'I had no idea anyone would give a s***

Their 13th studio album, Make ‘em Laugh, Make ‘em Cry, Make ‘em Wait, is ‘classic Stereophonics,’ says Cwmaman's Kelly Jones, but with a flavour of the band in 2025. The frontman tells all to Lifestyle editor Kathryn Williams

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‘I HAD no idea anyone would give a sh*t,’ Kelly Jones muses as he's asked, probably for the umpteenth time, about what the catalyst and thought process was behind his anthemic tributes to Welsh life back in the early to mid-1990s.

Stereophonics have now been in the Welsh and wider public consciousness almost three decades and have just released their 13th album, Make ‘em Laugh, Make ‘em Cry, Make’ em Wait - the title of which was inspired by the singersongwriter’s art school teacher back in Pontypridd.

The phrase has been worked into Stereophonics lore since Jones was first told it while developing his other passion, screenwriting, back in that art school. Their extensive back catalogue is a mix of observational everday scenes, emotions and situations that can make you laugh and blub in equal measure, such is the 50-year-old’s mean skill of songwriting - name me a Valleys native who doesn’t smile, revelling in the shouting of “OFFICE BLOCKS!” from A Thousand Trees or get a shiver over the melancholic but optimistic Maybe Tomorrow.

From 1997's debut, Word Gets Around - home of tracks that paint a vivid picture of a certain corner of Welsh life, like Local Boy in the Photograph and A Thousand Trees - to this year’s new release, and everything in between (including corkers like Performance & Cocktails, Kind, and Graffiti on the Train), the band at their best paint a picture of where they are, where Jones is in that moment.

Back at the start, Jones’ rigorous absorbing of what was around him in Cwmaman, a classic Welsh mining village, and the rest of the Cynon Valley, wasn’t seen by the writer as channelling emotion and feeling down on to the page. However, looking back, he says songwriting allowed those feelings to have an outlet. Local Boy is about a lad from the valley who died when he was hit by a train, Goldfish Bowl documents a claustrophobic, aimless feeling all smalltown teens experience once in their life at least.