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“The year previously I was working at a festival in Swansea called Beach Break Live and there was a lot of talk backstage about this one artist performing on Sunday afternoon.
“It must have been around the time The A-Team had just been released and Ed was still rocking his classic orange hoodie.
“I think what surprised me the most when I got to Newport Centre one year later was how quickly Ed blew up - he went from playing an opening festival slot with less than 100 people watching to becoming the most talked about artist of the year.
“It was like watching a different artist to the previous year, and at this point you could tell Ed was going to become a big deal.
“Hearing the songs brought to life and the number of tricks used with his loop pedal was really something cool to watch up close.
“I remember a local promoter advertising the official Ed Sheeran after party, which his management weren’t too happy with to say the least. I think the promoter then attempted to book Sheeran officially, but it didn’t come to fruition.”
Perhaps it’s foresight, or simply fortune, but Newport has had the uncanny habit of hosting major rock acts on the cusp of great success in front of tiny audiences over the years.
One of the most notable visits came in mid-1994, when a group of five Mancunians rocked up to TJ’s armed with a few tunes dripping in working-class attitude and facemelting overdrive.
Led by swaggering frontman Liam Gallagher, they called themselves Oasis, and little did the crowd know at the time, but they were about to become one of the biggest-selling bands of all time.
Just weeks after the gig, the band released debut album Definitely Maybe, kickstarting a 20-year career of rock domination and packing out stadiums around the world.
But it was at a famous spot in Newport, the former King’s Hotel, where chance would lead to a photo being taken that would go down in Oasis fan folklore.
Kevin Cummins, who was photographing the band at the time, remembers: “We’d been in Portsmouth the night before and it had been a late one. I remember we’d stayed in the Marriott Hotel, and the pool was right next to the bar, which was obviously a recipe for disaster.
“The band had been up half the night and headed to Newport the next morning, so it was a much more subdued affair.
“I was sitting in the hotel lobby the morning after the gig, and Liam came down. I hadn’t noticed it previously, but I saw Liam standing with the sign for the Oasis Bar right above his head. I told him to stay where he was, and knew I had to get the picture.
“It obviously ended up on their first NME cover, and became a picture that became synonymous with them.”
Back in simpler times, the biggest threat to parents was the notion that music, TV and cinema was prompting violent killings and aggression in American teens was causing horror among parents and talk show hosts.
The main victim of the hysterical invective was one Brian Warner, better known by the moniker Marilyn Manson, whose white makeup and aggressive, industrial rock and pumped-up talk of the antichrist was causing alarm among older generations.
Plonked right in the middle of the furore was a Newport date on Manson’s tour in 1997.
Steve Watts was 18 and living in Cardiff at the time, and remembers the day well.
“It was midweek but I had no college that day, so me and my friends arrived really early.
“You used to get people arriving at like 2pm outside the venue and waiting until the doors opened that night.
“So we spent the day hanging out, meeting other fans and just making friends with other people in the queue.
“I worked in a shop called Oriental Arts in the Castle Arcade in Cardiff at the time, and it was where all the goths used to come and hang out.
“I got some makeup from there and a friend gave me some clothes, so I came to the gig fully dressed in face make-up, lipstick, a dress and red and black striped tights. I looked quite the sight!
“It was that kind of weird moment for the metal scene, right before the internet, when there was still an air of mystery around a lot of artists.
“I remember the feeling that, you know, this is the gig where you can be as weird as you want.
“To this day I still have friends I meet up with that I met in the queues outside venues in those days, 20 years ago. It was amazing.”
As it happens, 1997 was not Manson’s last visit to the Port – he played again at Newport Centre in 2017.
Years before they became an arena-conquering behemoth, Green Day were on the support circuit and, in 1991, were bottom of the bill supporting Midway Still.
Dean Beddis, who fronted the Newport punk band Cowboy Killers, had performed on the same bill as the band earlier in the week in Wigan and, after their gig in TJs in Newport, had been asked by promoter Simon Phillips if Green Day could stay at his house.
Dean, who now runs Kriminal Records in Newport Market, says: “They were only young kids, they must’ve been 15 or 16 coming over from America at the time.
“We knew the guys from Lookout! Records, which had put out the first two Green Day albums, before they blew up.
“I was working in a record store and had work the next morning, so I told them they had to go to f***king bed when they got back.
“They were still up hours later, so I came down with a samurai sword I had in the house and threatened them if they didn’t shut the f**k up.
“People still ask them about it, and they still remember staying with a guy in Wales who tried to kill them with a samurai sword. I didn’t really try to kill them though. They’ve got no sense of humour these Americans, do they?
“They mentioned the story in Kerrang, and it was actually in their autobiography when it came out a few years ago. So it must’ve stayed with them as a memory of their first UK tour.
“I’ve been asked so many times about it, there’s been hundreds more gigs but people always want to know about that one!”
Before he was a Grammy award-winning electronic producer and DJ, Los Angeles artist Skrillex plied his musical trade in America’s post-hardcore scene.
A decade ago, before fully developing the EDM/dub sound that would define his mainstream career, and after leaving post-hardcore group From First to Last, Skrillex was touring under his real name Sonny Moore.
If you look online, you’ll find some grainy footage of Moore on the DJ decks at TJ’s in Newport in 2009. At the time, Moore had already started performing around LA under the name Skrillex, and if you listen closely you can hear fragments of the sound that would later lead to major hits like Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
Released just a year after the Newport gig, Scary Monsters .... would win multiple Grammy awards, and Skrillex was born.
Although it would be several years before its importance would be recognised, the Stowaway Club in Newport was a thriving nerve centre for much of the underground punk movement in South Wales.
Where there were no hoax proposals or singers pulled into the crowd on the night in 1977 that the Sex Pistols visited, the band’s tendency to provoke shock and indignation in many parts of the UK was contrasted by a riotous reception from the punk-mad gig-goers in Newport, a sign that the city was ahead of the curve in its love for the genre.