Once a mod, always a mod: the “look”, even a dress-down one, is everything.
Today, Paul Weller is sporting a purple T-shirt, a knotted,
geezer-down-the-boozer scarf, fawn pinstriped slacks, co-respondent shoes,
greying feather-cut hair, Benson & Hedges in his hand. Striding along
packed, late-summer-evening West End pavements, past the tip of the London
thoroughfare he immortalised in A-Bomb in Wardour Street, Weller, tall,
wiry, wired, is seeking a place to sit down. The pub? “Nah,” he says in his
Woking growl. “I’ve got a gig to do, I don’t want get too wrecked.” He
plumps for a deserted pizzeria. And promptly orders a beer.
Weller at 47 is, depending on your viewpoint, still coming up with the goods
or outstaying an already strained welcome. His core base of followers
recovered from the trauma of his decision to split the Jam in 1982 and
learnt to accommodate some of the wilder sonic excursions he took with the
Style Council.
Tonight, 150 of them will fill the 100 Club to hear him preview As Is Now, his
seventh solo album of original material. One devotee turns up to collect his
ticket, proudly displaying the tattoo of Weller that covers his back.
They’re not fair-weather fans, then.
Others, though, have either dipped in or opted out: Weller’s records no longer
sell in the size-able quantities they once did.
Credited (and later damned) with inspiring the mid-1990s revival of guitar
music — or dad rock, to detractors — he now finds himself being referenced
by new bands such as the Futureheads, whose songs resound with chord changes
and lyrical agitation straight out of the Jam songbook.
With five children, two of them in their teens, and a back catalogue bursting
with era-defining classics, Weller is long enough in the tooth to be running
the risk, culturally, of bumping into himself again. Is he mellowing (as his
new songs occasionally suggest)? Or is the man who, in the Jam days, once
wound up journalists with admiring references to Thatcher, and has been
known to rip into interviewers for bad reviews written years previously,
still fired up with the old, pugilistic indignation? “I just stopped reading
the reviews,” he laughs. “Whether I make a good record or a so-so record or
a crap record, it’s never my intention to make the crap one. I suppose I get
offended by reviews that intimate that I don’t care any more, that I’m just
chucking it out. But I would never go, ‘That’ll do, f*** it.’ Even with the
lousiest records, like Cost of Loving with the Style Council, I never
thought, ‘This is shit, but what the hell?’ But with a lot of my critics,
it’s not always about the music, is it? It’s more about the man. And I don’t
buy this thing where people say, ‘You should just shrug it off.’ Why should
I?” If these remarks imply that those old fires still burn, they are not, as
it happens, indicative of the place Weller is now in. In fact, he comes
across as more at peace with himself and his position in the world than he’s
seemed in years. Ask him for his reaction to a recent comment about his
being seen “as a traditionalist” and he chuckles where once he might have
snarled.
“I suppose what I do is traditional,” he concedes, “in terms of songwriting. I
write verses, bridges, choruses, middle eights.
I play guitar. So what? I’ve followed a traditional path. I don’t play
electric teapots or sample tables or whatever’s far out. Cooler people do
that. I don’t.”
Three years ago, shortly after the release of his Illumination album, Weller’s
muse packed her bags and left, and refused to take his calls. One upshot of
this dry patch was last year’s covers album, Studio 150. But another was
that he learnt, finally, to relax, instead of succumbing to the panic that
had invariably set in before.
“I thought, well, perhaps I’m just not going to write any songs any more,” he
says. “But I was kind of prepared for that.
I just thought, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. Plus, I don’t
know if there’s always that much to say.”
This might seem a startling admission from someone who, in his Jam heyday,
appeared to have more of importance and urgency to say than almost any other
writer of his generation. Songs such as Going Underground, Eton Rifles and
Town Called Malice, after all, seethed with fury and spat pure venom. This,
of course, made the Style Council’s heavily, well, stylised constructions
seem lightweight by comparison and served to mask the latter’s often heavily
political intent. And Weller’s solo career, patchy, wayward, but at its best
still stupendous and even heartbreaking, confirmed the sense of an artist
trying to rid himself of the baggage and expectations his first band placed
on him.
“I don’t see it like that,” he begins, when I ask him about this emotional and
creative rucksack, then he appears to check himself. “There was a time,” he
continues, “the Jam days. I loved that time. I mean, I can’t knock it, it
was fantastic. But I was very, very young, and it just seemed a bit weighty
at times. I mean, maybe Bono likes it, but ... Not that it was anybody’s
fault but my own. I dug myself into that hole. We ’d go to other countries
and do press conferences, and it would be all about politics: ‘Tell me about
Margaret Thatcher.’ And I’m like, well, I’m here to play a gig.”
Gigs are Weller’s lifeblood. “It’s how I make my living,” he points out. When
the songs dried up, he toured and, as has happened before, the juices began
to flow again. “Without even trying,” he says, “it just came back to me. In
the space of about a week, I wrote six or seven tunes. It was like, ‘Hello,
we’re back on it again.’”
He’s past getting hung up, he says, on interpretations and critical reaction.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the commercialism, in how many records you’ve
sold, but it isn’t about that. It’s about the communication. The whole thing
with marketing, demographics and all that bollocks: so my demographic is
white, male, 35. It’s just not true. You go to one of my gigs: it’s
pan-generational.”
It’s true. The 100 Club is rammed, with an age range from late forties to
adolescents the same age as Weller’s two children by his former wife, the
Style Council singer DC Lee. Does he play them his songs? “They do listen to
my music. Sometimes they’ll go, ‘Yeah, it’s all right, Dad.’”
The new album is by a country mile the best thing he’s done since 1993’s solo
breakthrough, Wild Wood. Its greatest triumph is to join the dots, more
convincingly than any of his other solo work, between the Jam, the Style
Council and the albums that followed. These are links the more blinkered
have always refused to recognise, despite the fact that there are any number
of Jam songs infused with soul, folk or blues that clearly signpost his
future directions. It wasn’t, ever, all about the politics.
For all that, one of As Is Now’s most beautiful tracks, Savages, marries
Weller’s enduring love for hazy, pastoral acoustica with one of the angriest
lyrics he’s written in years. If this is how Weller makes a political
statement in 2005, well, that’s his right; he’s earned it. Elsewhere,
further links are revealed on the Hendrix- like Blink and You’ll Miss It and
From the Floorboards Up, both of which glory in a guitar sound that first
screamed from Weller’s amp on In the City. And, in the era of dripping-wet
ballads such as You’re Beautiful, The Start of Forever is a reassuring
reminder that it’s possible to listen to a love song and not reach for the
sick bag. “I wrote that for my girlfriend,” Weller beams, before skewing the
anecdote by admitting: “I came back the night we recorded. Only she was
expecting me back two days before. I was so pissed.”
Damned with faint praise, called a shadow of his former self or just plain
dismissed, Weller’s arrived at a point where he both couldn’t care less and
still cares passionately. “It’s always nice when people like the record,” he
says. “I’d much prefer you to say ‘I really like this record’ than ‘It’s
shit, you were better 25 years ago.’ I know in my heart it’s just as
good as 25 years ago, if not better.”
Walking back to the venue, he muses about what might have been — “I could have
continued the Jam, but it would have turned into a museum piece, karaoke,
always trying to update the old songs; you know, the disco That’s
Entertainment” — before slipping, after one last suck on his ciggie, into
the venue. He’s got a living to make, and our great fortune is to witness
him making it. “I know a pop song’s not going to save the world,” he
concludes. “But they change people’s lives — and mine's been saved by them.”
The single Come On/Let’s Go is released tomorrow on V2; As Is Now follows
on October 10
