KELLY JONES
feared his guitar career was finished after a nightclub scrap
left him with a horror gash in his arm.
The
STEREOPHONICS frontman was rushed to hospital
during the early hours yesterday after a fight with bouncers at
the Vodafone Live Music Awards aftershow party.
He was operated on TWICE as surgeons battled to
repair the deep wound — and last night the shaken star was still
in hospital recovering.
Ringing me from his ward bed, he said: “The wound is very
serious.
“The surgeons said if the gash had been just ONE
MILLIMETRE nearer the tendon that could have been it —
I might not have been able to pick up a guitar again.”
The injury happened as Kelly and a friend were thrown out of the
star-studded showbiz bash at West London club Amika.
Kelly says bouncers moved in on him and his pal after they poked
their heads round the door of the ladies’ toilets to speak to
some female friends.
He told me: “We put our heads in the door to tell a couple of
friends that our car was outside.
“Then a bouncer says: ‘What are you doing in the ladies’
toilet?’
“But we didn’t even go in the toilets — a cleaner was in there.
“The bouncers then tried to grab hold of us and I pulled away
and gashed my arm on a glass vase.”
Kelly added: “The bouncers had me in a headlock and had hold of
my feet and arms.
“One said, ‘If you don’t keep still I’m gonna break your f*****g
neck.’”
After being hauled out of the club Kelly noticed blood was
pouring from under the right sleeve of his leather jacket — and
took it off to discover the injury.
An onlooker then called an ambulance. But as Kelly waited,
another scuffle kicked off after a fellow clubber abused the
gravel-voiced star.
He finally got to Chelsea And Westminster Hospital at 1.30am
yesterday.
He saw a surgeon at 4am then a consultant two hours later before
undergoing an operation.
The severe tissue damage meant he needed a second op in the
afternoon.
Meanwhile,
his band’s new single, It Means Nothing, hits shops on Monday.
But his injury could have meant everything to Kelly’s
guitar-playing as it cut deep into his axe-wielding arm.
Last night, a club spokesman said Kelly had pushed past a
bouncer on the way to the ladies’ and was hammered after boozing
heavily for around four hours.
Well, Kelly is no stranger to boozy scrapes.
Earlier this year he was caught relieving himself in a street in
Camden, North London.
And in July he had a vodka decanter chucked at him by a Russian
drunk in Moscow.
