Songfacts®:

• Stereophonics got a lot of positive press in their native UK when they released their first album, Word Gets Around, in 1997. Their second album, Performance and Cocktails in 1999, was also well received, so they had no qualms about allowing a journalist to accompany them on the road for a few days. To their dismay, they didn't like what this guy wrote.
  
  "He came across like a good guy, and he was writing stuff and listening to what we were saying, then we got to the the last day he was getting a bit more narky," lead singer Kelly Jones said in the Decade in the Sun: Best of Stereophonics DVD. "Then when he wrote the review it was like he spent three days with a different band. He had his chance to have this big slating match with us in the newspaper, and my natural reaction was to write a song about a journalist that hasn't really got much else going on in his life and he just spends all his time criticizing everybody else, and not in a very productive way or constructive way."
• In an interview with the Metro newspaper April 9, 2001, frontman Kelly Jones was asked about this song. He said, "It's just a song about a couple of people that have been around me, really. It's supposed to be a bit of a sarcastic song but, judging from some of the reviews, it seems some people didn't really get it. I think the fuss about it from some members of the press has been blown out of proportion."
• The English soccer star Wayne Rooney has a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm that reads "Just enough education to perform." A source told the Daily Mirror that the Manchester United forward "absolutely loves the band" and that "Just Enough Education to Perform is his favorite album." The album title also fits Rooney well as he left school with no GCSE's but is said to have a fine football brain.
• Jones told The Guardian October 28, 2008 that he regrets commenting about one journalist in this song as, "every journalist thought it was about them. It took me 10 minutes to write and 10 years to explain."
• Kelly Jones recalled to NME November 6, 2010: "Our relationship with NME started favorably, we were on the front cover all the time. Then a few journalists came on the road, but wrote a different version of events and we got pissed off. In a gnarly way we wrote a narky song called 'Mr. Writer;' and things have been a bit frosty ever since."