- #Paul weller the style council mod
- #Paul weller the style council mods
- #Paul weller the style council series
#Paul weller the style council series
The Jam never really made it in America and it nearly made me drop my post-work glass of wine a couple of months back when I tuned into AMC”s series The Walking Dead and heard The Jam’s well-known classic, A Town Called Malice played virtually in its entirety. Is it just me or is that a pretty good description of modern capitalism? Meanwhile The Gift had some great songs and some intensely political lyrics.
Both The Jam and The Style Council covered Mayfield’s Move on Up and Weller ended up interviewing Curtis for the VHS video, Curtis Mayfield Live At Ronnie Scott’s. Mayfield sang about a different kind of oppression from that which Weller had experienced first-hand and there is no doubt that he was a major influence on Weller and his next group, The Style Council.
#Paul weller the style council mods
Like so many mods Weller had been an avid consumer of soul music since at least the mid-1970s, when an early incarnation of The Jam had covered classics such as Rufus Thomas’ Walking The Dog and Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour.īy the time The Jam broke up his interests had extended to more socially-aware soul music, especially that of musical and lyrical genius Curtis Mayfield. Significantly he also wanted to move in a new musical direction. Weller wanted to break from his band mates but from his audience as well. This song actually predicted what would be Weller’s final break with Labour Party politics and perhaps politics in general when he got his hands very dirty with the Red Wedge musical movement to elect Labour in 1987.īy the time the final Jam album The Gift was released in 1982 the band’s split was inevitable. You’re saying power’s all! – and it’s power you need!”. You’re talking like some fucking hardened MP.
“What makes once young minds get in this state. Unlike the majority of pop stars of that era he turned to a Shelley poem for the liner notes – more specifically, The Mask of Anarchy:Īnd in the track Scrape Away from that album he had a few words of his own to add: In 1980, after the massive popular success of Going Underground, the first of four Number One hits, The Jam would release the follow-up album, Sound Affects.
I wish that could be possible worldwide.” “ describes getting to Barcelona when all the workers have taken over the city….this was it, actually in existence, and it worked – which is something very hard to imagine. Here’s an astonishing extract from an interview in Smash Hits (a best selling teenage pop magazine) a year after he left The Jam talking about George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: Just where was all this coming from in a 20 year old? Weller was always an avid reader. “These are the real creatures that time has forgot, Songs like Private Hell, Thick as Thieves and Saturday’s Kids speaking directly to the target audience. Setting Sons was the album – playing time of just under half an hour and perfect to listen to while getting ready to go to school.
#Paul weller the style council mod
Life and people are full of paradoxes and contradictions Paul had little personal exposure to the daily grind of waged work but he came to articulate the frustrations, anger, pleasures and hopes of working class people across the country.Īfter some ill-focused, perhaps even scatter-gun attempts at political writing on the first two Jam albums Weller moved more towards social commentary on the third LP, All Mod Cons in 1978, but it was in the mid-period that he would really hit his stride.ĭuring this period The Jam’s songs spoke directly to me as a fourteen year old growing up on a council estate in the ‘provinces’. In terms of subject matter he was deeply influenced by his own working class background. Musically Weller was influenced by the Sex Pistols and The Clash as well as a plethora of sixties legends. In 1982, the year that he penned the aforementioned lyric and that The Jam split up, he was just 23. At the time of the interview quoted above Weller was only eighteen years old, and it showed. The main driving force was songwriter Paul Weller, backed by inventive bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler. The Jam were the sound of the suburbs, coming out of Woking in Surrey, England. In this article I will reflect on his journey. This quote and lyric from Paul Weller demonstrate the considerable political distance he travelled in five years. You’d see the hands of oppression fumble. Who would earn their profits? Who would make their bombs? Not just British Leyland but the whole world. “Imagine, if tomorrow the workers went on strike. “We’ll all be voting Conservative at the next election.”
John Wheeler looks back at The Jam, who became arguably the most popular and political band to emerge from the punk explosion of 1977.
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