So maybe tomorrow I'll find my way home (Stereophonics) (LP 159 - 162)

Stereophonics Word Gets Around (CD - V2, 1997) ***
Stereophonics Performance and Cocktails (CD - V2, 1999) **
Stereophonics Just Enough Education To Perform (CD - V2, 2001) ***
Stereophonics You Gotta Go There To Come Back (CD - V2, 2003) ***

Genre: Welsh pop/rock 

Places I remember: Record shop Central World Plaza in Bangkok, Fives (Leigh-on-sea) and HMV (Edinburgh and Oxford Street)

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Maybe Tomorrow




Gear costume: Traffic (Word Gets Around); Local Boy In The Photograph (WGA);

Active compensatory factors: We were living in Essex in 2004 and I had back catalogued from 2003's You Gotta Go There To Come Back, which I'd bought in Bangkok on the way to my first ever visit to the UK the year before. Which is why I've lumped the first four Stereophonics albums together. Keeping up in the back?

At the time (2003), the title struck me as being particularly prescient, and I'd heard Local Boy In A Photograph on a compilation, and liked it a lot. So I took a punt. 
  
The song Maybe Tomorrow is responsible. I listened to YGGTTCB a lot on the plane ride from Bangkok to London to help quell my nerves.

It had the right kind of melancholy longing and haunted wistfulness that matched my mood. In the end I was going home (to Rochdale) but that was fleeting and, as it turned out, unsustainable.

Although it's not brilliant, when I got sorted in Leigh-on-sea I dug around and picked up the back catalogue. None are classics but there are enough individual brilliant songs scattered among each one to make me keep coming back for more.

While Word Gets Around is a really good debut, Performance and Cocktails, for me, suffers from classic second album syndrome (most of the time, Kelly Jones tries too hard).

Third album Just Enough Education To Perform hits the mark with some classic pop and a more varied approach - Mr Writer and especially Have A Nice Day distinguish themselves.

Which brings us back to where I started with Maybe Tomorrow.

Where do they all belong? A swag of post YGGTTCB albums to come.