This show was a mixed bag of hits and misses, though which was which was debatable. The hits were well-worn favourites from Stereophonics’ solid, safe back catalogue; the misses from the current album Keep Calm and Carry On, by far the poorest performing of the band’s 13-year career. No prizes for guessing which the crowd had come to hear.
Yet the mightiest moments of the night belonged to a spate of new songs. I Got Your Number was stomping, grinding glam rock, accompanied by an explosion of strobes and striking visuals that turned the band into real-time, on-screen illustrations. Live ‘n’ Love was passionate power-rock, the fast, furious Trouble owed a debt to Led Zep, and the broody ballad Beer Bottle was intriguing electronica, during which Stereophonics were swathed in murky shadows. How demoralising it must have been for the band to see all those songs greeted by a sea of disappointed faces, or a few fists half-heartedly punching the air.
Not all the new songs worked so well. Stuck in a Rut recalled 1980s Bryan Adams; Uppercut could hardly have packed a fluffier punch; and the set opener Innocent — a single that failed to chart last year — was join-the-dots rock. It didn’t help that, after a decade of selling out venues this size, the singer Kelly Jones still struggles as a showman. His habit of curtly introducing tracks by their title and the name (and occasionally date) of the accompanying album made him sound like an efficient librarian.
Despite Jones’s lack of charisma, you wanted to hug him for trying so hard to break Stereophonics out of the soft rock rut in which their fans have left them stuck. Sadly, the fans won out with their ecstatic reaction to golden oldies such as Same Size Feet, Pick a Part That’s New, Maybe Tomorrow, Mr Writer and the woeful Have a Nice Day, a song now as tedious as its title. Only on the glorious closer Dakota did Stereophonics’ ambitions and the fans’ expectations collide. Commercial concerns will stand in their way, but Stereophonics shouldn’t stop trying to change.
