In October 2007, we caught up with the late Stuart Cable. The curly-haired loud man that once graced the drums of the Stereophonics before a rather controversal split from the band, and for the first time ever he gave us his full story from the beginning as he spoke exclusively to wordgetsaround. May he rest in peace.

We’ll start at the beginning, its the early 90s, Kelly (Jones) comes up to you and asked to you want to be in a band again, what did you say? How’d that conversation go?
Oh fucking hell! That was about 1991 actually, in our local pub; The Ivy Bush, I was there one night and he was there one night, well, the two of us just started talking and he said ‘do you fancy getting together and having a bit of a jam?’ and I was like ‘yeah, sounds like a bit fun’ you know and he had a bass player in mind that he had been playing with called Mark Everett, from a band called Silent Runner and we started jamming with Mark, just the three of us, and what I remember saying to Kelly was ‘cause he was heavily into his blues rock at that time and I said I didn’t wanna do any of the blues rock stuff and I was really into this band called The Tragically Hip, where we got the Tragic for Tragic Love Company from. So we went from there really and Mark went on holiday, which was a bit of a fucking bad thing on our behalf I’d imagine and we just wanted to carry on jamming just because we were having so much fun. So Kelly ‘oh what about Richard?’ and ‘oh I didn’t even know Richard played an instrument’ and he said ‘yeah, he plays bass’ so yeah, Richard come along and he jammed, and that was that really.

How did early jams go? What happened? How long was it until you started writing songs?
We wrote stuff like Local Boy In The Photograph, A Thousand Trees and Looks Like Chaplin and stuff like that was quite early on, I would say about 6 months, 7 months after we started jamming again, so probably late 91, early 92 and probably the last song I remember writing for Word Gets Around was Same Size Feet and we wrote that song after we had a record deal, after we got signed and we went back to Cwmaman, where we rehearsed for, well, the best part of 15 years and I remember writing that song in the room with the two producers, who produced the album Steve & Marshall (Bird), and that was the last song, probably one of the first ones was Local Boy In The Photograph, and like I said we were writing all the time, and some stuff we would throw away and some stuff we’d keep, Buy Myself A Small Plane was a song that we wrote for the first record, of course, it didn’t make it to the album, Carrot Cake & Wine, I thought, should of made the album, Kelly & Richard didn’t feel it was strong enough, but I thought the song was a great song. Great lyrics, great hook, great riff but unfortunately didn’t make the record.

They ended up playing it a couple of years ago and released in on their concert album Live From Dakota.
Yeah, I think they brought it back didn’t they? They played it in some live gig the other week I read in the newspaper, but I’m like whatever, its just one of those things, it’s a good tune, very good tune.

How long was the name ‘Mabel Cable’ in contention for?
(Laughs) Not very long to be honest with you, I’ll tell you how that stuff about. Because we were into a band called Lynard Skynard, obviously a band from Florida and they got the name for their band from their school teacher, and Kelly thought it would be a good idea to call the band Mabel Cable, because obviously my mothers name is rhyming ‘Mabel’ and ‘Cable’. So it was Mabel Cable for about 6 days, probably less than that and then I found ‘Stereophonic’ on my fathers gramophone, and I said to Kelly what do you think of ‘Stereophonics’ and he thought that was a really good name.

When did V2 come in for you?
The story from then on in is, the reason why we changed our name was we were offered a gig with a band called Catatonia who had just signed to a label, and a guy from near where we’re from put together this thing called the ‘Splash Tour’ and what that involved was, there was the Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals and the 60 Foot Dolls and they were all gonna play headline shows, the Manics played in Port Talbot, Super Furrys in Cardiff, 60 Foot Dolls in Newport and Catatonia played in Abedare. Now, there was a competition for local bands to support the bands, so we sent on a CD, a tape I should say, CDs fucking hell, not in them days, couldn’t afford a CD player, let alone CDs, we sent a tape to this guy called Wayne Coleman and he rung me back at my mothers house and said to me, he said he loved the songs, he thought we were one of the best bands he saw in ten years, Kellys voice is great , we sounded great but our name was awful, ‘cause we were called Tragic Love Company up until then, so he said ‘look, I wanna give you this gig with Catatonia’ but I want you to change the name. And it was a thing of if you don’t change your name you don’t get the gig so we thought, fuck, we better change the name so panicked because we only had two weeks to find a name, and luckily we came up with Stereophonics and moving on, we played the gig with Catatonia, and John Brand who became very instrumental in the rise of the Stereophonics, he became the manager of the band, and without whom, I really honestly believe we wouldn’t be where we are today, yes, it does take great songs, yes, it does take great live performances, but if you don’t have someone who can handle the business side of things it becomes a very difficult machine to maneuver. He’d seen us play that night, he was a friend of Wayne Coleman’s and he came down for the evening and asked did we have a record deal, and we said no, and he said ‘well, why not?’ and we were like ‘nobody seems to respond when we send stuff away and he said ‘can I have some stuff of you’ and we said ‘yeah’ and within three weeks of that meeting we had every record label in the UK wanting to sign us, which is a bit shallow really, because it was only 3 months earlier we were having rejection letters from every record company in the UK, all from the same songs. Just because John Brand had a bit of clout because he was in the industry and he could walk into peoples offices and say ‘hey, you gotta come look at this band, because they’re really good’ so who knows? Without John Brand we could have been left behind and missed I’d imagine.

How long was it, until you as a band said ‘Hey, we’re gonna try and get signed, we’re gonna try and do this properly’
We were trying to do it all the time, from day one really, from the moment Kelly & I got back together. 1991, and even earlier, before we had that break, you know having the dreams of being a signed band, and playing shows and touring the world so yeah in 1991 we got back together and 1996 we signed a record deal. It was always a dream of ours to get on the road kind of thing.

When did you find out V2 had signed you, or had it been in the works for a while before it actually happened?
We went and met everyone, we went and met 36 record companies, over a matter of like 3 or 4 weeks, and what I found appealing and obviously I can’t speak for Richard & Kelly, but what I found appealing was Branson wanted to do this record company and wanted us to be the first band signed to the record company, he wanted to make us his main priority, he put a lot of money behind the band, and the management knew that’s what it takes to break bands in the UK, in them days anyway, and the other thing that I was quite suspicious of was getting caught up in the major record labels where you don’t seem to have any sort of priority and become just another band to the record companies. And we became a family really, from the MD to the guy who used to put the post in the letterboxes, and they all worked for the greater good of breaking Stereophonics.

And after Word Gets Around was released and you see you record in the shops, that must have been a weird feeling.
Yeah, of course, it’s the strangest thing in the world, especially when you grow up in the small village the three of us grew up in, it’s a mining town, albeit the mines have gone since the 1950s but there is still a sense of community there, and also a sense of low achievement, cause everybody used to say to us why are you flogging a dead sheep, pardon the pun, or a horse when really, you’re from Cwmaman, you not going to get anywhere, and I think that made us more determined than everyone else, to get up there and do it, but its even weirder when you walk into your local pub and your on the fucking juke box, is more weird than seeing a record in the shop, when it’s your record, and everyone knows it your record, and they look at you, especially in the early days when we used to hang out a lot together when we weren’t working as a band, we’d of course, have a beer together, and the three of us would be in the room it would be very bizarre.

Going back to Cwmaman, and about its sense of community, how did it feel to put it on TV in front of millions to do Traffic on Top of the Pops.
Ah yeah, that was all a bit bizarre, outside Kellys mothers house, that was Top Of The Pops idea, they wanted to come down to Wales, we were a very proud Welsh band, and we shouted about Wales more so than a lot of other Welsh bands, and although Kelly and Richard eventually moved to London, I never lived in London, I never had any aspirations to live in London, I love where I’m from, I love the people that live in this village, you know, I can walk into the local pub, I don’t get a moments hassle, so really, we protested about Wales a lot, and when we were doing interviews with the NME & Melody Maker we were quite precise on the fact that we were from Cwmaman and not Abedare, we wanted to put that village on the map, and we did. Not only through Traffic, I still go into the town and we had German people in the other day to see where we were born and bred, and that’s fucking bizarre, and its bizarre for me and the people of Cwmaman. But it inspired kids to get in off the street and form a band, I get people come onto me and say ‘you inspired me to play guitar’ or drums or sing, we gave them the confidence to become something from within Wales, and that’s fantastic and when I hear that I feel happy, ‘cause you feel that you’ve done your job really.

So Word Gets Around is out for around a year, and then you play 10,000 people at Cardiff Castle, was it really as good as it looks on the video?
Yeah its pretty better, that again was a fucking brainchild of John Brand, you know a lot of people have gotta wake up and smell the coffee and this man has got to have a lot of credit, Morfa Stadium gig was all John Brand’s idea, it was his baby, he was the one who said we can do this, and we were getting scared and said no, and he was saying ‘yes, we can, and we can sell the tickets’, the Cardiff Castle thing it started off it was gonna be 2,000 people there, and then it went to 5,000, then to 7,000, then it ended up fucking being 12,000. Then it ended up they wanted us to do three nights and if it wasn’t for John Brand putting his balls on the line and saying ‘this band is big enough to pull this crowd in Wales’ we would of bottled and not done those shows. Just for the simple fact we didn’t think that many people would turn up, and I’m glad we didn’t, because those shows will go down in history in Wales and still to this day not a week and people come onto me and say Cardiff Castle gig was outta this world, Morfa Stadium was outta this world, and you know you gotta remember the Cardiff Castle gig, we were in the studio writing Performance & Cocktails, and we played Bartender & The Thief that night, we had just finished writing and recording the song in Bath about 3 days before Cardiff, we done it in sound check, and the biggest crowd of our own that we had played to was about 400 people, so when we have fucking 12,000 people there in the field, it got a bit nerve racking to say the least.

During the recording of Performance & Cocktails had you’re version of I Wouldn’t Believe Your Radio ever been considered for the album?
Yeah, that’s a weird story that, I’m sure now when I look back, Kelly thought I was trying to pinch some limelight off him, but I wasn’t, I always used to like that fun element of The Beatles, where every album they used to write a song for Ringo, although Ringo’s voice wasn’t great, they took great pride and pleasure in writing this tune for Ringo, and he (Kelly) told me of this song he had, the title came from a friend of ours in Cwmaman, I Wouldn’t Believe Your Radio, it was a saying he used to say, but when Kelly showed me the lyrics it was all about flying giraffes and all other stuff, and I said ‘its something The Beatles would write for Ringo, I should sing it’, but it was always gonna be Kelly’s song, I don’t think Kelly would ever let me sing on an album (laughs).

After spending 3 years touring Word Gets Around and Performance & Cocktails, you sit down to record J.E.E.P. a lot quieter album, especially for you.
Well JEEP was a strange one to be honest with you, the record that propelled us into being a stadium rock band; Performance & Cocktails was tunes like Just Looking, The Bartender & The Thief, Pick A Part That’s New, Kelly turns around to me and says he doesn’t wanna write another album like that again, he didn’t wanna write anthemic rock songs, and I was like well there you are then, taking it from 10,000 people a night to 15,000 people a night, but you don’t wanna carry on the songs, so what can you say when one person sings & plays the only guitar in the band, it become very difficult for the other two. Just gotta go along with it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Neil Young, he’s one of the greatest artists that have ever walked this earth, but I really believe it was too much of a departure from what we done before, to be honest the one song that saved that album was Handbags & Gladrags, which wasn’t even our fucking song, and it was the record company’s idea to repackage it and re-release it and that’s how it sold over 1.8 million copies. It was looking quite thick until then, where as Performance & Cocktails had sold 1.3 million at this point, JEEP was at 600,000 and once it got repackaged and Handbags & Gladrags came out the sales just rocketed through the roof really, and that was our saving grace really on that record, a fucking cover version!

And when did that song first come about for the band?
What Handbags?

Yeah.
We went to America, to mix the JEEP album and we rented an apartment in SoHo in New York, just the three of us, and Richard had bought this old Rod Stewart record, and we used to wake up in the morning, and we used to get ready to go to the studio listening to this record. Myself and Kelly had never heard it before, and we looked into the song and came back to the UK and Kelly said ‘Do you fancy recording that Handbags song?’ and I said ‘Yeah, course’ and Richard sent me a copy down to Wales and we went into Jools Holland’s studio in Greenwich and we recorded it there with his orchestra, and that was just as a b-side, it was gonna be nothing more, nothing less than a b-side and we sent it to the record company and they were ‘we wanna release this as a single, we want it to be a big part of the record, repackage and re-release the record in time for Christmas with the song’ and we were like ‘fucking hell’ and that’s what they did!

Well yeah, it’s a good song, but there is some songs on JEEP that do connect to the previous record.
Yeah, I think Rooftop is a good tune, Vegas Two Times is on there isn’t it? Step On My Old Size Nines, I kinda like, because that’s another saying from Cwmaman, which is a very long story but its just an old saying a guy used to say, in the olden days when they had proper dances in the hall in Cwmaman not discos but with the one-two and with waltz and fucking stuff like that and he used ask women to dance, and they’d say their feet are hurting and they can’t dance anymore, he’d say ‘well step on my size nines and I’ll take you round’ so I kinda like that ‘cause its sentimental ‘cause I know the gentleman who said that, and he’s in his nineties now and I bumped into him only last Saturday, in the local pub, yeah, he’s getting a bit old now and his eye sights going but if it wasn’t for that man you wouldn’t have the line ‘Step on my old size nines and I’ll take you round’.

That record was a bit of a shock to the fans, who were used to hearing you belt out tunes like Local Boy, Too Many Sandwiches, Bartender and then out comes songs like Size Nines and Have A Nice Day, it was very, if not too different.
Well yeah, of course it was very different, I don’t know if it a good thing or a bad thing, maybe looking back I think it was a bad thing, I can only judge it on what people say to me, that’s the easiest and the best way for me, and if you put into respective the career of the Stereophonics, everybody who comes onto me and talks about the first two albums and nobody ever talks about any of the other albums, and I think that was maybe the time that Kelly started to chase what he thought was the American dream, because every album even the song Moviestar which was written off the back of a U2 tour, and that’s why that song sounds like that, because he thought that was the formula we needed to break America, you know, its very U2, very Adam Clayton bass line the way it moves. I dunno, when Kelly was a young writer, before he started blinking for want of a better word, stuff like Local Boy, to me, still to this day I love Same Size Feet, I love Too Many Sandwiches – proper fucking rock songs, Kelly, I don’t understand what he’s doing now with his voice, it doesn’t make any sense to me, but hey, what am I to say, I’m not in the band no more.

On the earlier songs, even the ones that didn’t make it, Buy Myself A Small Plane, Raymonds Shop, Carrot Cake & Wine, they are all very innocent small town stories, and songs like Have A Nice Day sticks with that, but at the same time moves away to something fans weren’t used to, and they say ‘All publicity is good publicity’ but do you think the way the media reacted to Mr. Writer was ‘good publicity?’
I really don’t know, Have A Nice Day is very American isn’t it? But that’s an experience Kelly had in San Francisco, I wasn’t with him but apparently he got into the back of a taxi, and the taxi driver started talking and he reckoned every body looked the same, talked the same, dressed the same, obviously the guy was a fucking fruit loop, you can tell that but obviously Kelly took it on board and wrote a tune out of it. But as for publicity I dunno, because I was kinda disillusioned with the band at this stage, because at the end of the day I’m a fucking rock drummer, I’m not about to tap about a drum and that’s what Kelly wanted me to do, I didn’t really wanna be that kinda guy, and you know I don’t know what to say about it really, I think the band were very good in their early days and they’ve kinda gone away now really its quite sad to see.

Around this time though of JEEP and even before during Kelly’s acoustic tour, there were heavy rumours of the band splitting up, were these ever close to true?
That was the only time that Kelly started to show his true colours, you know he was quite child-like in this scenario, yes, we’d been in each others pockets for some years now, I had just got married, my wife was expecting our first child and you gotta remember I’m 4 years older than Kelly & Richard, and yeah during that album, my wife was about to give birth at any time and we were in fucking Bath and I wanted to get back down to South Wales and be with my wife and Kelly couldn’t get his head around that, obviously now he can, because he’s got children of his own, and if we had of come close to splitting up, Kelly would of probably walked out of the band, apart from that no, nothing at all, there were rumours and there was a letter that Kelly had sent out to us which was very headmasterish, very Kellyesque that I later found out, actually, looking back now on it, after those first two albums, a lot of me doesn’t really care, what went on after that to be quite honest with you. I think I worked on some of the best songs of my career on those albums and then on the subsequent two, JEEP and You Gotta Go There, You Gotta Go There I wasn’t even fucking interested in making that record, I didn’t even wanna be in the band any longer, I made the decision halfway through that album I was gonna leave the band, hence Kelly got in there before I did, so those albums mean nothing much to me, looking back Have A Nice Day was a total and utter pop-song.

Very un-Stereophonics.
Yeah, but that was Kelly trying to break the American market, and sadly it doesn’t work that way, you can’t just write a hit for a certain part of the world, and at the end of the day I think Stereophonics are just destined not to be big in America and that’s the way it goes, and now, they are still touring the same places, playing the same venues as when I was in the band 5 years ago.

Well, after You Gotta Go There was out, the band were doing the promo tour, and Kelly & Richard did it, infact without you, where were you while this was going on?
What happened was this, we had a big meeting in the record company, basically everybody who worked for the band were there, and they wanted us to do a promo in Australia and I was all ‘yeah, lets go do that’ and Kelly says he wants to do it acoustic so I turn to him and say ‘well, what the fuck am I gonna do then? Am I gonna come and just sit and drink?’ and he said ‘do interviews’ and I was all ‘bollocks am I flying halfway around the world to sit and do interviews, I’ll do them on the phone’ and the girl from the record company said ‘that’s ridiculous Kel, why would you want to go around there acoustic when Stuart can’t?’ and because Kelly didn’t like it that I had one over on him, and it wasn’t one over on him I mean would you wanna travel around the world just to do interviews when you’re the drummer in a band?

Either way, for that album after JEEP it would make sense to go there full band, with songs like High As The Ceiling, Help Me & Helga surely they’re suited for a rock show.
Well you know, I didn’t go to Australia, I spent two weeks doing interviews from my house and I went and met them in Japan about three weeks later, and basically Kelly didn’t talk to me for 7, maybe 8 days probably longer, and I had already decided I was leaving the band, after the Australia thing I went home and made the decision I was gonna tour the record, and walk away after the Millennium Stadium gig at the end of 2003, and I was gonna tell everybody after the gig that I planned to walk. But in Japan, I got pissed up with the keyboard player (Tony Kirkham), told him my intentions, he went off and told Kelly and Kelly was just waiting for an opportunity which unbeknown to me I didn’t know and it went from there really. So that’s how the sacking came about.

Was it Kelly who broke the news?
It was Richard who come on the phone first and he kinda stumbled about, look I knew what was going on, Kelly came on the phone and said its run its coarse, and I said ‘well yeah, I know its run its coarse’ and he said ‘what ya mean?’ and I said ‘you know I’m gonna leave the band anyway’ so before I could do it, he jumped in there ahead of me, and he said it was gonna be sad, and I said ‘well, I’m not sad, the last few years for me have been fucking hell, just total bollocks!’ and that’s the way it is, I’m the happiest guy in my life to be honest right now, happy as fucking ten bears.

And what’s your relationship with Kelly like now?
Well every time that Kelly says something about me in the press, I call him up and he denies it every time, so where am I to stand? ‘cause I told him, its gotta stop or heads will roll, that’s the last time I spoke to him about it, I seen him last Christmas and we spent two nights together in Cwmaman, it was his brother and my brother and a couple of mates, and I never said anything bad about Kelly, and all the shit he has said, he said about me. So its Christmas, we’re getting on, we’re having a laugh, and I said to him ‘you really gotta stop opening your mouth, and you gotta be a big man and shut the fuck up, and when people ask you about me you gotta say ‘no, I don’t wanna talk about it’’ and he agreed with me and it wasn’t 6 weeks after Christmas and there’s more stuff in the press, so I phone him up and say ‘what did we just talk about in the club at Christmas?’ so to be honest with you, there’s no love loss between me and Kelly, I’d would like to say that he’s a friend of mine but he’s not, because friends wouldn’t do that, I’ve asked him on countless occasions to shut his mouth, I can dish the dirt on Kelly more so than he could on me, I swear man, I know things that could make you fucking cringe! But at the end of the day he seems to be happy where he’s at, at the moment and I’m very, very happy where I’m at, over the fucking moon… over the moon!

What about your relationship with Richard now?
I haven’t spoken to Richard for four years.

Wow, four years?
Four years, nothing at all.

Is that out of choice?
No, he knows where I am man, they are the ones who sacked me from the band, he got my phone number, my email address, if he were a big man he’d pick up a phone and say how he is. Kelly had the audacity to turn round to me at Christmas time and say ‘Richard misses you’ I said ‘Misses me? He knows my number, knows where I live, knows my email address’ what a load of bollocks man, what a load of fucking bollocks.

Have you seen the new DVD documentary, Rewind?
Let me tell you about that now, I rang Kelly up, when he sent me the rough copy and asked ‘why haven’t I been interviewed, why haven’t I given my side of the story? Why is it always you and Richard giving your side of the story and I never get to give mine?’ they make out to be your friend, but that’s no friend.

So you’ve seen it I’m assuming
I have, its very much the way that Kelly Jones would want that film to be portrayed, anything that can paint Kelly in a better picture is better for Kelly, so if I had the opportunity to go on there and I’m the only one who can put this story straight and tell you exactly what went on and not a load of fucking bollocks that he brings up in the press all the time, then he’s not gonna look like the big man that he’s gonna portray himself to be.

Well that’s one thing I noticed, there is interviews from you throughout the film from the beginning but they just stop after JEEP…
And what does that say to you Duane? Does that say that somebody is being gagged? Does it sound like somebody hasn’t been allowed to speak their minds, because at the end of the day, Kelly wanted that band for himself, now he calls all the shots, he writes all the songs, he produces the record – which is a really bad move, and just flicking through the press of their new record I haven’t seen anything major, I’ve seen it slated in the press which speaks volumes to me in the sense that, no one man is an island, Kelly is a great songwriter, Kelly has a great voice, I will never, ever take that away from him but as a person and a human being he’s not nice at all.

Going back to Rewind, I was in London for the premiere and when you first appeared on the screen there was a large cheer from the audience, so the fans still appreciate what you did for the band.
At the end of the day, the most important part of the Stereophonics is the fans, they are the people, and as soon as Kelly grasps this into his head the better, those people, you guys, everybody who buys the record around the world, buys the t-shirts, a ticket to a concert, they pay the way we live our lives, the car that I drive, the car that Kelly drives, the car that Richard drives, the settee that Kelly sits on and the expensive meals he buys his girlfriend are paid for by people like you, who are hard working, who follow a band, love a band, I think Kelly should take that on board sometime and appreciate that, sometimes he doesn’t and sometimes he takes a lot of shit for granted, he’s a very lucky man to have a loyal fan base that band has got, and I used to take a lot of time for the fans, whether it would be trying to pull funny faces, trying to talk to them or throwing sticks out to the crowd, its all something a bit special, I always felt Kelly should do a bit more and he never did, maybe one day he’ll understand.

Did you hear the last record, Language. Sex. Violence. Other?
That the one with Dakota on it?

That’s the one.
Well, when they released Dakota, this is how much of a man I am, I don’t want to preach to be a man, but I rang Kelly when it went to number one, the first one the band ever had and I said ‘Fair play to you dude, it’s a great tune, congratulations, have yourself a nice evening’ and that was it because I left him go and I said he would of wanted twelve Dakota’s on that album ‘cause the rest of that record is very poor.

Well one track on that record is one you were around for Royal Flush (on the album as Deadhead)
Yeah and that’s a song that I played on and I’m not even credited for. Oh no, no credit at all, its written by Kelly Jones, what do you expect.

Javier (Weyler, Stuart’s eventual replacement) must have been around during the You Gotta Go There sessions?
Yeah, he was actually, he was an assistant to Jim Lowe who engineered the record, and Javier came on the road with us, I thought he was more of a jazz drummer to be honest with you, he’s a nice guy, I bumped into him a few times, he’s a good drummer, I haven’t really seen a lot of him to pass judgment, he’s got a good head for time, he looks good, he looks better than I did, all in all he’s a nice, I can’t really say a bad word about him.

I think its safe to say you haven’t been to see any of their gigs since then?
Oh no, no I’m not interested in that, I’ll tell you what I did see the other night, the BBC red button thing when they played live.

Radio One’s Big Weekend?
Yeah, that’s what its called, I thought the performance was lack luster, very wooden like, very played by numbers if you know what I mean, no energy there, everything gotta be done in time, nobody does anything on stage they just stand there, and I’m like ‘fucking hell boys, this is so boring’.

They played their current single It Means Nothing that night, did you catch that?
When I watched that Big Weekend thing on BBC, I say Dakota, Local Boy and that one, I was in from the pub that night and watched that song and was like ‘fucking hell, this is fucking dire, this is really bad’ and when they announced it was gonna be the single I was ‘fucking hell boys, why don’t you just step to the gallows and just hang yourselves’ so its gonna be interesting to see what’s gonna happen in the next few months, V2 has been sold to Universal so that’ll be a whole different kettle of fish, I don’t know what’s going on with them but yeah, the albums gone to number one so that’s pretty cool, so you can’t fault it there, but see how long it’ll last.

How do you feel when you see the band going on without you?
I’m happy where I’m at now, I got this new band together called Killing For Company, they’re fucking great, the guys in the band are complete down to earth, humble people, who really just wanna get along and become a good rock band, we all do writing together, it doesn’t matter if someone comments on my fucking drumming, doesn’t matter if I make a comment on Greg’s vocals, that’s how it should be in a band.

How did that come about? Were you approached?
It just come about solely from me actually, John Brand who got sacked from the Stereophonics the same time that I did, phoned me up and said ‘You should go drumming, don’t stop’ and I was like ‘Nah, I’m not interested in that anymore’ and he just told me to put a band together, I know its easier said than done, but that’s what I did really my old drum tech Swampy knew Andrew, the guitar player and his brother, the bass player, I bumped into Greg doing a thing for BBC Wales, and the guitar player from his band was the last one to join, and its going really good, we’re going into the studio with a guy called Bob Marlette, who’s a big producer from America who’s worked on stuff like Ozzy Osborne, Black Sabbath, Creed, Evanescence, Saliva and basically it looks like he’s gonna get us a deal in America, he loves the tunes and he’s got his own record label, so hopefully with a bit of luck we’ll have a single out next year, maybe an album, so watch this space.

So you’re hoping you get signed with this band and can take it on the road?
Well this guy Bob, he’s big in America, has his own label, is in with other labels and he just wants to come over and work with us, he’s a bit of a writer aswell, a producer/songwriter and just sit down and write with us, and that’s something I’m really looking forward to, because its one thing I always wanted to do in the Stereophonics, and it was something Kelly always put the kibosh on. I’d love to work with someone else, whoever it might be – Sting! Bono! The Edge! Just anybody who can come into the studio and have some fresh ideas and bounce stuff off, I’m really looking forward to that, and yeah we’re just going where the wind blows us really man, if it takes us to America, we’re a very American sounding band, a very big sound, we’re very good live, we’re fucking electric! I gotta say it really is, it’s the band I always wanted to be in, its very AC/DC and that’s the band I like.

I’ve seen it advertised in newspapers and online as “Stuart Cable’s new band – Killing For Company”, how do Greg and the lads respond to being labeled like that.
Its always done that way, I mean Dave Grohl when he released the Foo Fighters, it was “Nirvana’s Dave Grohl’s new band”, and they are like ‘well you’ve got a past, you’ve sold millions of records, lets fucking use that as much as we can, to get people on board’ and you know that’s very humble of them, for the sake of the band, pushing it in the right direction, same coarse and hopefully the same result.

Well I’d imagine, if a record comes out, a number of people will buy that album based on the fact that you’re the former drummer from the Stereophonics.
There’ll be a lot of people that will, but a lot of people that won’t, we’ve had access to the Stereophonics database and we’ve had a few people come on board via that but I understand the band aren’t the Stereophonics, and Greg doesn’t sound like Kelly Jones, the songs don’t sound like Stereophonics songs, I would say they have a bit more balls, more attitude, I just think it’s a bigger sounding band, no disrespect to the band but realistically they’ve only got one guitar player, yes, they use Adam (Zindani, SpiderSimpson, Stereophonics live guitarist) now, but still Kelly is the core guitar player in the band and we’ve got two, and they can vary, one of them may write one song and the other one may write another song and they take the lead role in that aspect and that’s the way you should be.

Its good so that the band are different than the Stereophonics, therefore those who actually stick around after realizing it sounds different will be genuine fans.
I’m under no illusions at the end of the day, I know we gotta start at the bottom rung of the ladder again, and I kinda like that, I’m happy with that, I guess it shows a good sense of character. What other new band can say they have a guy who was from the biggest band in Britain at the time, I mean I’m working for Kerrang! Radio, I’m working for XFM radio, I do TV shows for the BBC and I’ve a new band going, I don’t know, it takes a big character to do that, I don’t like blowing my own trumpet its just what people say to me. Friends and family, you know to come back from that, I wasn’t gonna let it beat me, I know I had more to offer, than what I could in that band and its just what this band is doing, I think my drumming has improved 100% since the Stereophonics just playing with these guys, because they are better musicians, and because its more demanding and we’re gonna push this as far it’ll go really.

You grew up listening to bands like AC/DC, and dreaming of being like them, obviously being in a band similar to them, you’re gonna get more drive and ambition.
It doesn’t sound like AC/DC, because if we try to sound like AC/DC, we’ll just end up ripping off and sounding like a cheap impression AC/DC. But we took the attitude and the no balls rock, in your face attitude and that’s our attitude really, and some of the greatest compliments that I can have is, we have a guy who writes for Classic Rock magazine and he came and watched us in the bar in Cardiff the other night, two hundred and fifty people there and he just come onto me and says ‘Its weird this, its like watching Led Zeppelin in their early days, I know in ten years time people are gonna be saying, ‘I was in that bar watching Killing For Company’’. Now I’m not saying that, right, he’s a journalist, I’m just sitting there thinking that I dunno where this band is gonna go but he thinks its gonna be the biggest thing since sliced fucking bread and maybe it will be but then maybe it won’t, but one thing is, you gotta have a good time and you gotta enjoy it, and that’s what I do enjoy now, I do enjoy playing and being around the guys in the band whereas I didn’t towards the end of being with the Stereophonics.

The rest of the band, obviously, haven’t amounted to the success that you have so they just go forward, but do you think you can or will use your knowledge to cut a few corners and get there quicker?
No not really, I’m kind of looking forward to it, Greg will get all the attention as singers do, and its fantastic I’ll be able to put my feet up and watch him do interviews in the future ‘cause at the moment I’m doing them all. Who knows? The music industry has changed since I got into it ten years ago, I’m just grateful people like it, guys in Kerrang! Magazine thinks its fucking brilliant, guys in Classic Rock and they know, they see bands every day and you gotta remember this guys is £14,000 for one song to work with and he’s coming over and working with us for free ‘cause he loves the band, that speaks volumes. This guys sells between 10 and 15 million per record he makes he wrote most of the Creed, Evanescence & Saliva. For this guy to come all the way to South Wales, its more than promising, he wants to take us to America and explore over there, which would be fucking fantastic, I wouldn’t complain.

Going back years now, back to square one… why drums?
Why drums? Because I tried to play guitar and I was terrible so I tried giving drums a go and low and behold I was fucking terrible at them too (laughs).

What would the first song you played?
Highway To Hell by AC/DC or Deep Purple or something like that.

You’ve a son now don’t you?
I do indeed.

What would you say if he took position behind the kit?
He has a set of drums, but he wants to be a guitar player instead so he’s getting lessons at school. I’m very supportive of him, he’s into motorbikes and is very good at is bike, but he wants to be a guitar player, he doesn’t have to drum, he’s nearly 7 and he starts guitar lessons next week and I tell him he’s gotta come home and concentrate and do at least 30-40 minutes a night on his chords, his scales and he’s gonna and good for him.

Wish him the best of luck anyway.
You may see him on stage sometime.

You can drum in his new band then.
Yeah, you never know.

And lastly, before you go, what message do you leave for the fans?
Well to all the fans out there, thanks a lot really, I’m just disappointed that you didn’t get the full story as to what went on, thanks for you’re support, when I was in the band you were great and without you guys the band wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today so thanks very much.

Well that’s everything now.
Ok so Duane, take care buddy and have a nice day… pardon the pun!

—
This interview is also available to download on iTunes here or on the site, click here.