I've made an interesting but disturbing discovery this week.

In some ways I think I may have always known, but never have been able to admit it; I'm hoping post-hypnotic triggers may have been involved, but I suspect the truth is just that much more mundane.

It's taken me ten years to make this admission, but it appears - to some slight shock and surprise on my part - that I Like The Stereophonics.

Granted, I want to make this more specific; I like the Stereophonics in the same way that a Sleeper Agent likes the country they're planted in; I like them because, in some ways, I have no choice.

Let's rewind a little.

And begin with the fact that I would very much like to believe in Phonomancy. I really would. I love the idea of people being able to access magic and make it work via music; it's, well, nifty.

Even if Phonogram is fiction, by it's very existence it names something people have long suspected to be the truth; music is - or can be - magic, or magical, depending on how you choose to look at it.

In terms of Phonomancy, two things seem to matter; knowledge and roots. Knowledge allows a user to pick apart a song for the power it has and can provide, and the ability to use that power to their own ends; roots are the particular strand of music that the user is embedded in. For instance, in Rue Britannia, David Kohl, the protagonist, has his roots in the goddess Britannia, and draws his power - at least to begin with - from works related to her, for isntance Britpop and late-90's music.

The 'knowledge' part I understand. But the 'roots' part always, on a personal level, bothered me, because, musically, I'm rootless, through a combination of environment and genetics.

Both of my parental units are big on music, but one is more so than the other, and tends to seek out the New, Novel and Ingenious across genre rather than stick with one particular furrow to plough. So the household I grew up in had a wide variety of music cross-genre rather than one particular path I could walk, which made, as you might understand, rejecting my parent's tastes - as any teenager is expected to do - more difficult than it should have been.

By the time I developed my own awareness of music, Britpop was in force - or, more accurately, enforced - and I was only able to dip my toes in. I became enamoured of Pulp - and, to a lesser extent, Suede - and I sat on the sidelines of the Blur vs. Oasis battle, wondering what all the fuss was about, really. Other than a lasting liking for Pulp, my teenage years haven't yielded much of anything in the way of lasting musical taste. (Well, maybe, maybe not, but I'll come back to that later.)

But, when I went to University, all that - by necessity - changed. Gone was rooting through the cheap single racks at the tiny local newsagent to see if anything interesting was passing me by. In fact, with the budget I was on, gone was buying CDs all that much, really, but then I managed to get on to the student newspaper and blew my musical world right open, so that wasn't always a concern either. That's another story, though.

As I say, I feel curiously like a sleeper agent right now. This is because I was in a Popular Supermarket last night, wherein I saw Decade in the Sun, and something clicked, plangently, in my head.

This is because there's an odd dovetailing between the Sterephonics musica career and my self-musical-awakening and evolution. More power to me, I guess, and I'm not claiming them as anything other than The Band Of The Time. So this is how the songs worked for me.

Local Boy in the Photograph

In terms of resonance, this song has a complicated pattern. To me, not only is this the sound of Xfm's first year and a parental unit taking an interest in the band because of the song - no, it's also the sound, technically, of my final school year and, over a year later, the song that reminds me of getting a train home from London with a girl I achingly fancied but was smart enough to know I never had a chance with; the train was so packed we ended up sitting in the 'corridor' section. Aptly, it was Radio 1's 'song for travelling home' that summer, I seem to remember.

I didn't notice this until yesterday, however, but this song is more impressive than I thought, because it is, in effect, a 3:22 long howl of grief disguised as a pop song, and, to me at least, the disguise held up for a long time. This disguise theme is one I'll come back to.

The Bartender and the Thief

Ties in to my time as a Student Journalist, or - and this is a better way of saying it - Promotional Freebooter, because I received a review copy of Call us what you want but don't call us in the morning and held off reviewing it at the time because of a combination of laziness and dislike; the only thing I truly remember is the 'making of' the video for this song. Lots of napalm, lots of Apocalypse now references, not a great deal of point, at least to me.

A Thousand Trees

Reminds me of a V festival - possibly V99 - which is slightly embarassing, as the V festivals have always been the grown-up, respectable, suited-city-worker of the festival world by comparison to the others. At least this was true until around two or three years ago, wherein the majority of festivals now seem to wear suits, albeit some self-consciously.

From here, I would like to self-consciously skip by Traffic, having already skipped More Life in a Tramp's Vest as I missed that, and also to give little consideration to Just Looking, because - even though I remember it - it has no significance in particular attached to it.

In fact, let's break for a moment. Yes, I'm being selective. I'm not a Stereophonics fan because I particularly want to be; I don't love them, cherish them and honour and obey them in any damn way. But a majority of their songs have been present at a lot of times in my life, whether I particularly liked it or not. And so, here we are.

In fact, maybe I've been over-egging the pudding somewhat, because I think there are only three more songs that need dissection herein. But then again, even if I'm not bowing and kowtowing to the whole back-catalogue, I would struggle to find any band who have had six songs that I consciously remember and which have impacted on my life.

So there. But the next one is a doozy.

Mr Writer

This is where it gets prosaic, because this song is the sound of me flushing a relatively promising journalistic career down the toilet, because of a combination of interpersonal relationships, a self-destructive impulse, and basic stubbornness. At the time, I was working as a student journalist while still on academic sabbatical; this is not strictly accurate in terms of chronology, but it's more that the song - and the album it came from - were on permanent rotation in my personal life. And so, going on sabbatical, getting dumped, and metamorphosing from a journalist to a freebooter (although, if I'm honest, that had begun a while ago and gained unstoppable momentum by then) were all nicely coming together with this song as the background. Not just this song, but also

Have a nice day

Oh, irony. I'm so aware of the irony that I could spit. Lastly, and most complicatedly,

Dakota

And this, being the most recent, is the most complicated, I think.

To my mind, this is one of the ultimate songs about a relationship dying, and alternating between dying shattered on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and dying slowly after finding poison in the champagne. But given that the relationship it reminded me of died at least three years before the single came out, that's not so relevant. It also reminds me of a friend trying to find the way to tell me to stop fucking around, get a decent job and get back into the world at large and failing not because the words weren't there, but because they didn't have the heart - or the strength - to say them, which is a little sad. The video, also, is in my top ten, I think.

I've still not stopped fucking around, I haven't got a decent (or, at least, decent-paying) job, and I've not gone back into the world in any meaningful way. But at least I realise now what he was trying to say then.

I think that's something.

I thought, somehow, that this would be longer than it is, but I guess my linkage to the Stereophonics is not as strong as I thought it was, even if it definitely exists.

This Is A Good Thing.

To get back to the point, I believed, when I started writing this, that my musical roots were tapping the wrong water table; I've always been concerned that my shiftless musical upbringing had led me to seek the comforting, boring stability of MOR. (At least, I wanted to believe this was why I liked the occasional Dido song. But I didn't just say that.) I honestly thought that my roots were in generic rock.

But now I'm not so sure. And I'm happy with this result, because even if I'm not sure where my roots are, I now at least know where they're not, which gives me something to work with.

Six songs, though. Six. It could have so easily been Travis instead - indeed, Writing to reach you spins off a lot of subsidiary memories every time I hear it - or some other big band of the time. But I got stuck with The Welsh Sound Of Grief which metamorphosed over time into something quite, quite different.

Much like we all do.