Studiedly
Brilliant
Stereophonics' new album Just Enough Education To Perform is all about ordinary people.
By Mohammad A Qayyum
In the early '80s, Robert Redford cleaned up at the
Oscars with his directorial debut Ordinary People, a movie that, as the title
suggests, was about ordinary people. Nothing much happened in the movie in
terms of action, but it was inhabited by some real characters who were assailed with some real, ordinary problems and
struggled to cope with the same. The realism and soul-baring honesty of the
movie made it one of the most intensely emotional movies one could ever see.
The Stereophonics' third
and latest album titled Just Enough Education to Perform (JEEP) after their
award-winning debut Word gets around (***1/2) and the remarkable Performance
& Cocktails (****) similarly strikes a chord in one's heart and may well
also have been called ordinary people as that is what it is about. Nothing
startling happens in the album, but it is beautifully realized and is invested
with observations of the wry, bittersweet truths of life. The characters in the
album, as in the movie, are believable and have a heart, aspirations and
failings. These memorably include in the various songs on this album, a
money-truck driver who doesn't have any money of his own, a cabbie who does not
much care for foreigners, an old couple still in love on the dance floor and
another couple on a holiday in a caravan and who are getting on each other's
nerves. JEEP with its remarkable realistic vignettes manages to be a mature
piece of work and deserves to pick up all the musical
awards equivalent to the Oscars.
Admittedly, maturity in rock is often a dirty word,
but do not be put off by it. The 'Phonics manage to be mature and fun.
Generally, when faced with the dilemma of making a third album in their career
cycle, simple minded (Oasis) and less talented bands (Verve, Supergrass) often fall into the trap of equating maturity
with being boring. This often signals the death-knell for them as, at the end of
the day, almost all great rock is juvenilia. The Stereophonics
- "Phonics" to the fans - buck the trend here. They say a lot that is
intelligent and mature in this album but also manage to accompany it with
thoroughly catchy, memorable music.
A lot of this is down to the remarkable makeup of
the band. The drummer Stuart Cable and Richard Jones the bassist are
workmanlike (their past jobs included bricklaying and hard labour).
Their no-nonsense, blue collared attitude seems to reflect in their approach
(solid and unfussy) to music too as they set up a firm rock foundation over
which Kelly Jones, (former market trader, one-time boxer, and budding
scriptwriter), now the Stereophonics singer,
songwriter, guitarist and pocket sized frontman
blazes away.
Kelly is well and truly the star here, one bright
enough to outshine the cream of the Brit-rock brigade (Oasis, Blur, et. al.)
The first thing to catch one's ear on the album is Kelly's voice. He has one of
the most truly unique voices around. It is cross between the early rasp of Rod
Stewart (circa Every Picture Tells a Story, before he blew all his talent away
on blondes and mindless disco ditties) and the whine of Chris Robinson (Black Crowes; check out the video to the 'Phonics-Crowes' duet Twice As Hard on the
net). You either love Kelly's voice or hate it. I love it to bits: Kelly's
blues-tinged rasp and the way his voice breaks on certain songs is stunning and
adds so much more to songs than much more accomplished vocalists could. When he
wraps his Marlboro-corroded lungs around his deceptively plaintive lyrics, you
cannot help but be moved.
The next thing that strikes the listener is the
music: on some songs (Mr. Writer, Have a Nice Day) it is incredibly catchy and
on others it is remarkably understated - most of the others. It is, however, at
all times quite spectacular and appropriate in the service the particular song.
The obvious singles are incredibly catchy with harmonies (some of the best in
recent memory) and hooks aplenty. On the mellower numbers the music is
appropriately beautiful with a countryish tinge
(pedal steel and a lot of other acoustic instruments). The one qualm one might
have with the album is that it lacks the hard rock edge of Kelly's previous
work. But then again Kelly might counter that the edge is not there because he
did not put it there.
If he ever did say so actually, he would be lying.
This album has a razor sharp edge, one that actually lies in the incisive
lyrics which can be devastating in their observations. The parallel with Ordinary
People drawn earlier is appropriate as Kelly's approach to lyric-writing is
akin to that of painting wryly observed word-pictures. His lyrics are invested
with a screenwriter's eye for telling description and action.
Kelly's lyrical edge can, in fact, be biting.
Consider the words to Mr. Writer, the impossibly catchy first single from the
album. This is a catty put down to music journalists ("You've just enough,
in my own view/Education to perform/I'd like to shoot you all") who have
done Kelly wrong ("Mr Writer/ Why don't you tell
it like it is?/ Like it really is?") Not since
Get In The Ring by Guns N Roses, has there been as
brutal a thrashing of newsmen. But where Get In The
Ring was a rant that soon got on one's nerves, Mr. Writer is a masterwork with
sneering harmonies, wah-wah guitars and Wurlitzer
organs.
Mr. Writer as an acid barb aside, Kelly does not
often comment on his character. He is more like a cameraman who captures
telling details. His ultimate forte is in well-observed songs depicting
everyday life and the mini-tragedies therein.
Lie In The Sun is written
from the perspective of a character living on the street. There is no mawkish
self-pity in the song, initially just a sad resignation and wish to be able to
do simple things that everyone does ('Wish I could lie
in the sun / just like anyone'.) This is not a street urchin wishing for a huge
mansion; he just wants to be able to lie in the sun, read a newspaper like
everyone. The man, however, in the end gives way to anger which is remarkably
jarring with the payoff line in the song 'Did I kill a child?/
Or something worse/ Same things are anyone'. His startling
point being that all those who kill children and do something worse in the real
world seem to be doing better than him at the end of the day. A biting
social comment this is!
Still, not all Kelly's songs are invested with
social comments: Kelly also takes on the trite topic of love in his own unique way. Step On My Old
Size Nines gets nearest to a traditional romantic ballad. Kelly in his song
archly adopts a third person's perspective and looks on at an aged couple in
love and wonders if he will ever get a love like that. The couple at the heart
of the song is a real couple Kelly saw on a dancefloor
where the woman said to the man that her feet were too tired to dance anymore,
so the man said "Step on my old size nines (shoes) and I'll take you
round" And that according to Kelly is what the old man did. When Kelly
puts this in his song, this is a simple evocation of love, but he also adds a
bittersweet tinge to it with his lyrics from the perspective of a person
longing to have a love like that.
The other song on the album that deals with a
relationship, if not love, is Caravan Holiday. Here there is a picture painted
of a love under strain from apathy or minor grumblings. It is the story of a
young man out with woman on a holiday in a caravan. Nothing much happens but
one can feel their love dying with despair that overfamiliarity
brings. They sound sick of each other but still hope 'Seasons change in a day
just like each other/ But we wait for summer.'
Caravan
In actuality what all the songs demonstrate is that
Kelly is brilliant due to what he does and what he does not do. He doesn't have
the verbal diarrhea of a Bob Dylan. He does not try his hand at the keen
wordplay of say a Leonard Cohen or Elvis Costello; one suspects he couldn't
pull it off even if he tried. Kelly does not deal with odd-ball characters like
Lyle Lovett and Randy Newmann. While he deals with
blue-collared characters like Springsteen, he does not do so with bombast. He
just sings of ordinary people in ordinary situations with ordinary failings.
Kelly goes to
In fact the artist that Kelly reminds me most of is
not a musician at all but the celebrated short-story writer, Ray Carver. Carver
also wrote of simple, ordinary people in a simple straightforward manner. Some
time ago, Roger Ebert wrote that '[i]n a Carver
story, there is typically a moment when an ordinary statement becomes crucial,
or poetic, or sad. People get blinding glimpses into the real nature of their
lives; the routine is peeled aside, and they can see they've been stuck in a
rut for years, going through the motions. Sometimes they see with equal clarity
that they are free to take charge, that no one has sentenced them to repeat the
same mistakes.' The same is equally true of the songs on Just Enough Education To Perform. The added bonus one gets here is that the songs
are married to brilliant melodies and music.
Ultimately it seems that a lot of this album is a
con. Its understated mood at times hides it depth. Even the cover of the album
is muted and if one blinked one is likely to miss it lying next to other
flashier covers or even the 'Phonics own eye-catching Performance &
Cocktails cover. If one were to pick faults with the album one would say that
it lacks the great rockers of other 'Phonics albums. That much is true. The
album opener Vegas Two Times and the album ending Rooftop are both rather weak.
Other than that the album is chockfull of stunning songs.
Nice To Be Out is great
and may alternately be an update of We Didn't Start The Fire by Billy Joel or a
pat take on old people. Maybe (I give a lot / I take a lot / It's nothing new
to me) is yet another high-mark in the album. It is particularly effective in
the way Kelly sings it. He mangles words a la Paul Westerberg and in Maybe one
is not sure if he is singing All I want is stuff to be
happy or All I want is for us to be happy. He may well have been singing both
(he has done so in live performance) and each gives a delightfully wicked twist
to the song. Have A Nice Day ought to be the next single. It is that good and
catchy.
For all their individual brilliance, the songs
cohere well together and in that make a great album. The various songs seem to
interact lyrically as well as thematically with each other and make the album
gel as a complete piece of work. The couples of Step On
My Old Size Nines and Caravan Holiday in their juxtaposition span the whole
spectrum of love. Lack of money unites the money truck driver in Everyday I
Think Of Money and the homeless man in Lie In The Sun.
This album clearly has many thought-provoking
elements, none moreso than its title: Just Enough
Education To Perform. Initially I thought it may well
be the band posing to be less intelligent or educated than they really are:
most intelligent bands in rock (other than Manic Street Preachers) try to act
less intelligent than they are. Being dumb sells.
Either that or, I thought, the title was used to take the serious edge off the album
just like Achtung Baby, a throwaway title, was used
for the most intense U2 album. Just Enough Education To
Perform, according to Kelly Jones, is in fact a description of qualities of a
perfect soldier he read in a military manual. Having considered the album as a
whole, though, I propose that the title is a cruel comment on the ordinary
people Kelly writes about. These ordinary people live, love, worry and die.
Nothing changes. Sting more bitterly called these people 'another statistic on
a government chart' (Invisible Sun).
In conclusion, JEEP is a work of sheer understated
genius. All its tracks might not be instantly catchy - though some (Mr. writer,
Have A Nice Day) are - but give them time and almost
all the songs will grow on you. Moreover, all the songs have a lot of depth and
layer upon layer of meaning. The only failing on the album are
the two weak tracks that bookend it and make it fall short of being an instant
classic. Still, Just Enough Education To Perform is
unreservedly recommended and to date is my album of the year.
Comments and suggestions may kindly be sent to
maqsimillion@hotmail.com. An HTML version of this article with links can be
found at http://www.qayyums.com/maq/ . Please also
note that the song Handbags & Gladrags (Kelly almost
tops Rod's finest hour) is only available on original CDs .
The original CD not only has a heavily annotated and interesting CD booklet
providing the background to the writing of each song, the drop-dead gorgeous
live rendition of Rod Stewarts' Handbags & Gladrags
is well worth the price differential alone.