Combining old and new guard, filtering out bombastic prog rock and adding a dynamic twist of fag-end Brit pop, Wales's Stereophonics have managed to raise working class kitchen sink dramas to new heights. They have done so in a period where the ordinariness of Oasis has sunk to a new low, and where even the most fitful of British bands are resorting to fey, faux folk to bolster their credibility.
Before the band arrive on stage, The Who's My Generation plays, and immediately Stereophonics set out their stall, branding their music and status as being inspirational to disaffected youth - which, judging by the full house, they most certainly are. They start with Mr Writer, a music journalist-baiting song (me? I rise above such pitiful moaning) that has a tune decent enough to get the audience fervently on their side. The flip side to Stereophonics comes a few songs in - their first major hit single, 1998's The Bartender And The Thief. It's as fulsome a rock tune as you could wish for, teeming with the type of tightly-stretched dynamics and melody lines that come along only once in a blue moon.
Interestingly, it's the best and most exciting song of the evening. For the remainder of the show, Stereophonics appear content to divide their music into two distinct halves: blustering poppy rock as vacuous as it is engaging; and acoustic, busking music that brims over with an earnestness bordering on the mundane. Both amalgamate into simplistic, perspiring anthems, solid, barely digestible rock which acts as an ideal background while people are being regularly rescued from behind the crowd control barriers.
Have A Nice Day, Hurry Up And Wait, Just Looking, Step On My Old Size Nines and new single Handbags And Gladrags (a cover version that suits Stereophonics's blue collar aesthetic well) are given the run through. Each highlight the fact that there will always be a market for no nonsense, rock-fuelled sentiment and the extolling of old fashioned virtues. Each highlight another fact: that, amid the bluster of the musicianship and the on-stage, foot-stomping stoicism of lead singer/songwriter Kelly Jones, Stereophonics music is essentially toothless.
