MusicUK

On the afternoon that Rolling Stone catches up with Stereophonics leader Kelly Jones, he's already had a full, and rather upsetting, day. The 43-year-old singer and guitarist is calling from his home in the Parsons Green district of London, where, just a few hours earlier, an explosion on a train at his local tube station injured several people. "I've got three daughters, and I dropped the oldest one, who's 12, at the tube," he says. "And she went off on the train and then 10 minutes later I come back and there's men with machine guns and helicopters flying over. So it's been kind of a weird, insane, surreal day, to be honest."



Jones is on the phone with Rolling Stone to speak about the Stereophonics' new album, Scream Above the Sounds, the Welsh band's 10th full-length overall. But several times throughout the conversation, he'll make reference to the day's alarming event – which, in its own way, also ties into some of the emotions captured on the record. "You know," he recalls, "we opened up for U2 on their Elevation Tour, when 9/11 happened, and the names of all these firemen would come on [the screen] and stuff like that. There's been a lot of stuff that has gone on in my professional life, and things happen and you don't talk about it and you bury it. And I guess you get to a certain point and maybe you start making life choices, you don't want to go here, you don't want to go there. And then you realize it doesn't really matter where you go, there's shit happening all the time. Today is a fucking perfect example of that. And I always try to write about the things I'm experiencing. "

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