PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | Last night I dreamed I was Paul Weller. I was on stage, wearing a truly atrocious sweater and singing “My Ever Changing Moods” when someone in the front row, who also happened to be me, pointed a quivering finger in my direction and cried, “J’accuse!” It was a very disturbing dream, almost as disturbing as the dream I had where I was Bono and staring at my naked buttocks in a mirror and cooing “My beautiful, beautiful babies.” But at least I knew what the Weller dream was about. I had long disliked Paul Weller, to put it mildly, but after immersing myself in his music I had discovered, much to my horror, that I quite enjoyed some of it. And the dream–or rather make that nightmare–was telling me I was a quisling, a traitor, and well on my way of becoming the very thing I despised: a Paul Weller convert.
Weller, the son of a bricklayer (I’m just guessing; every Brit musician seems to be the son of a bricklayer) from Little Storping in-the-Swuff, West Burpingshire (just guessing again) is perhaps best known as “The Modfather” who founded The Jam, who everybody seems to love but yours truly. They have been variously labeled a punk (my ass: my grandmother was more punk than The Jam ever was, as the legendary live bootleg Iggy and My Grandmother: Destruction in Detroit attests), New Wave, and Mod Revival band, and over the course of five LPs between 1977 and 1982 they produced scads of catchy, well-made songs whose only failing is that, while I admire their craft, I’m largely indifferent to them, although I will confess to a liking for “That’s Entertainment,” “Eton Rifles,” “Non-Stop Dancing,” “Slow Down,” and “A Town Called Malice.”
And I can’t say I truly abhor any of their songs, with the exception of the treacly “English Rose” (which never fails to cause me to throw up in my mouth) and “Stoned Out of My Mind,” which despite its great title turns out to be bloody bad blue-eyed soul tune with godawful lyrics like “I was just a back seat driver in a car of love.” Oh really? And who was driving the car, and why didn’t he toss Weller out of the moving car for writing a line so hopelessly hackneyed? In short, I can understand why people love The Jam but I’ll never be one of them, and I would happily trade their entire body of work (with the exception of “That’s Entertainment” and “A Town Called Malice”) for The Divine Comedy’s “Gin Soaked Boy.”
The Jam dissolved in 1982, and had Weller stopped there he wouldn’t be on my Top Five List of Evil Artists along with Sting (“Roxxxxxxxxane!”), John “Imagine no possessions/Why gee I guess I can’t” Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bono. But no, in 1983 Weller did something so horrifying, loathsome, and injurious to the public ear that the Khmer Rouge made him an honorary member: he formed the The Style Council. A synthpop band with soul, funk, and jazz predilections, whose main members were Weller and former Dexys Midnight Runners keyboardist Mick “Thank God I Got Out of Dexys Midnight Runners” Talbot, The Style Council promptly synthed and crooned their way into peoples’ hearts and onto MTV, which is where I first heard them. I was drunk at the time and promptly put my foot through the television. Who cares if I had to awkwardly walk a mile to the nearest ER with a TV affixed to my foot? I had killed the beast. Unfortunately, when I sobered up they were still there.
Which is too bad, because I loath everything about The Style Council, from their name, which brings to mind a star chamber of smug fashionistas coolly passing judgment on the less sartorially resplendent, to the truly unspeakable sweaters Weller and Talbot are sporting on the cover of The Best of The Style Council: The Millennium Collection. To look at those sweaters is to know that whatever’s inside that record sleeve is not catchy, but catching, like a flesh-eating virus. And sure enough, its bland-eyed soul and synthpop mutations are so vapid they make George Michael sound like Captain Beefheart. One listen to the boy-bandesque “You’re the Best Thing,” the perky and putrid “Shout to the Top,” or the sweet and sour swill that is “Speak Like a Child” and I immediately strip out of my clothes and scour myself in the shower, the water as hot as humanly bearable, for no less than 45 minutes. Because whatever they have, I don’t want to catch it.
And that’s not even to mention their mega-smash “My Ever Changing Moods,” which only puts me in one mood–to hurl myself from a high window into a dense crowd of Prussian soldiers wearing pointy pickelhaube. Seriously, I can’t hear it without echoing Withnail’s immortal cry, “I feel like a frog shat in my head!” Or the unbelievable love in a concentration camp ode “Ghosts of Dachau,” which is so wrong in so many ways (you’ll never look at the Holocaust the same way again!) it’s actually great, and I tip my hat to it. But maybe I’m wrong about The Style Council, because gadzillions of apparently sane homo sapiens love them. Then again, millions of people loved Hitler, including my second wife’s grandmother, who was so smitten mit Der Fuhrer she hid his cherished portrait behind the kitchen stove before fleeing the approach of the Russian Army, hoping to one day come back and retrieve it.
That said, I have to admit–and oh how I hate to admit!–to finding bearable several Style Council tunes, particularly the more funk-oriented ones such as “Confessions of a Pop Group,” “Internationalists,” and some of the songs on 1986’s live Home and Abroad. They’re hardly Funkadelic–more like Bunkadelic, especially on the flute-happy crapfest “With Everything to Lose,” which never fails to remind me of Will Farrell’s great flute solo in Anchorman–but I still find The Style Council’s funk-lite tunes far more palatable than the smooth jazz tripe of “The Whole Point of No Return,” the synthpop monstrosity “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” or the Lovecraftian horrors that are “Angel” and “A Woman’s Song.”
Fortunately the Style Council broke up in 1989, due in part to waning popularity and in part to dire warnings about the band from Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Weller decided to go it on his own, and since 1992 has released 11 LPs, and the most amazing thing about them to me is that, well, I actually like many of them. A lot. In my ‘umble opinion–and I’m sure I’m in the minority on this one–Weller the solo artist boasts a higher percentage of likeable songs per album than The Style Council, and perhaps even The Jam, ever did. And I find his latest, 2012’s Sonik Kicks, to be particularly excellent. Its songs are tougher-edged and more sonically adventurous, with lots of strange noises and sound effects and moody soundscapes, than anything he ever recorded with The Jam or The Style Council. In this sense Weller rather reminds me of Daryl Hall, who went the strange and darker route the moment he was surgically separated from the mustachioed tumor that is John Oates. I particularly enjoy “Green,” “The Attic,” “That Dangerous Age,” “When Your Garden’s Grown,” and… perhaps it would be better to do it arse about-face and say the only songs I don’t much care for on Sonik Kicks are “Kling I Klang” (veddy veddy annoying) and the pretty but mawkish “Be Happy Children.”
And he has numerous songs off earlier albums, such as the no-joke funky “Blink & You’ll Miss It” off 2006’s Catch-Flame!, the hard-edged rocker “A Bullet for Everyone” off 2002’s Illumination, and the folk-rockish “Dust and Rocks” off 2000’s Heliocentric, that are bona fide excellent. And there are plenty more, like “The Changingman,” “From The Floorboards Up,” “The Attic,” and “That Dangerous Age,” just to name a few. He’s still prone to writing lines like “Hidden in the back seat of my head,” which is why I’ll never think of him as highly as I do Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker or The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, but not everybody can write great lyrics, and Weller isn’t so terrible a lyricist that he’ll ever be in the running for the “Walking Slowly Down the Hall, Faster Than a Cannonball” Award, which I hand out annually to the artist who writes the worst lyrics of the year. In short, I find Weller a compelling character, one who–and this is rare–is producing stellar, heck perhaps even his best, work at an age when plenty of once-great artists have burnt out and been reduced to going the reunion route, trotting out their greatest hits over again and over again, or even worse (and yes, I’m talking to you, Rod Stewart) to whoring themselves out to the latest bathetic ballad and geriatric-friendly songs from The Great American Songbook.
So I was actually looking forward to seeing Weller at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday, July 30, although I was careful to bring along a pair of airport ground-control-strength headphones in preparation of the moment he broke into “My Ever Changing Moods.” Unfortunately I missed the opening act because I was in tie and tux, handing out the “Faster Than a Cannonball” Award to Train for their lines “Just a shy guy/Looking for a two ply/Hefty bag to hold my love” (both stupid and menacing, a tough combo) when Shania Twain hurled a high-heeled shoe whose needle-thin heel poked me right in the left eye, screeching, “I should have won for my line, ‘‘With all this stress, I must confess/This could be worse than PMS’!!” The Black-Eyed Peas, who have won several times in the past, weren’t happy either. What can I say? Music people take the “Cannonball” very seriously.
As for the show, I largely enjoyed it, although it had a few down moments. Weller, in a grey t-shirt, bopped around the stage like a man half his age, played some great solos, and was in great voice throughout. As for the band, which boasted two drummers, a bassist, two guitarists (counting Weller), and a keyboardist, they were tight, as you would expect a Weller band to be. And yes, they played “My Ever Changing Moods,” but it didn’t sound so horrible as the recorded version, although that’s not to say I didn’t suffer while Weller sang it. I simply didn’t suffer as terribly as thought I would. What really caused me some pain was “Porcelain Gods,” whose melody I didn’t like, went on forever, and even included that bane of all live rock shows, a lengthy drum solo. Nor was I thrilled by “Going Places,” a slowish soul tune that brought back bad memories of The Style Council, or “Dragonfly,” which Weller announced, moving to the electric piano, was a song he wrote for his daughter. It wasn’t very pretty for a song you’d write for your daughter, in fact its melody was downright drab, although it was redeemed in part by a very good guitar solo. Finally I wasn’t impressed by “Above the Clouds,” which had an “adult contemporary” (what horrible words; they’re as bad as “adult diapers”) vibe. In my notebook this morning I found this sentence: “If I eat my own liver, will it make it stop?”
That said, the band played a wonderful version of “That’s Entertainment,” with acoustic guitars and some nice “sha la la la la la’s” and Weller singing ironically, “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 lamplights blinking/That’s entertainment.” And The Jam’s “Start!” was a total New Wave joy, with its great bass riff, insistent power chords, and great chorus (“And what you give/Is what you get”). Speaking of The Jam, Weller and Company also played “A Town Called Malice” as the show closer. And it drove the audience into a frenzy with its great bass opening, wonderful melody, and great guitar riffs. “Friday Street” was also great, one of my night’s favorites, what with its slow start that transitioned by way of some funk guitar and big drum crash into a swifter, sleeker beast, with its lovely melody, crunchy guitars, and Weller’s powerhouse vocals. I also loved “Fast Car/Slow Traffic,” a punker with soul, not to mention some cool keyboard and very dissonant guitars.
“Waking the Nation” was great too, although I’m generally hesitate to wake nations, they’re so grouchy in the morning. But with its really big guitar opening riff and power chords, not to mention the powerful wham blam of two drummers, this is one nation I was glad to see rudely dragged from bed. “From the Floorboards Up” was a short but frenetic rocker, probably the fastest song of the evening, and it featured a great guitar solo that, like all the guitar solos played at the show, was too short for my liking. The mid-tempo “Peacock Suit” had a bluesy vibe, with big-ass guitars, lots of Bonham-big drum pummel, and great vocals by Weller, who sang, “I don’t need a ship to sail in stormy weather/I don’t need you to ruffle the feathers/On my Peacock Suit.” I also loved the soul-inflected “Sunflower,” a perky number with a pretty melody and a guitar riff that brought to mind the Beatles. “I miss you so,” sang Weller, but I won’t miss the rambunctious but annoying “Kling I Klang,” which sounds just like the songs I used to hear on German radio when I was over there, and never failed to make me tell my ex-wife, “You people are strange.” That said I loved “7&3 is the Striker’s Name,” with its great guitars, the echo on Weller’s vocals, and the line “They’re all bastards too.”
“The Attic” off Sonik Kicks was super peppy and wonderful, especially thanks to some excellent keyboard accompaniment, while the atmospheric “Sea Spray” had an almost folkie feel and made me very sad in a happy way, what with its acoustic guitars, group vocals, and thumping beat. Why, it was almost ecstatic, which is why I go to shows, with Weller singing “Carry me home/Carry me home/You old sea spray” while the acoustic guitars reminded me of Faces’ folksy sing-a-longs at their very best. Meanwhile, “That Dangerous Age,” which opened with some handclaps and vocal “Sho-oop Sho-oops!,” bounced along like a Mod on leapers and was good clean fun, especially with the band’s dual drummers pounding out a beat so propulsive it could power a panzer. “Whirlpool’s End” opened with some quiet guitar strumming, then the guitars and drums kicked in and what you had on your hands was a good, mid-tempo hard rocker, with Weller singing “Now I don’t feel the same way/I’m changing again” and the guitarists providing some cool “Sha la la la la la la la’s”and the whole shebang ending in a crescendo that did indeed remind me of a whirlpool, what with the drummers smashing away and Weller playing some nice feedback guitar.
I wasn’t thrilled by “Wild Wood,” which was slow and a bit dull to my jaded ears, although Weller’s vocals were impassioned and it featured some nice wah-wah guitar. I wasn’t crazy about “Broken Stones” either, which was soulful but rather lackluster and reminded me of a Style Council tune. Weller was again at the electric piano, where he bobbed and shook his head like a white Stevie Wonder, and I’ll be damned if I understand the line “Like broken stones/Who are trying to get home.” Why not take mass transit? That said I really enjoyed “Sunflower,” which was also soulful but far more upbeat and with a catchy melody, not to mention an irresistible guitar riff and Weller singing, “We have no future/We have no past” and “I miss you so” like a latter-day Steve Winwood. And last but far from least there was “The Changingman,” a very nice rocker with Beatles-esque guitars, tight backup vocals, some squealing synth, and a great but brief Weller guitar solo. Not to mention some nice lyrics like “And the more I see/The more I know/The more I know/The less I understand.”
What can I say? I got lucky. Now only did I escape the show having to hear only one Style Council tune–although I wouldn’t have minded hearing “Ghosts of Dachau,” just so I could be absolutely certain I hadn’t imagined it–but I learned that I am a traitor, a quisling, and a Benedict Arnold, and I have accepted it. I was wrong, dead wrong, about Weller and I would recommend his records or live shows to anyone, except of course my younger brother, who only listens to the albums that feature Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing six saxes at once.
Weller may not have put on the perfect show, but I enjoyed it immensely, and I would see him again. Why, I would see him again just to hear “Friday Street” and “Sea Spray” and “Sunflower,” not to mention the New Wavish–even though I never cared for New Wave–“Start!” Weller may never win “The Cannonball,” but he has nothing to be ashamed of. He’s a survivor, a great songwriter, and unlike The Style Council or that nightmare about Bono’s buttocks, he doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies. Whatever could that Bono dream have been about? I don’t know, and I don’t think I want to know. Some things are eternal mysteries, such as why the pimples on his ass spelled out “putz.”
