Paul Weller

In a recording career that’s lasted 43 years and yielded 26 studio albums and 75 singles with The Jam, The Style Council and as a solo artist (and that’s not counting one-offs such as the Council Collective, King Truman and the Smokin’ Mojo Filters – see panel overleaf), Paul Weller has excelled in all aspects of the songwriter’s art.
As a teenager starting out in The Jam, he married the melodic structures of Motown and The Beatles to the attitude, energy and innovation of punk to provide a soundtrack to a very English experience, and one that still resounds with universal truths. Graduating from the songwriting school of Ray Davies, his astute observations spoke of and to the disaffected suburbs from which he comes. Saturday’s kids, the Mr Cleans, the men in the corner shop – all are vividly portrayed in his character studies and vignettes.
He could have continued his success following this path, but a fierce appetite for new music and experiences led him to split the trio at their height and form his soul-pop-jazz collective The Style Council, where influences as wide ranging as Blue Note jazz, Philadelphia soul, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie were drawn upon, and where he developed his social conscience along the lines of another of his songwriting heroes, Curtis Mayfield.
Still he didn’t stop moving forward. Going it alone in 1989, he pioneered the 90s renaissance of 60s rock values, producing the bucolic Wild Wood and testifying Stanley Road before eschewing traditional songwriting to experiment with musique concrète and tape loops on a series of albums beginning with 22 Dreams. On Sunset, his 26th solo outing, released this June, meanwhile, sees him reconfiguring soul music for the 2020s.
Such an eclectic catalogue is emblematic of a man forever driven by a desire for the new, whether previously undiscovered past gems or the latest thing. It feeds his relentless work ethic and inspires his musical propulsion.  The Jam In The City (Polydor, 2383 447, LP, 1977) £25 HHHH
On 29 April 1977, The Jam issued their first single, In The City, which encapsulated everything the three-piece from Woking were about with its romanticised view of London and its Wordsworthian revelling in being young: “All those golden faces are under 25,”
as Weller barks. Voted the NME single of the week, it hit No 40 in the UK chart and began a run of 18 consecutive Top 40 singles. The album of the same name arrived a month later and, recorded at Polydor’s in-house studio at Stratford Place in London’s West End over 11 days, with Polydor’s Chris Parry producing and Vic Coppersmith-Heaven engineering, it fanfared their arrival, breaking into the UK Top 20.
The brief was simple. “It was a case of just getting our live set down as quickly as possible and capturing the energy coming off the stage,” said Weller. Heavily influenced by The Who and Dr Feelgood as well as his punk contemporaries, In The City did just that, its 12 songs including frantic covers of Larry Williams’ (via The Beatles’) Slow Down and the Batman theme. The first strands of social observation emerged with Bricks And Mortar, while that early sign of Weller’s evolution, Away From The Numbers, revealed a more thoughtful, keening introspection. The album is also notable for the explosive Art School and the Motownish I Got By In Time, which punk peers The Nips, led by Shanne Bradley and featuring Jam fan Shane MacGowan, later reconfigured as Infatuation. Key tracks: In The City, Away From The Numbers, Art School The Jam This Is The Modern World (Polydor, 2383 475, LP, 1977) £25 HHHOver the years Weller has regularly disparaged The Jam’s second album and the press and the public (it charted two places lower than its predecessor, stalling at No 22) didn’t rate it that highly, either. Yet it’s a vital stepping stone in the group’s evolution, facilitating Weller’s huge leap in songwriting development from In The City to The Jam’s third album, All Mod Cons.
The typical difficult second album, then, it didn’t help that it was hastily conceived. After a renegotiated record deal, both Polydor and Weller’s dad/manager John were hungry for product. As a result, just three months after their first album release, they were back in the studio, this time Island’s Basing Street studios in Notting Hill, with Coppersmith-Heaven and a £20,000 advance.
While the sound of The Jam’s debut had been strictly templated by the title track, the approach on This Is The Modern World was to be deliberately more varied. “We wanted to push ourselves musically,” said The Jam’s bassist Bruce Foxton. “We didn’t want to make In The City Part 2. Paul was experimenting with songs, bringing in harmonies and acoustic guitars.” With little time to develop his ideas, however, Weller was spread thin, though tracks such as Life From A Window, Tonight At Noon, Standards and I Need You (For Someone) hinted at future possibilities.
Key tracks: Life From A Window, Tonight At Noon, I Need You (For Someone)The Jam All Mod Cons (Polydor, 2442 155, LP, 1978) £20 HHHHHPolydor rejected Weller’s initial demos for The Jam’s third album – “They were shit,” Weller agreed – and with his back against the wall he wrote a new batch in under a week, some in his London flat, some at his parents’ home in Woking.
Once worked up in the studio, the results were astonishing, marking his transcendence of punk orthodoxy and the artistic constraints placed on a working-class boy, with piquant Kinks-like character sketches and observational studies (Billy Hunt, an obliterating update of Billy Liar; Mr Clean, a searing indictment of the beneficiaries of privilege) and beautiful love songs: the Beatle-y It’s Too Bad, Fly and English Rose. The latter was like no other song he’d authored before. A plaintive, heart-on-sleeve ballad, written while he was on tour in the States, gripped by homesickness and missing his first serious girlfriend Gill Price, it is overwhelming in its emotional power.
Other tracks are also startling in their maturity and self-awareness – it’s worth remembering Weller was just 20. In The Crowd is a Quadrophenia-esque struggle for adolescent security and belonging; To Be Someone (Didn’t We Have A Nice Time) is a prophetic rumination on the life of a rock star; the title track took a swipe at his paymasters at Polydor. The artwork revealed his influences, the inner sleeve displaying a pop art collage comprising Weller, Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler’s favourite things, many of them mod-related, including The Creation’s Biff Bang Pow 7”, Junior Walker And The All Stars’ Road Runner 45, a 100 Club matchbox, the Sounds Like Ska album and a frothy coffee. The use of the Immediate label’s lettering on the band’s moniker and album title gave a further clue as to where Weller was coming from. Issued on 3 November 1978, All Mod Cons hit No 6, making the album The Jam’s first to reach the Top 10.
Key tracks: To Be Someone (Didn’t We Have A Nice Time), English Rose, Down In The Tube Station At Midnight
The Jam Setting Sons (Polydor, 2442 168, LP, 1979) £20 HHHHFollowing stand-alone Top 20 singles Strange Town
and When You’re Young, The Jam went into The Townhouse in Shepherds Bush to record their fourth album. Originally intended as a concept album, only a few of the finished tracks related to the proposed theme, inspired by a poem by school chum Dave Waller, of three close friends growing apart.
Nevertheless, this was an ambitious work. Thick As Thieves epitomised the group’s explosive sound at the time while on Little Boy Soldiers, Weller achieved new levels as a lyricist, speaking with the vernacular of the war poet – see the song’s grave epitaph: “Then they send you home in a pine overcoat/With a letter to your mum/ Saying, ‘Find enclosed one son, one medal’ and a note to say he won.” Saturday’s Kids provides a light in the dark, with its breezy step and canny insight: “Saturday’s kids live in council houses/Wear v-necked shirts and baggy trousers/Drive Cortinas, fur-trimmed dashboards, stains on the seats – in the back, of course.” Notably, future Style Councillor Mick Talbot plays Hammond on their cover of Martha And The Vandellas’ Heat Wave. The album’s sole single, The Eton Rifles, meanwhile, written during a rainy week off in Weller’s mum and dad’s Selsey caravan, documented the class struggle played out on a Right To Work march where protestors were jeered by Eton schoolboys. It took the band into the Top 10 for the first time, peaking at No 3. Its parent album reached No 4, despite Weller being dissatisfied with its production. Key Tracks: The Eton Rifles, Thick As Thieves, Little Boy SoldiersThe Jam Sound Affects (Polydor, POLD 5035, LP, 1980) £20 HHHHH“We were trying to stretch ourselves,” Weller said of The Jam’s fifth album. And buoyed by the No 1 single, Going Underground, they delivered their most courageous, expansive work. Influences were wide-ranging, from The Beatles’ Revolver to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and the atonal dissonance of Gang Of Four and Joy Division. The results were spectacular. Wired into societal anxiety, both musically and lyrically, with the irascible post-punk of Set The House Ablaze and Pretty Green’s attack on capitalist greed, Weller’s reputation as a gifted songsmith was further underscored by English folk song That’s Entertainment. From the opening lines of “A police car and a screaming siren/A pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete/A baby wailing and stray dog howling/The screech of brakes and lamp light blinking,” it reads as poetry. “Lyrically, I was writing what I considered to be prose and poetry then putting it to music as opposed to writing verse, chorus, verse,” he explained. Polydor wanted the aforesaid Pretty Green to be the album’s first single from the album, but Weller insisted on Start! About the importance of human contact – “If we communicate for two minutes only/It will be enough,” he exclaims – and built around The Beatles’ Taxman riff, it landed the group their second consecutive No 1 single and remains a fan favourite to this day. Elsewhere, Weller’s extraordinary songwriting depth and breadth are further revealed on Man In The Cornershop, one of the most stirring, insightful encapsulations of the human condition in a song. Light relief is provided by the peacock-strutting mod anthem Boy About Town, another homage to youth and the capital.
Key tracks: Start!, Man In The Cornershop, That’s Entertainment The Jam The Gift (Polydor, POLD 5055, LP, 1982) (Initial copies in pink and white “gift” wrapping) £40 HHHHJanuary 1982’s double-A-side, Town Called Malice/Precious, delivered the group their third No 1 single and signalled a soul and funk direction, the first track pinning Weller’s kitchen sink portrait of early 80s Britain to the mid-60s Motown sound; the second, inspired by Pigbag’s Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag, a frenetic Britfunk framed in wah-wah licks, scratchy rhythms and stabbing JBs-like brass from Loose Ends’ horn players. Its parent album, arriving in March, further explored soul music’s possibilities with the northern-sounding Happy Together and the pounding Trans-Global Express, which nabs the riff from World Column’s Wigan Casino gem So Is The Sun. Weller, dissatisfied with the limits of the guitar trio, also distanced himself with emotional ballad Ghosts – he’d return to its digging-deep-into-the-psyche approach on his early solo work. The Planner’s Dream Gone Wrong, which embraced carnival-esque calypso rhythms and steel drums while lyrically referencing class war and the incompetence of city planning, was perhaps an architectural blueprint for The Style Council’s second album, Our Favourite Shop. Despite such musical freedoms, Weller still felt the band were locked into an essentially rock format: The Jam’s commercial apogee – their only album to hit No 1 – it became their swansong.
Key tracks: Town Called Malice, Precious, Ghosts The Style Council Cafe Bleu (Polydor, TSCLP1, LP, 1984) £15 HHHHThe eclecticism of the final Jam album, The Gift, and their swansong 45, Beat Surrender, hinted at the future. But nothing quite prepared Jam fans for what came next. Liberated from the rigidity of a rock three-piece, Weller formed his soul-jazz-pop collective with Hammond organist Mick Talbot and released 1983’s effusive debut 45, Speak Like A Child. Three more singles followed that year – Money Go Round (Part 1), Long Hot Summer and A Solid Bond
In Your Heart – before Cafe Bleu, their inaugural album, which further confounded expectation.
The aforesaid singles were omitted; in their place were five Blue Note-styled instrumentals, typified by the Talbot-scribed organ-led Mick’s Blessings, a re-recording of B-side The Paris Match voiced by Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn (her partner Ben Watt plays guitar on it) and A Gospel, which featured a rap by Dizzy Hites. Elsewhere, new levels of sophistication were achieved with the superlative My Ever Changing Moods and the lush balladry of You’re The Best Thing, a full band version of Headstart For Happiness, which had first appeared in different form on the B-side to the Money Go Round 12-inch, the neo-funk of Strength Of Your Nature featuring Dee C Lee and the glorious gypsy swing of Here’s One That Got Away, with its swathes of violin (played by Bobby Valentino of The Bluebells’ Young At Heart fame). This was Weller’s New Thing. “The Style Council was totally liberating,” he revealed. “It felt like the right thing to do, the right time to do it, and I was at the right age.”
Key tracks: My Ever Changing Moods, You’re The Best Thing, Headstart
For HappinessThe Style Council Our Favourite Shop (Polydor, TSCLP 2, LP, 1985) £15
HHHHHAs battle lines were drawn in a decade under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, culminating in the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85, The Style Council became the standard bearers of protest pop, with Our Favourite Shop their powerful state of the nation address – their What’s Going On or Curtis, if you like. With a line-up of Weller, Talbot, drummer Steve White, singer Dee C Lee (Weller’s then-girlfriend and future wife) and bassist Camille Hinds, who’d honed his craft in Britfunk band Central Line, their music was fired with an anger and intensity. “You don’t have to take this crap,” Weller shouts on Walls Come Tumbling Down, the record’s jubilant call to arms over a northern soul-styled beat. Another Top 10 single – real change was palpable.
Follow-up single Come To Milton Keynes, orchestrated by former member of the Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet, John Mealing, only reached No 23, yet it remains one of Weller’s most poetic and powerful social commentaries. The Lodgers, another pertinent assault on the Tory party, and the album’s third single, saw the band back inside the Top 15. Internationalists, its title a reference to the socialist anthem, The Internationale, was another rousing rallying cry, a call for unity and uprising. All Gone Away further stretches the parameters, pinning social observation to bossa nova, while Down In The Seine incorporates a Jacques Brel-via-Scott Walker influence and features accordion. Then there is A Man Of Great Promise, Paul’s touching eulogy to his school-friend Dave Waller, who had died from a heroin overdose in 1982 (Weller had previously paid homage to his friend on All Mod Cons). The Stand Up Comic’s Instructions, which featured Lenny Henry, is the only blip on a flawless album, which gave The Style Council their sole No 1.
Key tracks: Walls Come Tumbling Down, Come To Milton Keynes, A Man Of
Great Promise The Style Council The Cost Of Loving (Polydor, TSCLP 4, LP, 1987) £15
HHHIn January ’87, It Didn’t Matter, The Style Council’s 12th single – a glossy duet featuring Weller and Lee – hit the UK Top 10 and fanfared a new contemporary soul direction. It was captured fully on the same year’s The Cost Of Loving. The first to be produced solely by Weller, the brief was to create “a modern American soul sound like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis”. “We were aware we could just make Our Favourite Shop Volume 2,” added Talbot, “but we were also adamant we weren’t going to.”
Further touchstones included US R&B contemporaries The Valentine Brothers, Jimmy Young and Anita Baker. The Valentines, of Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) fame, mixed It Didn’t Matter and the Council’s reverential cover of the aforesaid Baker’s Angel; John Valentine also sang backing vocals on the deeply soulful Walking The Night. Weller’s longtime hero, Curtis Mayfield, meanwhile, mixed the protest soul of Fairy Tales, one of the best tracks on the album. “Those soul influences from the 60s and 70s never went away,” said Talbot. “I remember being impressed by Isley-Jasper-Isley’s [1985 comeback] Caravan Of Love and we went to see Bobby Womack around that time.” Other highs include the Marvin Gaye-styled Heavens Above, the potent Right To Go featuring hip-hoppers the Dynamic Three, and the album’s second single, the soaring Waiting – inexplicably, the group’s only 45 not to hit the UK Top 50.
Packaged in a plain orange sleeve in a nod to The Beatles’ ‘White Album’, the album was slated in the music press. It may have been attuned to US R&B chart but it was out of step with the UK’s rock-oriented inkie weeklies. Nevertheless, it reached No 2 and went gold.
Key tracks: It Didn’t Matter, Fairy Tales, Heavens Above
The Style Council Confessions Of A Pop Group (Polydor, TSCLP 5, LP, 1988) £15 HHHHHThe political idealism that had galvanised Our Favourite Shop had been quashed when Margaret Thatcher took the Conservatives to their third consecutive general election win. Dejected, Weller distanced himself from Red Wedge – it finally disbanded in 1990 – and organised politics. Instead, he scored his despondency in a series of piano suites and political polemics, delving deep inside himself on the exceptional Changing Of The Guard, a poignant reflection on past love over blissful piano and sweeping strings. There was further exploration of human fallibility on the brutal invective The Story Of Someone’s Shoe, the mournful Why I Went Missing and the break-up pop of How She Threw It All Away. The album’s lead single, Life At A Top People’s Health Farm, was a scornful summary of the late 80s political climate and encapsulated the feelings of a man and country in crisis. A tale of class struggle namedropping Thatcher, Trotsky, Engels and The Archers, Weller called it his updating of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, and it began with the sound of a toilet flushing.
Released in June 1988, to mainly scathing reviews, the album stalled at No 15 and sparked the end of The Style Council’s relationship with Polydor, who refused to release its follow-up. Too artful yet direct for the mainstream, with its piano suites and polemics, Confessions Of A Pop Group was consigned to the bargain bins. “There was a sense our time was up,” Weller said. “It wouldn’t have mattered what we put out, it would have bombed. So we thought, if this is going to be our last time, we better make sure it counts. And we did.”
Key tracks: The Story Of Someone’s Shoe, How She Threw It All Away, Changing
Of The Guard The Style Council Modernism: A New Decade (Polydor, TSCLP 6, LP, 1998) £80 HHHPolydor refused to release their 1989 recording, but when it finally came out in 1998, Modernism once more confirmed how ahead of the curve The Style Council had always been. Joining the dots from the 60s modernists’ love of jazz, soul and R&B to the then-contemporary sounds of deep house and soulful garage coming out on Chicago’s DJ International label and New Jersey’s Movin’, TSC made an album that pinned unifying lyrics to gospel, JB funk and repetitive beats. Highs include the rousing Everybody’s On The Run and Sure Is Sure, both still criminally underrated. That Spiritual Feeling, another winner, features James Brown’s backing band who were over on a UK tour, and was reworked as a B-side for Weller’s first solo single, 1991’s Into Tomorrow. A stand-alone single, an ecstatic cover of Joe Smooth’s 1987 house anthem Promised Land, was issued at the time. Their 17th single, it became their swansong, despite making the UK Top 30, and it remains the Council’s only song to enter the US dance chart at No 19.
Tracks from the album were premiered on a Japanese tour in June ’89 before their final UK appearance at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 4 July, where their new style was booed. “I had total belief in the record, and I never thought they were right not to put it out,” Weller said. “But I thought, this is where it comes to a stop. I’ll have to see what else I can do.” The following year he was back on the road with The Paul Weller Movement and getting ready to launch a solo career.
Key tracks: Everybody’s On The Run, Sure Is Sure, That Spiritual Feeling Paul Weller Paul Weller (Go! Discs, 828 343-1, LP, 1992) £60 HHHHAfter TSC disbanded in disarray, a period of hard reflection led to a joyous regeneration. Regrouping with TSC collaborators Marco Nelson of the Young Disciples and producer Brendan Lynch, Weller picked up the guitar he’d sidelined in TSC and penned some of his most intimate, candid work. His debut solo single, Into Tomorrow, issued on his own Freedom High label under the moniker The Paul Weller Movement, still stands as one of his finest moments and put him back in the Top 20 after a four-year absence.
The album that followed is equally satisfying. “The blinkers were off – I was just soaking up everything from Jimi Hendrix to music made by strange men with long hair and beards, to Roy Ayers,” he said. Thematically, much of it involves soul-searching: on Above The Clouds he ponders his own mortality, on Bull-Rush with its Magic Bus refrain he’s “missing what I had, happy times and sad.” On Kosmos, a transportive, lysergic funk that features Dr Robert on bass and backing vocals from Camille Hinds and Dee C Lee, he’s lamenting, “Now our dreams are sad, slow creatures/Dying to know – who am I? What am I? Where am I to go?” The apologetic I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You is a William Bell I Forgot To Be Your Lover-type confessional while The Strange Museum, co-authored with Mick Talbot during The Style Council but shelved, channels Bill Withers. Round And Round, a reworking of Dee C Lee and Dr Robert’s Slam Slam band’s song, has a breezy lightness of touch, bringing to mind Donald Byrd’s Dominoes. The Traffic-like mix of rockin’ psych and soulful strut on Bitterness Rising hints at its author’s future on Wild Wood and Stanley Road. First released in April 1992 in Japan on the Pony Canyon label, who provided Weller with an advance so he could actually make it, it hit No 1 over there. When it came out on Go! Discs in the UK five months later, it took Weller into the Top 10.
Key tracks: Into Tomorrow, Above
The Clouds, Uh Huh Oh Yeh Paul Weller Wild Wood (Go! Discs, 828 435-1, LP, 1993 with obi and poster) £50 (Go! Discs, 828 435-1, LP, 1994 reissue with obi and poster and extra track Hung Up) £60 HHHHHWith confidence fuelled by the success of his live show and inaugural LP, Weller, with Lynch, Nelson and TSC drummer Steve White, captures a British late-spring hue on Wild Wood. Put down live where possible at The Manor, a residential studio in Shipton-On-Cherwell near Oxford, it marked a critical and commercial rebirth, with songs coming surprisingly quickly – four including the album’s two Top 20 singles, the cosmic Sunflower and redemptive title track, were cut in the first week. The discs spinning on the record deck – Nick Drake, Traffic, Tim Hardin, Neil Young – seeped through. “I was getting into that whole acoustic folk thing,” Weller admitted.
Imagine a modern take on Island’s pink label roots rock. Songs showed a lyrical and musical depth ranging from Has My Fire Really Gone Out?, Weller’s fierce challenge to his critics, to All The Pictures On The Wall, a poignant lament to lost love. Shadow Of The Sun is a poetic contemplation on life,
Weller’s renewed belief in his guitar playing was demonstrated in that song’s closing psychedelic jam, and Foot Of The Mountain is defined by his delicate acoustic guitar playing. Ocean Colour Scene’s Simon Fowler and Steve Cradock, the latter soon to become a permanent fixture in Weller’s band and still present today, guest on the mesmerising The Weaver; Dr Robert joins in on Country, another acoustic passage, while former Style Councillors Mick Talbot and Dee C Lee, along with guitar roadie Dave Liddle, contribute to 5th Season. A No 2 hit, the message was clear: Weller was back.
“Everything seemed exciting, fresh and new,” he declared. “It was almost like starting over. I wasn’t making Wild Wood for anyone else. I was making it for myself. It was a very positive and creative time. There was a party vibe, drunken nights and stoned nights.”
Key tracks: Sunflower, Has My Fire Really Gone Out?, Wild Wood
Paul Weller Stanley Road (Go! Discs, 828 619-1, LP, 1995) £80 HHHHHThe working title for Weller’s third solo album was Shit Or Bust, which described the mood in the Weller camp at the time. “I put everything into it,” he said. “Emotionally and physically. It was the culmination of my solo career to date. I knew it was special. We had a playback and I could sense the excitement among the people listening to it.”
But though professionally he was experiencing a high – live he was on fire and shone at Glastonbury ’94 – personally he was experiencing an all-time low, having separated from his wife Dee C Lee. Thus, Stanley Road, named after the street on which he grew up, became a psychiatrist’s couch: the songs unfurling were angry, dark, contemplative. Steve Winwood joined in on keyboards on Woodcutter’s Son and Pink On White Walls and Carleen Anderson led the seraphic Wings Of Speed, a hymnal to the John Waterhouse painting, The Lady of Shalott, the lines, “With Jesus at the helm” and “one candle left to light the way” referring directly to same. Noel Gallagher, flying high with Oasis and Weller’s new pal, was in the studio for a cover of Dr John’s I Walk On Gilded Splinters, though he later admitted he’d mimed his guitar part. Weller had first heard the song by Humble Pie on their 1971 live album Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore. The audacious The Changingman landed him his first Top 10 solo single, peaking at No 7. The album, with sleeve artwork designed by Peter Blake, gave him his first solo No 1. Remaining on the Top 30 chart for over a year, it was also his first solo album to gain platinum status and remains his biggest-selling to date. “Stanley Road was one of those perfect moments when everything slotted into place naturally,” he said. “It was a dream.”
Key tracks: The Changingman, Porcelain Gods, Out Of The Sinking Paul Weller Heavy Soul (Island, ILPS 8058, LP, 1997) £60 HHHHHis fourth solo album was recorded in early 1997 at Van Morrison’s Woolhall studios in Bath. Despite a wide array of instruments used – the core of bass, drums and guitar supplemented with tamboura, zither, piano, vibraphone, sitar, ukulele, strings and accordion – a back-to-basics approach was adopted. The aim, according to Weller, was “to create a deliberately rough, raw and spontaneous sound”. Aside from Up In Suzy’s Room, which had a light, jazzy touch that recalled The Style Council, the rest achieved a 60s rock feel exemplified best by two of the album’s four singles: the strutting R&B braggadocio of Peacock Suit, which yielded Weller’s biggest solo hit single to date when it reached No 5, and Brushed, an aggressive bluesy work-out that eschewed melody for riffs and reached No 14. Critics dubbed it “dad rock”; nevertheless, fans loved it and it was only kept off the top spot by Radiohead’s OK Computer after 20,000 sales were disallowed – five images within the album’s booklet were replaced with postcards of the images in the Special Edition release, meaning sales of the Special Edition didn’t count towards the album’s sales as they were defined as free gifts.
Key tracks: Peacock Suit, Up In Suzes’ Room, Science Paul Weller Heliocentric (Island, ILPS 8093, LP, 2000) £100 HHHThe title of the album was taken from Squeeze co-founder Chris Difford’s Heliocentric Studios in Rye where the majority of the album was put down, though tracks were also recorded at Weller’s own Black Barn studios in Surrey. It’s a very different-sounding record to Heavy Soul, intentionally so. “I wanted something more light, more open-sounding, more uplifting,” Weller decided. “I wanted strings and orchestration, but not like those in The Style Council where the focus was very much on replicating American soul and R&B records. I wanted this to be a very English-sounding record, almost like chamber music.” Hence the recruitment of Nick Drake string arranger Robert Kirby, whose lush, pastoral orchestrations provide the cushioning to Weller’s songs.
The breezy Picking Up Sticks, featuring Hurdy Gurdy played by Cliff Stapleton, and Frightened are the highpoints, showing classic songwriting craft, the latter returning to the familiar Weller themes of self-doubt and human fallibility. “Hoping to be everything you want/Wish I was the man that you thought I was/Waiting to fly up on eagles’ wings/But truth be told, I’m not that bold at all,” he sings. Elsewhere, He’s The Keeper pays tribute to his hero Ronnie Lane and Sweet Pea My Sweet Pea is a touching lullaby for his daughter, Leah. Weller’s last solo album to be co-produced with Brendan Lynch, it was his second consecutive No 2 and delivered a full-stop on his solo career’s first act.
Key tracks: Picking Up Sticks, Frightened, Back In The Fire Paul Weller Illumination (Independiente, ISOM33LP, LP, 2002) £30
HHHHWith Illumination came a changing of the guard: producer Brendan Lynch was out as Weller took over the production reins, with Simon Dine helping out on a couple of tracks. “We clicked straight away,” said Weller of Dine, the mastermind behind
neo-mod outfit Noonday Underground whose 2001 Self Assembly album had been a favourite of Weller’s. “He got what I was looking for and we started to write demos together. He would play me sounds and layer them up. Then I would write on top of that. We didn’t mess around. We got it tied up pretty quick.”
Recording was split between Wheeler’s End studio in Buckinghamshire and Black Barn and for the most part it was just Weller with Steve White in the studio, though Weller’s musician chums lent a hand when called upon – Steve Cradock and Damon Minchella play a smattering of guitar and bass throughout; Gem Archer plays acoustic guitar; Noel Gallagher plays drums, percussion and bass on One X One; Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones duets with Weller on their co-write Call Me No 5; Aziz Ibrahim plays sarod and electric tamboura on Spring (At Last); and Carleen Anderson and Jocelyn Brown bring a gospel touch to Standing Out In The Universe, All Good Books and Leafy Mysteries. It’s Written In The Stars is the apogee: a mesmeric elision of 60s lysergic, gospel effusiveness and Dine’s samples and loops, it yielded Weller’s fourth Top 10 solo single. The album also became his second solo No 1.
Key tracks: It’s Written In The Stars,
A Bullet For Everyone, Standing Out In The UniversePaul Weller Studio 150 (V2, VVR 1026901, LP, 2004) £100
HHA covers album was a no-brainer – Weller’s back catalogue is littered with reworkings of touchstone songs from The Jam’s take on Move On Up to TSC’s version of Promised Land. And a covers album had been on the cards for decades. So, when Weller fell foul of writer’s block after the recording and touring of Illumination, it provided the ideal stop-gap. Recording in Amsterdam’s Studio 150, hence the album’s title, with producer Jan “Stan” Kybert, Weller put down 14 versions, not of his favourites, but of songs that he thought “were good, that I could do something with.” Some make perfect sense: see the robust covers of Aaron Neville’s Hercules, Nolan Porter’s If I Could Only Be Sure and Gil Scott Heron’s The Bottle. Other more leftfield choices, like Sister Sledge’s Thinking Of You and Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain featuring Eliza Carthy on violin, also impress; others, though, such as Bacharach and David’s Close To You and Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, fall short of his usual high standard. Nevertheless, the album went in at No 2.
Key tracks: Thinking Of You, Early Morning Rain, Hercules Paul Weller As Is Now (V2, VVR1033201, 2xLP, 2005) £30 HHHHAfter the respite of Studio 150, the inspiration came flooding back with As Is Now, an album that, for many, was where his second solo regeneration began. Recorded with producer Stan Kybert at Wheeler End studio piecemeal in two weeks, then mixed at Studio 150 in Amsterdam, it’s a musical autobiography of sorts, singles From The Floorboards Up and Come On/Let’s Go harnessing the ferocious energy of The Jam with Weller’s Wilko Johnson-esque riffs to the fore.
The former provided his second biggest solo single to date when it hit No 6; the latter made a very respectable No 15. “From The Floorboards Up was the turning point,” he said. “I wanted a band in the studio bashing it out, capturing the spirit and vibe of the moment. Which I think that song did.” Elsewhere, Blink And You’ll Miss It successfully reworks an outtake called Changes from the Wild Wood sessions. Bring Back The Funk revisits the experimentation of TSC. The anti-war protest song Savages reveals a man still politically aware and at the top of his game. The album’s title was derived from an Eduardo Paolozzi painting called As Is When which Weller had seen at an exhibition of 60s pop artists while in Rome. And though it only reached No 4, his lowest placing since his solo debut, it was obvious Weller had his mojo back.
Key tracks: From The Floorboards Up, Come On/Let’s Go, Savages
Paul Weller 22 Dreams (Island, 1769350, 2xLP, 2008) £60 HHHHHAbout to turn 50, Weller shook things up. Out went drummer Steve White, a part of the Weller furniture since 1984 (“There were no hard feelings, it was time to move on for both of us,” said Weller) and in came Simon Dine as his co-producer on his first double-album, what he dubbed his ‘White Album’. A huge success, it became his third No 1 and biggest-seller since Stanley Road. It was also probably his most diverse and daring he’d recorded since TSC’s Confessions Of A Pop Group, with elements of soul, rock’n’roll, avant-garde freeform, a classical piece, psychedelic electronica, pastoral folk and a spoken word poem called God voiced by Aziz Ibrahim.
Weller, influenced by new discovery Neu!, flagged up the krautrock-styled 111 and atmospheric mood mosaic Night Lights as new territory. The soulful Have You Made Up Your Mind? was instantly more recognisable and as a single returned him to the Top 20 for the first time since 2005. But boundaries were pushed once more on Song For Alice, his tribute to Alice Coltrane, with piano and trumpet played by Robert Wyatt. Noel Gallagher and Gem Archer contributed to the trippy Echoes Round The Sun, Graham Coxon played drums on the folky Black River and on One Bright Star, and Weller’s school chum and Jam co-founder Steve Brookes returned to the Weller fold
for the first time since he left their pre-signed band.
Key tracks: 22 Dreams, Have You Made Up Your Mind, Song For Alice Paul Weller Wake Up The Nation (Island, 2732868, LP, 2010) £50 HHHH“A rallying cry to get people up onto
their feet and to do something about this sea of mediocrity we are drowning in,” Weller said of his 10th solo album, with producer Dine again at the helm. Under the musical instruction of AMM and Broadcast, he went on a genre-skipping sonic adventure, creating 16 songs – 12 clocking in at under three minutes and one, Trees, inspired by a visit to his late father John Weller’s rest home, a five-part rites of passage suite that courses through swaggering Chess-styled R&B, music hall vaudeville and piano balladry in four minutes.
To explore new frontiers, he recruited My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields on the distorted Bo Diddley groove 7 & 3 Is The Strikers Name, which rages with the same ire that stoked such Jam class-struggle missives as Mr Clean and The Eton Rifles and takes a shot at the Royal Family. He also reunited with former Jam bassist Bruce Foxton after 28 years, on the urgent, chaotic post-punk of Fast Car/Slow Traffic and the psychedelic avant-garde collage She Speaks. “We’d both lost loved ones and that was the spur of it. There was no big plan, it was easy, a laugh, and nice to see him and work together again. We just slipped back into it,” Weller said. In sharp musical contrast was the Johnny Franz-inspired gothic pop melodrama of No Tears To Cry, redolent of The Walker Brothers and Dusty Springfield with its own intense wall of sound. “If you don’t want to see me fall, turn your face to the wall,” he sings. Despite the vintage reference, though, this was all about Weller pushing forward and forging a new way.
Key tracks: No Tears To Cry, 7&3 Is The Strikers Name, Trees Paul Weller Sonik Kicks (Island/The Vinyl Factory VF039, LP, 2012) £18 HHHRecorded in Black Barn and co-produced with Dine, who also co-wrote 10 of the 14 tracks, Sonik Kicks continues Weller’s experimental journey of discovery. A family affair, his wife Hannah Andrews, whom he’d married in 2010, duets with him on the soulful, dubby meditation Study In Blue – “Everything I’ve ever wanted lives inside of you,” they sing. Weller’s daughter Leah and son Mac appear on the sentimental, soulful Be Happy Children. Dragonfly, a trippy raga rock, was inspired by a poem his daughter Jessie wrote at school – Graham Coxon also plays Hammond organ on it. Elsewhere, That Dangerous Age is a Kinksy send-up (he’d just turned 53 and had a wife half his age); Weller himself described Green as a sound poem, its half spoken-half sung lyrics taken from bits of advertising Dine and Weller spotted on hoardings on their respective journeys to the studio. The Attic, meanwhile, reminded him of “Helen Shapiro after she’d tried a few lines or been given a pipe”. The Weimar bombast of Kling I Klang came to fruition after The Trolley Song, the Meet Me In St Louis standard, got stuck in his head, though its subject matter –the Middle East conflict – is rather more serious. Sprawling and disjointed, Sonik Kicks gave him his first No 1 since 22 Dreams, after beating David Guetta’s Nothing But the Beat by just 250 copies. The experience was marred, however, by a falling-out with Dine over royalty payments. The pair haven’t worked together since.
Key tracks: Study In Blue, Dragonfly, That Dangerous Age Paul Weller Saturns Pattern (Parlophone, 0825646147656, LP, clear vinyl, 2015) £15 HHHH“It’s a never-ending quest to go places you’ve not been before,” Weller said of his mindset going into the studio to make Saturns Pattern. “You want to push things as far as they can go, you’re ripping up the rule book, and with age [he was then 57] comes a certain freedom and contentment. You can do whatever you like, you know: push yourself to the limit on one song, then sit back and see where it goes on another.”
Advancing the experimental bent started with 22 Dreams but acknowledging the importance of melody, Weller plunges once more into the musical unknown, working with mix team The Amorphous Androgynous aka Future Sound Of London for opener White Sky, a psychedelic bluesy squall that sees Weller with core band – bassist and vocal arranger Andy Crofts, percussionist Ben Gordelier, guitarist Steve Cradock, drummer Steve Pilgrim – in full flight with Weller’s vocals raw and distorted.
More concise and coherent than predecessor Sonik Kicks, with just nine songs, the bulk of the album, produced by Weller with Stan Kybert, was written in Black Barn. Work began at 12pm and ran until 2am with songs improvised on the spot and completed in three- to four-day spurts. Canterbury psychedelic band Syd Arthur, one of Weller’s then-current tips, provide backing vocals on the thrilling Pick It Up and their multi-instrumentalist Raven Bush adds violin to the eight-minute closer These City Streets, redolent of TSC’s Confessions… with its washes of jazzy instrumentation. Josh McClorey of The Strypes, another band championed by Weller, plays slide on the fiery Long Time. Steve Brookes and Hannah Weller also guest.
Key tracks: White Sky, These City Streets, Pick It Up Paul Weller A Kind Revolution (Parlophone 0190295845261, LP, 2017) £15 (Parlophone 0190295830588, 5×10” box set, 2017) £30 (Parlophone 0190295845261 LP, reissue, 50 only, blue vinyl) £400 HHHHForty years on from The Jam’s debut In The City, Weller calls for a love uprising with an album made up of peace and unity message songs. “Trying to bring a bit of hope into these bleak times,” he said of his motivation. Recorded in Black Barn with co-producer Stan Kybert and instruments shared equally between Weller, Ben Gordelier and Andy Crofts, the styles are varied, from lyrical centrepiece The Cranes Are Back – a demonstrative piano ballad calling for global peace and a new day – to Woo Sé Mama, a New Orleans Mardi Gras spirit dance featuring jubilatory exhortation from 60s soul sirens PP Arnold and Madeline Bell. The latter was redolent of Wild Wood’s A Walk On Gilded Splinters and Heavy Soul’s Peacock Suit, only cast very much in its own image. Then there’s One Tear, an extraordinary soulful house groove featuring Boy George, with a lyric despairing of mankind but finding redemption in song. Weller, a long-time admirer of George’s both in TSC peers Culture Club and as a soloist, had first approached him to sing on Saturns Pattern but their schedules hadn’t allowed it.
Robert Wyatt, who had come out of retirement to play 2016’s Concert For Corbyn with Weller, meanwhile, provides trumpet and sings the middle-eight on the bright funk of She Moves With The Fayre. A majestic work with a universal message, A Kind Revolution deserved more than its No 5 placing.
Key tracks: Woo Sé Mama, The Cranes Are Back, One Tear Paul Weller True Meanings (Parlophone, 0190295635947, 2LP, 2018) £20 HHHHAfter a clutch of albums driven by experimental innovation, Weller took
a left turn, finding an intimate acoustic setting with evocative string accompaniments conducted by Hannah Peel creating an album of simple beauty. “It began with just me and my acoustic guitar, sat in my front room in the early hours singing songs in the folk tradition,” he explained. The songs are reflective and contemplative; some are personal. “I’m 60, with a new daughter [Nova, his eighth and third with wife Hannah Weller] and it felt like the right time to take stock,” he explained. “It’s not a new direction, but [it] reflect[s] on one man’s journey up to this point.” Other songs comment on the wider world: the stirring Books critiques organised religion and features old pal Noel Gallagher on pump organ and Surrey singer-songwriter Lucy Rose adding ethereal vocals. Gallagher also plays organ on White Horses, one of three songs – the other two being Wishing Well and Bowie – penned by Erland Cooper of folk rockers Erland And The Carnival. The latter is a moving treatise on death which features quotes from the title’s legend. Opening up the writing credits further –
“I was sick of my own words, I wanted to hear what someone else could do,” Weller explained – album opener The Soul Searchers was co-written with Villagers’ Conor O’Brien, who plays the bulk of the instruments on it (bass, drums, electric piano, synth), though The Zombies’ Rod Argent adds signature Hammond. “A joy,” said Weller, who cites Odessey And Oracle
as his all-time favourite album.
Key tracks: The Soul Searchers, Books, BowiePaul Weller On Sunset (Polydor, LP, 2020) £20 HHHHHWeller comes full circle, re-signing to Polydor to make a joyous, soulful-sounding album that positions him favourably alongside his new labelmates Michael Kiwanuka and Celeste. Co-produced with Stan Kybert, who’d last worked on Saturns Pattern, and with Hannah Peel as his orchestrator again, the album was conceived as a journey with songs spanning the giddying opener Mirror Ball, a seven-minute suite paying tribute to the dancefloor as utopian space, to Rockets, with its Bowie-ish keen. The evocative title track, its lush orchestration inspired by Lalo Schifrin, takes Weller back to the early days of The Jam when he first visited LA and played the Whiskey A Go Go on the Strip. There’s further reflection on Old Father Tyme: “Time will become you, you will become time.” Closing track Baptiste,
a celebration of soul music’s very existence, reunites him with former Style Councillor Mick Talbot; Steve Brookes also plays guitar on it. More, another standout, features French singer Julie Gros of Le Superhomard and succeeds in recreating the mood of Roy Ayer’s We Live In Brooklyn Baby, its cinematic vistas comprising jazzy flute, bluesy, soaring guitar played by Josh McClorey and colourful horns and strings. Elsewhere, Madness’ Lee Thompson plays sax on the compelling Walkin’ and Slade’s Jim Lea provides a violin solo in the vein of Coz I Luv You on Equanimity, which also mixes in elements of Brecht and Weill cabaret and lyrically touches on marital discord. Earth Beat is another showstopper: co-written with Jim Jupp, the founder of Ghost Box Records – they issued Weller’s sound collage In Another Room EP earlier this year – it features London rapper Col3trane and is a slab of dazzling futuristic R&B. Eclectic, bold, Weller once more proves he’s the sonic alchemist who knows no bounds.
Key tracks: Baptiste, More, Earth Beat On Sunset is issued by Polydor on
12 June.