Originally published in the June 2015 issue of British GQ
Standing almost 6ft tall in his flat black moccasins, Paul Weller still looks every inch the pop star. With his pewter-coloured hair, green MA1 bomber, skinny jeans and endless supply of Marlboro reds, Weller seems less like a silvern rock behemoth and more like a ripened Saturday kid, the kind he wrote about way back in 1979 when he was still in The Jam.
Like I said, every inch the pop star.
Today he is preparing to entertain the troops at the Watford Colosseum. He's on a short tour to promote his 12th solo album, Saturn's Pattern, bouncing around at the sound check like a man two-thirds his age. He may be a 56-year-old silver fox, but Paul Weller, a man who has already had three of the most important careers in British popular culture, has the enthusiasm of the terminally youthful.
Peter Pan, then, with a glottal stop.
Backstage, he explains the reason for this pep and vim. "I'm a happy man, by and large," he says. "I'm a lot less angry than I used to be, for sure, but that image of me is largely a press portrayal anyway, as it's hard to make an assumption about someone after meeting them for an hour or two. But I have calmed down and grown up, so in that respect I've changed an awful lot, so I am definitely happier. I'm happy in my own skin as well. A lot of people ask me why I don't write the kind of political songs that I used to write, but I'm better off just singing the same ones I wrote 30 years ago, as they're the same arguments and the same issues, really. For me to try and sit down and write a song like that, I'd find it really difficult. And I'd just be repeating myself - what I'd said years ago or felt years ago."
He is sipping tea, too, something that wouldn't have always been on the agenda. Weller hasn't had a drink in five years and he feels a lot better for it. "I gave up, as I'd basically had enough. You can become a bit obsessed with talking about it, and if people get me on the subject I can wax lyrical for some time, but it's probably just boring, to be honest with you. It was just time for me to stop. I'd been at it for a long time, 35 years or whatever, for as long as I can remember, and I knew it was time to stop. It was just part of the culture, from the time I was a young kid playing clubs and working men's clubs. It was always a drink culture. We're a drinking nation, aren't we? So I had a good run at it, but it was just time to move on. It's good to know when to move on in life, isn't it? In all honesty I probably could have done it ten years before that, but I didn't."
This is perhaps slightly out of character, as Weller is a man who has always known when to move on. Whether its changing his political opinions, his band or his trousers, Weller tends to be ahead of the wind rather than behind it. It would also be difficult to find a British musician with such a varied and illustrious CV.
First, he came out of nowhere - OK, Woking - with The Jam, one of the few punk heavyweights. Then he helped define the Eighties with The Style Council (one of the most under-appreciated British groups of all time) and then, in the early Nineties, managed to forge himself a solo career, in a heartbeat becoming the "Modfather" of Britpop.
Today, with a legacy that would deter less ambitious men, Weller is happy to record when he wants, tour when he wants and dip his toe back in whenever he feels like it.
Recently he even wrote a song for the The X Factor pop star Olly Murs (a powerful ballad called "Let Me In"), a situation which would have been unthinkable a few years ago - even though he still has the utmost contempt for TV talent shows. "Olly's a nice enough lad," he says, "although the whole genre is shocking, absolutely f***ing shocking. Interestingly, all the people who have had continued success are all the ones who didn't win the show, so maybe they're the ones with true ambition. But it's karaoke, isn't it? For the masses. I don't get it really, I don't understand it. There's thousands of people who can sing, who can hold a note. But it doesn't mean a thing, it doesn't mean anything at all. And there's loads of people in pubs and clubs as we're sitting here now who can probably do a passable cover of someone's tune, but... it's not quite it, is it? It requires a bit more than that, really. "I hate the whole celebrity culture we've had for the last 20 years or so, and I feel absolutely no part of it whatsoever.
There's a difference between being a star and being an artist, and I would like to think in my own little way that I'm an artist. If you talk to David Bailey or Peter Blake or David Hockney, men who have been around for a while, they're still creating, still working, still artists. They're not famous for being famous. They just happen to be good at what they do."
The Jam were Weller's finishing school, a band who made some of the best British singles ever, singles that rival anything achieved by the iconic British groups of the Sixties. They were also there right at the beginning of punk. There was a night at the legendary punk hang-out 100 Club that will always stick in my mind. I was standing at the front of the stage, right in front of Weller, as one of the speaker stacks began to teeter. As the bass reverberated through the wooden stage, the speaker swung forwards, swung back, swinging away as though it were being pushed back and forth by a wind. I caught the eye of a roadie, who, like me, expected the speaker to topple at any minute. He couldn't do anything about it as it was too high. In the end it just kept swinging back and forth, and even seemed to speed up the longer the gig went on.
This motion seemed to mirror the jutting chins on stage, as all three members of the band kept pushing their chins forward like chickens, metronomically keeping up with "All Around The World", "This Is The Modern World", "Away From The Numbers" and all the others, little horizontal pogos that were copied by all of us in the crowd. The Jam were hugely influenced by Dr Feelgood, and the way they stuck their necks out appeared to be copied from Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson.
During punk, Weller looked like the tersest man you'd ever have the misfortune to meet. John Lydon looked as though he'd shout at you, Sid Vicious looked as though he'd thump you and Joe Strummer looked as though he'd give you a lecture. Weller, meanwhile, just looked as though he'd tell you to f*** off and be done with it. He seemed deliberately, almost confrontationally, inarticulate, as though having a good vocabulary might somehow imply a betrayal of his class. Yet even at that young age, when he was as callow as he was ever going to be, he could write, on occasion, with the subtlety of Van Morrison or the ferocity of Pete Townshend.
Although he was the son of a taxi driver and a cleaner, and had a thoroughly working-class secondary-modern education, nevertheless Weller was embarrassed about being from Surrey. Weller came from the London overspill, the no-man's-land of belonging, neither one thing nor another. One of the most evocative songs from The Jam's first album, In the City, was "Sounds From The Street", which contains one of Weller's latent insecurities writ large: "I know I come from Woking and you'll say I'm a fraud/But my heart is in the city where it belongs." Part of the Greater London Urban Area and the London commuter belt, Woking was fundamentally parochial; visitors were once greeted with a billboard that proclaimed, "All-Weather Shopping And Sparkling Entertainment", a promise too dull to even contemplate. "When I was a kid I remember asking my dad how long a mile was," says Weller. "He took me out into our street, Stanley Road, and pointed down to the far end, towards the heat haze in the distance.
To me, there was a magical kingdom through that shimmering haze, the rest of the world, all life's possibilities. I always return to where I came from, to get a sense of my journey and where I'm heading next."
As a boy he would accompany his father to Heathrow to watch the planes, and when he hit his teens would travel up to London by train to record the traffic noises, which - having returned home with the excitement of a Victorian butterfly collector - he would play back in his bedroom in Woking. (Weller was from a generation who were already feeling excluded from inner-city cool.) He appropriated urbanity by developing an interest in clothes, an adolescent obsession that has never left him. Modernism enveloped him, to the extent that he wouldn't talk to other children unless they were wearing the right clothes (to this day he appears to distrust those he thinks are poorly dressed). "Even though I've lived in London for most of my life, I still don't think of myself as a Londoner," he says backstage in Watford. "I'm still from Woking, from Surrey, still outside suburbia. So, for me, the city has never lost its fascination or its magic. In fact I think it's better now. It's a cleaner city than when I first moved here. There's better shops, there's better cafés and bars.
It's caught up with our European brothers as well. I think it's a magical place, the greatest city on earth, you know? "My roots are strong, and it's important to remember where you came from. These things define who I am, my background, my upbringing. The whole mod thing helped define who I am, and I guess a lot of it has never really gone for me, and the rules still apply and I still believe in those things. Like the old working-class ethic of you only get what you work for. That's what I was always taught as a kid and I kind of think it's probably true."
London became something of a focus for pop during punk. The cult was born in London and the city became a metaphor for the whole movement: urban decay, anarchic fashion, backstreet violence, fast drugs, silly hair. The town became vaguely mythical, a magnet for the future punk royalty: The Jam's urban fixation showed in "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight", "In The City", "A Bomb In Wardour Street" and bassist Bruce Foxton's dreadful "London Traffic" ("...going nowhere"- nice one, Bruce!). One of the band's earliest songs was called "Sounds From The Street" and their first two albums are so poorly produced they don't sound much better than Oxford Circus at rush hour.
When he formed The Jam in his early teens, his influences were The Beatles, then Dr Feelgood and then anything with a pulse emanating from London. Unlike punks (dirty, subversive), the band wore bank clerk suits - Bruce Foxton even sported one of those "Dmitri" haircuts you used to see advertised in barbers' windows.
Weller hated being labelled a throwback, though, and once wore a placard around his neck on stage that asked, "How can I be a revivalist when I'm only f***ing 18?"
Weller wrote proper songs, too. Fuelled by bolshiness, power chords and shouting, for sure, but there were real tunes there, so many that he never worried about moving on and leaving punk behind.
I lost count of the number of times I saw The Jam. The 100 Club, The Marquee, The Nag's Head, The Red Cow. I probably saw them - and their more-than-occasional support band, the decidedly mediocre New Hearts - a dozen times, sweating through their suits, jutting their chins and pumping out the likes of "In The City", "All Around The World" and "The Modern World" with the sort of sincerity that would look forced and nostalgic these days. Then they ditched punk, became the most popular band in Britain and bowed out in a blaze of retroactive glory.
One of the salient reasons he disbanded The Jam in 1982 was because of their success, and the fact that the crowds at the band's concerts often turned ugly and started to resemble those at football matches. The cultural aggression felt at early punk concerts had swiftly morphed into a gang mentality that made the crowd at a Jam gig not that much different from the crowd at one by Sham 69. The political sentiments broadcast from the stage may have been poles apart, but the crowds were nearly as unruly. So, sensing a change in the zeitgeist, and enjoying the sort of cross-fertilisation between new-romantic pop and jazz-funk he heard on records such as Spandau Ballet's "Chant No1", he decided to ditch The Jam, buy a pair of white socks and reinvent himself as a sort of tongue-in-cheek new-wave soul boy. His next vehicle, The Style Council, may have been mannered, yet they sounded just like the Eighties, all spick-and-span and shiny. Keen exponents of faux jazz (they were the "Nescafé society"), they enjoyed getting up the noses of those fans and critics who would have preferred him to keep on making Jam records in perpetuity. They emerged as the pop promo started to grow in reputation and influence, and Weller used the medium completely to his own advantage: in their ironic Summer Holiday-style videos, Weller had the appearance of a fey Sixties boulevardier, a creature of cheekbones and colour, frequently in motion and tantalisingly throwaway. The Style Council may have been born out of pastiche, but their identity was actually incredibly well defined.
Unlike many of his generation, who hadn't got a clue how to further their careers after punk began to wane, Weller had talent, tenacity and a thirst for change. And The Style Council turned out to be extraordinarily successful, and for many are remembered with more fondness than The Jam.
Not that he was a patsy. Along with his partner in crime, Mick Talbot, Weller went out of his way to distance himself from the game of self-promotion. One way in which The Style Council combated their image as a "quirky 'Eengleesh' pop band" was to send the whole thing up. Irony was always big in their world, and what was often seen as gross pretentiousness was actually a giant wind-up.
It was in this way that Weller defused a lot of the contradictions thrown up by him being on one hand a recognisable icon in Smash Hitsand an opinionated political animal on the other. For the maudlin pied piper, donning a silly hat let him off the hook, although for many of their fans the irony was lost.
They just liked their records.
While the band often looked as though they got dressed to appear on children's television - all tennis whites, blazers and primary colours - ironically his lyrics became angrier, not least on the 1985 Style Council album Our Favourite Shop: "Come take a walk among these hills/And see how monetarism kills/Whole communities, even families." He was as distrustful of Labour MPs as he was of their Tory oppos.
Having fleetingly expressed some admiration for the Conservatives when The Jam first started attracting attention in 1977, in a volte-face Weller quickly embraced the Labour Party, almost to the point of obsession, turning himself into a class warrior in the process. The rise of Thatcher only exacerbated this.
His lyrics would often sound idealistic and naive, although this was forgivable considering how sweet his melodies were. A self-proclaimed "moody bastard" (whenever I hear The Style Council song "My Ever Changing Moods" I think, "Ah yes, all the way from taciturn to grumpy"), Weller was the champion of everyone he knew with a "bingo accent"; he was 18 in 1976, and was almost fully formed when he became famous. There were three principal figureheads of punk: John Lydon, an unreconstructed sociopath; Joe Strummer, a slumming busker; and Weller, who managed to articulate the desperate aspirations of the suburbanite while cataloguing the strip-lit nature of late-Seventies Britain.
However far he thought he'd come from the punk ethic and from the punk noise, Weller was still a surly punk at heart and rarely dropped his caustic mien. He may have had a strong sense of balladry, but throughout the Eighties he had a true punk sensibility. No, he didn't get a Mohican, like Joe Strummer during The Clash's death throes, and no he didn't drink and swear a lot like John Lydon, but he remained true to his intransigent nature. For a while he appeared to assume prejudices the way some people collect shoes. And vice versa, actually. There is nuance, though. Like Van Morrison a generation before him, Weller has always had a reputation for grumpiness and for being anguished; and, like Morrison, it's not strictly true. What Weller is, is particular.
However, the Eighties is a decade that Weller would prefer to forget, even though it was good for him. "I think a lot of our problems now stem from the Eighties and Thatcherism," he says, perhaps predictably. "We lost so much during the Eighties - community spirit, trade unions. Even big hair!"
Weller has always made a point of staying close to his fans, which is one of the reasons he still plays places like Watford. "It's nice to play other places, smaller places, because if you look at the way that touring's developed in the last few years, when bands get to a certain level, they probably only play six or seven shows in the whole country. So I wanted to play some of the towns where people never go; so far we've been to Swindon and Portsmouth and Plymouth. For a lot of people, they might only see a couple of shows a year, in which case they have to travel to wherever the nearest arena is. But I think there's something to be said for going out and taking it out to the people. Do you know what I mean? "It's a testament to the music that there are teenagers in the crowd. I don't necessarily try and appeal to any one type of person or age group, and I'm not consciously trying to appeal to anyone.
But to get young people coming to see you, it just keeps it all alive really, keeps it all relevant."
There is even a smattering of old songs in his set, including some he hasn't played for years. "There are some songs I can't play because they are so high, but it's nice to play some old stuff. I like it when we play 'A Town Called Malice', for instance, and I get off on the fact that the crowd are so happy to hear it. It's their tune, and it's almost become sort of the people's song or something, almost like folk music in its traditional sense, if you know what I mean. So I get off on that."
True to his earlier incarnation as one of punk's angry brigade, Weller hates the way that most people who experience success pull up the ladder behind them. His fans buy his records, come to his concerts, have made him a star. And although he knows he has innate talent, he is grateful. Telling a story about Weller's generosity towards his fans, Noel Gallagher says, "I've seen a kid come up to him once and say, at a pub outside ours, 'I really like that shirt', and he just took it off and gave it him and then sat in the pub topless for the rest of the day."
Discussing his own journey from Weller fan to Weller friend, Gallagher says, "Once you've had to throw someone out of your house a couple of times at seven in the morning and, you know, nearly got in fights with them, that kind of thing ceases to exist any more and it's like, you know, you're kind of his mate."
There is still a core to Weller, and while he may have found some new kind of solace, he remains a principled, committed person.
Years ago he would have been criticised for being self-righteous, but essentially he just wears his convictions on his sleeve. "The political environment is no different to what it was 20 years ago," he says. "It's just all the same really, it doesn't move on. Generally speaking, we're less racist, less homophobic, less xenophobic, and we have the makings of being a great modern society but the dark forces are still keeping us all at bay. As for politicians, I can't really tell the difference between them. They all look the same to me - they're all well-scrubbed middle-class college boys, aren't they? They certainly don't represent the working classes anyway, or the underclasses, that's for sure.
They're so removed from all that."
Weller's solo years started with a new-found reliance on Steve Winwood, using Traffic as a kind of leitmotif.
Looking backward propelled him forward, and, remarkably, almost from the off he started to push out classics as though he were a broodmare. Every nine months, another one arrived: "Into Tomorrow", "Uh Huh, Oh Yeh", "Above The Clouds", "Sunflower", "Wild Wood", "The Changingman", "You Do Something To Me", "Brand New Start", "From The Floorboards Up", "All On A Misty Morning", "Be Happy Children", "Brand New Toy", "All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)" etc.
He became a dignified example of a rock elder statesman. He kept whippet thin, managed to keep his hair and dressed with an attention to detail that even those of us who care about such things here at often found bewildering. Sure, he still sounded fabulously grumpy in interviews and was withering about those he thought had crossed a particular line (he fell out with his long-term pal and sometime biographer Paolo Hewitt and hated the fact that David Cameron had expressed a penchant for "Eton Rifles"), and yet he remained untouchable. A singular man. Grouchy, idiosyncratic, yet somewhat exempt from rules that govern your average ageing rock star. Damn it, he was Paul Weller! Cool?
Seriously, did someone say cool? "Style? Well, I am fairly obsessed with clothes, though I don't make any apology for it," he says. "It doesn't matter what happens to you as you get older, you shouldn't just give up and start wearing dungarees! People get lazy, don't they? Because they start wearing trainers or slippers because it makes their feet feel more comfortable. But I know a couple of old mods, way older than me, first time ones, and they're still pretty sharp. You know, it's down to the individual, isn't it? I love London and I love walking round window-shopping. Sometimes I go out just to see what's going on and what's happening with it all. I haven't got a favourite brand or shop or anything. I do like the little independent boutiques when you find them; it's just nice to go and see someone else's vision."
Saturn's Pattern continues in the experimental vein of his past few records, spurred on in part by a new-found interest in David Bowie, someone in whom he had previously expressed no interest. If during the Nineties some of Weller's records were rather lumpen - due in part to the demands of his commercial renaissance - for the past 15 years or so he has bounced around between styles and formats, rarely giving a hoot for what his customers or his record companies think. Having experienced extreme popularity at three different periods in his life, to chase after success at this stage, or to cover himself in bubble wrap, would belittle both Weller and his audience. From the bucolic to the bountiful, he has made music that sounds like the beginning of raindrops, music that sounds like thunder. The writer Jonathan Coe wrote a line about Robert Wyatt that in recent times could certainly apply to Weller: "He once said something to the effect that he had no objection to songs not making sense, because when songs do make sense, more often than not he doesn't like the sense that they make."
Written and recorded at Weller's de facto HQ, Black Barn Studios in Surrey, the album was produced by Jan "Stan" Kybert and Weller himself. It features some of his touring band faithful - Steve Cradock, Andy Crofts, Ben Gordelier and Steve Pilgrim - along with The Strypes' Josh McClorey and an old friend from Woking, Steve Brookes, who was a guitarist in the original line-up of The Jam.
On this new record, Weller manages to mix archetypal Britpop with cunningly constructed heavy rock and even some songs that sound as though they may have been recorded at the same time as some Stephen Stills records from the early Seventies. In fact, the longer his career goes on the more you get the impression that Weller could immerse himself in any musical period without sinking into pastiche. He's never done a jazz album, a blues album, never done genre, but you know that given half a packet of Marlboro and a spare afternoon he could probably turn his hand to anything. "White Sky", the song that opens the album, is a kind of apocalyptic boogie, a piece of music that not only shows that Weller never stops listening - never has he sounded more contemporary - it also proves that his sense of adventure and invention are keener than ever. "Long Time", for instance, sounds like a cross between Supergrass and The Velvet Underground, and yet sounds completely now. "Pick It Up", on the other hand, is futuristic soul; "I'm Where I Should Be" and "Phoenix" are dreamy esoteric pop (referencing everyone from Blur, Bobbi Humphrey and Swing Out Sister); "These City Streets", rolling in at nearly nine minutes long, is a kind of epic urban love song, and a big bad world away from "In The City". Critics have occasionally said that Weller is too literal in his songwriting, and Saturn's Pattern reinforces the fact that critics are there to be contradicted. Paul Weller continues to get better with age. "With this new record I just wanted to go somewhere new and different," he says. "I wanted a sense of adventure, a sense of freedom. I don't know if it's abstract or not, I don't know what you'd call it. But that's the thing that interests me, moving forward and not really knowing where I'm going."
As for its reception, he says he'll take it on the chin - if he has to. "There was a time when I used to read all of my reviews.
And then I stopped reading any of them. And now I just try to read the good ones."
His motivation, such as it is, remains the same. "Whenever people ask me about my motivation I'm never really sure what to say, because it seems such a silly question. Because all I ever wanted to do was to make music, make records and be in a band. And I got to fulfil my dream, so isn't that motivation enough? It's not something I ever tire of. I might tire of the peripheral marketing stuff, but to play music is a pleasure. It's all I ever dreamed of doing. I have always taken it seriously and still believe in the cultural value of music. I'm not trying to compete with anyone else particularly; I don't think anyone else does what I do and so the only person to compete with is myself, trying to get better on each record. It's all about self-improvement. "When I was younger and had writer's block, I'd think it was the end of the world; I thought I'd run out. Through age and experience, I've realised that it doesn't really ever do that. I go through a period of time when I'm not writing anything, I don't freak out any more. It's just a period of time and it'll come back and I just have to wait for it to return. Something will spark it off and then I'll start writing again."
Watching him sit backstage, sipping his tea, smoking his cigarettes, listening to him chat, you could be forgiven for thinking that here sits a man completely at peace with himself. And he probably is happier than he was a few years back. But Paul Weller wouldn't be Paul Weller if he didn't tend to his own little furnace, if he didn't look after his own little fire, his passion, call it what you will. He not only has an innate ability to write extraordinary songs, but he also possesses an ambition that isn't going to be tempered by success, age or anything else that comes his way. He's going to go on forever.
"I think it's great that the likes of Van Morrison, the Stones and Paul McCartney are still performing at the age of 70. If they were old jazzers we'd be applauding them. If you're a musician you'll go to your deathbed thinking, 'Ah, I could have done that better,' or, 'I wish I'd have done this.' It's all about being the best. I've seen McCartney in the last couple of years and he's f***ing great. I loved the record he made with Rihanna and I like the fact he was just playing guitar. I thought he looked really cool. As for me, I can't imagine not performing, regardless of how old I am. I can't imagine not playing music. Whether I'll be able to at 80 is another matter, of course. "I've been asked to write my autobiography a number of times, but I don't think I'm old enough yet. It's laughable these days, there's biogs on people who have been around for three weeks. So many books, it's just like, 'Then I got into heroin or cocaine and it all went downhill for a bit, but now I'm all right again.' That seems par for the course. But I'm not ready for that just yet, thank you very much."
In "Bull-Rush", a song from Weller's eponymous first solo album, released in 1992, he created my own favourite earworm. I've been singing it in the shower practically every day for the past 23 years, though having spent a considerable amount of time with Saturn's Pattern, and having waited for it to bed in, I fully expect to be singing some of it for years to come.
Originally published in the June 2015 issue of British GQ
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