In the crowded lounge of a hip London hotel, Kelly Jones is not an easy man to spot. Scan the room, leave, come back, scan it again, and still nothing.

Suited executives bray down mobile phones, small groups of media types gather round laptops, stylish waitresses deliver drinks, yet no sign of a seven million album-selling rock star.

But then a waving hand and a gap-toothed grin flash from one end of a huge white sofa, the endless expanse of which accentuates Jones's slight 5ft 5in frame and leaves the frayed hems of his heroically outmoded denim bell-bottoms dangling an inch above the ground. Flares? The rock-fashion diktat du jour is for boys in bands to squeeze themselves into pencil-thin drainpipes, but Jones is unconvinced.

"Oh, I wouldn't be able to pull off those tight jeans," chuckles the 32-year-old as white Russian cocktails materialise, noon having passed a good five minutes ago. "I think you need to be at least 5ft 10in for that to look all right. But it's funny, the other day I was stopped in the street by two 20-year-old kids who looked like they were in the Libertines or somethingŠ skinny jeans, trilby hatsŠ I'd never have had them down as fans of Stereophonics."

Perhaps he was right to be surprised. If you really want a good idea of what Jones is like, you could do worse than bringing to mind former Libertine and current Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty, and then polarise pretty much everything about him. If Doherty has been profligate with his talent, then Jones has been relentlessly industrious with his (since their 1997 debut LP Word Gets Around, Stereophonics have enjoyed a run of four consecutive No 1 albums, 23 chart singles and a knack for filling the nation's arenas with regular ease). If Doherty is a drug-ruined poète maudit for cosmopolitan, arty youth, then Jones is a bloke from a South Wales mining village known for ballsy, barnstorming, here-comes-the-chorus rock songs that strike a chord with schoolgirls and white-van men alike. Doherty is tabloid fodder; Jones is pointedly low profile, cropping up mostly when he has music to talk about (which today he does, ostensibly his solo debut LP Only The Names Have Been Changed). And if the music press still strives to present Doherty as a credible artist, then it still regards Jones and his band with lingering scepticism. Even when the 2005 LP Language. Sex. Violence. Other? yielded Stereophonics' first No 1 single, Dakota, critical praise seemed begrudging at best.

"The NME wrote three paragraphs on why you shouldn't like that album, but the headline was basically ŒThis Is Brilliant!' The Sunday Times made Dakota its single of the year, but said stuff like ŒIt's fantastic. It shouldn't be, but it is'," Jones recounts, his slightly sour expression nothing to do with the cream and Kahlúa he sips.

"But you know what? They can kiss my arse. Some of the artists I respect most were never in those sort of magazines anyway, whether it was Tom Waits, AC/DC or Creedence Clearwater Revival. We're a people's band, not a media band."

As much as a shared love of rock helped bring Jones together with Stereophonics' namesake bassist Richard Jones and now-departed drummer Stuart Cable, so too did the close confines of Cwmaman, a former mining village hemmed in by the South Wales valleys. "Stuart lived seven doors from me when I was growing up," Jones remembers. "At the time, seven doors seemed quite a long way away. We were in and out of different bands until Richard joined, and we got a record deal in 1996."

The first act signed to Richard Branson's V2 label, Jones recalls playing a gig in Newport to a room of record company A&R men from London. The idea of trailing off to the big city in search of success never seemed necessary, and this steely, small town approach was equally apparent in the music. Taking inspiration from daily life in Cwmaman, Stereophonics examined the day-to-day for drama and recounted real-life events with an earthy innocence, making them a rare commodity during the excesses of the post-Britpop comedown. "What I wanted was a kind of folk-lyric thing," Jones explains. "A sense of humour, but also with some tragedy. A little bit tongue-in-cheek, but sincere at the same time."

It was, he suggests, not a million miles from the observational approach of subsequent acts such as the Streets and the Arctic Monkeys. Coupled with an unadorned rock delivery designed to "knock your head off", songs such as Local Boy in the Photograph and A Thousand Trees helped Stereophonics scoop the Brit Award for Best New Group in 1998 and win them fans who weren't necessarily keen on music intellectualised to a point where it becomes no fun. That much of it felt good to sing along to after a drink or two also helped. Though despite the obvious interest, these chart-bothering sons of factory workers appeared reluctant to lay themselves salaciously bare in the way rock stars might be expected to (in Jones's case, literally: requests that he pose nude for women's and gay men's magazines were politely declined). "Where we came from, if you bragged about how many women you'd slept with or how many lines you did last night, you were a complete prick," says Jones. "If you were bragging about it, you hadn't done enough."

Not that this ever affected the band's fanbase. If anything, Sex. Language. Violence. Other? earned them a new generation of fans, and for the first time many of them in America. With the band's sixth album in ten years due soon, there's no suggestion that Jones is suffering creative pressures, battling any particular demons or any of the other maladies that can set in at this stage of a singer's career. Frighteningly, despite the rigours of being father to a toddler (he and girlfriend Rebecca announced the birth of Lolita Bootsy in January 2005), he looks in exactly the same nick he arrived in a decade ago. It helps, he explains, that although he still has a house in Cwmaman, for the past five years he's lived among the pink polo shirts and yummy mummy-commandeered 4x4s of Fulham.

"I didn't end up moving there for any particular reason other than that it was near the M4," he defends himself. "It was only later I realised," he moves closer, conspiratorially, "that it's actually quite posh. At first I thought it was a bit rubbish, but now I like the contrast between that and the messiness of the road."

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