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 Holiday also demonstrates another one of the most precious aspect of Kelly songs which is the inherent ambiguity he invests in them. As already pointed out in earlier lines, one is unsure whether this is the story of a couple soon to fall apart or one that will pull through. When Kelly talks of the man 'on a seven day holiday' in the song, one does not know whether the person is on a holiday or is actually unemployed. Is this the source of tension between the couple? The possibilities for multiple interpretations left in the songs is what makes them great and more artistically satisfying than a straight love song.

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 America and is told by a xenophobic cabbie that 'We dress the same way/ only our accents change' (Have a nice day).

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.