Just Enough Education to Perform

Just Enough Education to Perform is Welsh rock band Stereophonics' third studio album. Following the immense success of their breakthrough record, Performance and Cocktails, the band began their run of successive chart-topping albums, with JEEP being the second of five. It also spawned a number of successful singles, including “Have a Nice Day”, which peaked at #5 in the UK Singles Chart.

The critical reception was mixed. The album is one of the most well-known of the “Post-Britpop” era, utilising a soft rock sound with greater use of acoustic guitars and more melodic vocals than the ‘Phonics’ previous work, but many critics found this sound to be bland and uninspired, like several other Post-Britpop records. The Observer Music Monthly had some particularly harsh words for the band:

Stereophonics clearly have no performing qualities whatsoever. If they are suggesting a connection between formal education and musical ability, they must be four illiterate morons who were expelled from playschool for being too thick… [The album is] musical excrement, scooped unhygienically from a poorly-maintained squat toilet in an area without adequate sanitation.

In 2013, Kelly Jones also reflected on the album in a positive but nonetheless critical manner:

With Just Enough Education To Perform, I loved the title and I loved what it was trying to say, but I don’t know if we achieved it fully. It was the first time the band had started to grow up. Stuart [Cable, drummer] had got married. He wasn’t there for four weeks of the session and it was starting to feel separate within the camp.