06/11/07 - Stuart Cable - The Exclusive Interview
Recently, we caught up with the curly-haired loud man that once graced the drums of the Stereophonics before a rather controversal split from the band, now for the first time ever he gives his full story from the beginning as he speaks exclusively to wordgetsaround. Have a look.


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.

Go to Part 2 - The Break Up