Feature:

TALES FROM THE BACKSIDE:
#1: INTERVIEW WITH THE STEREOPHONICS, 1997

Here at B-Side, we’re as keen to celebrate East Anglia’s musical history as we are to enthuse about its present and future.  Although local scenes around the area may have wobbled on and off – often depending on how many promoters and venues were willing to put their balls on the line (figuratively speaking) and give local bands a reason to exist – there have always been interesting things going on somewhere in the region at any given time.  So from hereon in, we’ll be trawling the internet for interviews, reviews, features, videos and general insane scribblings from the frontlines of East Anglia’s musical history, and bringing you the best, most intriguing or at least strangest things we find.

To get you started, here’s one we found online thanks to R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine’s Richard Rose: an interview with Kelly Jones - frontman of soon-to-be-massive Cwmaman rock trio Stereophonics - conducted by The Polymath Perspective backstage at Cambridge Junction in Summer 1997.  Strange though it may now seem, at that time Stereophonics (along with also-soon-to-be-massive rock types Travis) were almost exclusively the preserve of heavily-eyelinered fanzine writers and trawled tirelessly around the country, playing to enthusiastic but generally meagre crowds.  But by November 1998, the band had scored a #3 hit with (actually pretty awesome) none-more-rock single The Bartender And The Thief; its parent album, Performance and Cocktails, went on to sell two million copies and the rest, as they say, is geography.

CLICK HERE to read the interview.

NOTES OF POSSIBLE INTEREST:

1. The “amateur local fanzine” mentioned in the article was a Bury St Edmunds-based A4 effort entitled Notes From Underground; the “two eager and attractive young girls” were named Natalie and Vicky, both BiS and Kenickie-obsessed Thurston Community College students whose pictures later appeared in the sleeve of Travis’s debut album, Good Feeling. 
2. Notes From Underground’s singles reviewer was none other than B-Side’s Features and Reviews Editor, Seymour Quigley.
3. AC Acoustics – mentioned by Kelly Jones in the interview – were a Glaswegian four-piece, whose second album, 1997’s Victory Parts, quite rightly won them a great deal of critical acclaim.  The band’s singer, Paul Campion, would later co-write Placebo’s 1999 hit single Every You Every Me.
4. R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine issues #9 and #10 also featured Stereophonics interviews and reviews from this gig; you can buy the printed versions here.  

Photo: Stereophonics poster from 1997, captured by anothermusic