyn – himself a promising club singer in the 1970s – while surrounded by posters of musical heroes like the Rolling Stones.
Like a decibel-heavy Dylan Thomas, Kelly honed his talent for transcribing the human condition into lyrics during his teenage years working on the fruit and veg stall in Aberdare market. Watching the world and his dog go by, he’d scribble his observations on brown paper bags before bashing them into spiky three-minute rock songs during weekend jam sessions at the local scout hall.
Many of these ended up gracing what would become the ‘Phonics’ acclaimed 1997 debut album, Word Gets Around.
Don’t Let The Devil Take Another Day also sees the singer hark back to former childhood pitstops around the country – such as the 100 Pipers, a hotel on the Blackpool seafront with its best days now firmly behind it.
In one scene, prior to a gig at the town’s Opera House Theatre, he pulls up outside the guest house, stares up at the sign boasting “en-suite bedrooms & cabaret” and gets hit by a wave of nostalgia.
“So, 1987 or thereabouts – first year of secondary school – this was where I pitched up on holiday with my mum and dad, two years on the bounce we came here,” he laughs. “Second year I brought my mate with me – four of us in the back of a BMW 316 travelling all the way from south Wales and the place was full of Scottish people.
“My parents went out to watch a show one night and they left me in the hotel with a guy from Dundee called Fred, who was also there on holiday with his wife. You’d never do that today, it would be like an episode of The Killing or something.
“But they left me there to go and have a craic and, by the time they came back, I was sitting at the bar with Fred and he’d taught me how to roll my own fags.”
A lifetime ago now, as he readily admits. And a lot’s happened since.
“Yeah, we’ve not long had baby number four, Marley, and he’s great, always smiling,” says Kelly, who has two children with his MTV journalist wife Jakki Healy and another two from a previous relationship.
He adds that he’s always been keen to dispel the old cliché about the rock ’n’ roll father figure who flits in and out of his kids’ lives in between tours.
“Nah, I’ve always been a hands-on dad. I mean, this morning I was in the kitchen with Neil Young playing in the background while I made the oldest one a packed lunch pasta, the other one had already made herself a bagel, while my four-year-old Riley came downstairs dressed as a princess and I had to run alongside her as she went to school on her scooter.
“Then, on the way back, me and Marley listened to the new AC/DC album in his buggy.”
A ploy, perhaps, to save money in future years by raising his very own road crew?
“Ha, I don’t know about that, but there’s no more coming, I can tell you. We’re stopping at four.”
It’s his eldest who’s recently hit the headlines, however. Having initially inspired the ’Phonics track Fly Like A Eagle back in 2016 by coming out as gay, the teenager – born Lolita Bootsy – recently revealed having transitioned into a boy and now goes by the name Colby.
“It’s very hard to put into words, but it was difficult to come to terms with at the start,” says Kelly. “I almost found myself going through a sort of grieving process, as though I’d lost a daughter and hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye properly.
“But then you realise they’re the same person, the same soul – and suddenly it hits you, ‘Right, I need to get my head around this.’
“I mean, how tough must it be to feel you were born inside the wrong body? I can’t even begin to imagine.”
He adds that, luckily, he and Colby have always been able to talk openly and honestly with one another.
“I could tell something had been going on for a while by the kind of questions he would ask me and all I can do is listen and be supportive. As a family it’s our job to help him realise he’ll eventually get to where he wants to be – and I’m proud of how we’ve coped.”
Kelly adds that the all-girls school which Colby attends is letting him stay on to sit his GCSEs – “They’ve been very cool about it all” – after which he’ll be applying to various sixth-form colleges.
“He’s a very good artist and digital designer and that’s what he wants to do – he’s actually responsible for the cover of the ’Phonics’ Kind LP.”
It’s a lot easier coming to terms with and expressing such feelings in this day and age than the one in which he grew up, I suggest.
“Absolutely, and I’m flabbergasted that, through all this, not one person has bullied Colby or made any sarcastic comments to him,” says Kelly. “He goes to a local youth group full of likeminded kids who are all going through their own thing, both gender-wise and sexually-wise.
“He looks like a cool little guy too, with a messy haircut and Dr Martens – he’s found his own little style. It’s my job to keep him happy and confident.”
Currently in the middle of an England-wide Tier 3 coronavirus lockdown, Kelly says he’s using the time on his hands to look forward to a brighter 2021. He hints at a collaboration with The Wind & The Wave – the US duo who’ve supported him on previous tours – under the moniker Far From Saints, along with the release of a second Stereophonics greatest hits collection to mark the band’s 25th anniversary.
“I know it’s hardly been a plate of strawberries for anyone these past few months, but the last two years have really been tough for me, a lot to go through,” says Kelly. “I tell you, my nervous system has taken a proper hammering.”
There’s a sigh, quickly followed by a chuckle. “And, at the moment, I can’t even go to the f****** pub.”
Don’t Let The Devil Take Another Day will be released in cinemas around the UK from December 11 before being available on demand from December 18. The live album of the same name will be available to buy on December 4