STEREOPHONICS / FEEDER - The Ice Stadium (live) Posted by claire on Tuesday, November 20, 2001 Opening up for a band like The Stereophonics cannot be easy for anyone, but tonight FEEDER manage to pull it off with great aplomb, so much so that one wonders if the billing order should have been reversed. Despite having little over thirty minutes to warm up the partisan crowd, the set list reads like something off the back of one of those ‘Shine’ compilation albums, with ‘Insomnia’ followed by ‘Buck Rogers’ then ‘Turn’ and so the hits keep on coming, most notably ‘Seven Days In The Sun’ and the ace new single ‘Just A Day’. Its just a pity that the majority of the people in here couldn’t really give two hoots about Feeder because they transcended their school disco indie to a pinnacle most stadium rock veterans desperately crave. The sea of Welsh flags create a setting more akin to Cardiff Arms Park than Nottingham Ice Stadium, and the tumultuous roar that greets Kelly Jones and co. further emulates that which would greet an 80th minute try against their old enemies in red, white and blue. It is amazing to think that little more than five years ago, the STEREOPHONICS were playing to less than twenty people in venues the size of your living room, so I suppose it would be harsh not to give credit where it’s due when examining their rise to stardom. Musically, they are as tight as a duck’s arse, so what is it that irks me about the Stereophonics? Could it be that for all the supposed sincerity of their earnest, meandering ballads, when it all boils down to it, their songs are just a tad on the dull side? Or maybe that Kelly Jones’ between song “banter” eschews all the charisma of a vacuum cleaner, because that is basically a fair summary of the ‘Phonics - workmanlike, with the reliability of an old Hoover but never quite igniting the creative spark of a Dyson. They play a selection of rockier numbers from ‘Word Gets Around’, several pedestrian drawling ballads from the new album, and too many songs from the largely uninspiring and vastly overrated ‘Performance And Cocktails’. And that’s it, really. The general feeling is that you either love the Stereophonics or hate them, but as with the passionless display onstage, why bother wasting the energy? Dom Gourlay