The Eternal and Ever-Living MOD

Having established himself with The Jam, contenders for the title of finest post-punk singles act of the late ’70s, Paul Weller split the band at a creative peak in 1982 and immersed himself in modernist lounge, soul and jazz with The Style Council. By the early ’90s he was in the doldrums, without a record or publishing deal, and was forced to go back to working the clubs. But 1993’s Wild Wood album re-established him as one of the UK’s biggest selling and most enduring solo acts. Since then, he’s hardly looked back.

DAVE FANNING: You’ve called 22 Dreams a musical journey. Should we listen to it as one whole piece, and not just pick one song out of it?
PAUL WELLER: Well that’s how it was intended, so it’s a proper album in that respect. When I started this record last spring I was obviously mindful of the fact that I was going to be 50 this year, so I thought, ‘I’m really going to go all-out to do something different and try and create what could possibly be my best work ever.’ Just to be contrary I suppose, and to show myself and other people that I can do it. It just seems quite a monumental age. I’m half a century, and that’s really quite unbelievable. But if I don’t think about it I don’t feel any different than how I did when I was 30. I mean, I’m kind of enjoying life a lot more at the moment, so perhaps it suits me, I don’t know.
Were you enjoying life at the beginning when The Jam started?
I loved it, loved all the early days of The Jam. I even liked the bits before we made it. We always had so much fun just driving up the A3 from Woking to London and back doing gigs. And that initial rush of when you’re starting to make it, and you can tell you’re getting more popular and more people are coming to gigs – you kind of only get those times properly once in your life really, that real initial excitement. That was a very exciting time but I enjoyed most of it. I think it was just quite a lot of pressure towards the end. It was, I felt, quite a heavy pressure for a relatively young man as well. So The Style Council was a kind of relief for me, a real weight lifted.
Your third Jam album, All Mod Cons, put you into a level of, ‘We’re not just this little band from Woking, getting on TOTP and getting on the cover of NME. We’re really serious contenders here.’
It kind of all exploded after that and people started taking us seriously. Success can be a great thing. Success isn’t always destructive. It can spur people on to greatness.
You were massively successful with The Jam, and yet you decided to break them up. Did the others being a few years older than you make it very difficult?
We were just three very different people. That’s probably true of most bands. As long as you can get together and make it happen on the stage, that’s kind of all right. It’s nice if you do get on socially, but we had our moments. Me and Bruce were pretty tight, but we all lived different lifestyles. I kind of lived in London, and the other two lived in Woking. I think all those things make a difference.
Did The Sex Pistols have a big effect on you?
I was 17 when I first saw them and it was so fantastic for me to watch a band who were pretty much the same age as me, who looked different, and looked more like I thought I possibly did. They were the antithesis of all those ‘70s stadium bands: REO Speedwagon, Fleetwood Mac and all that stuff. People bang on about the Pistols now like it was a massive cultural force, which was a lot of nonsense really. But they were very important at the time. They kind of set fire to a lot of people’s passions and hearts and I think it was what our generation needed.
But didn’t you take it one step further with The Jam by bringing it to the suburbs?
Well, it was very cliquey. It wasn’t a particularly working class thing. We took it and made it our own. Kids that wouldn’t normally go to gigs started coming to gigs. And I was writing about things that those people can relate to, and I think that’s why we clicked with a lot of people, that’s why our music’s endured and why people still love The Jam. And I think also ’cos we ended at the right time. We didn’t carry on for the next 30 years.
When The Style Council started, it was a shock to Jam fans, not least the way you were dressed. You had a kind of ‘We can take on the world, we can beat anything’ attitude, a slight arrogance.
Yeah, a lot of arrogance. And I just wanted to get away from what people recognised and what people assumed I was like, and that involved smashing a lot of images and musical references and all sorts of things. I mean some people came with it and a lot of people weren’t having it at all because they just wanted the three-piece Jam sound and that stuff. But the only way to move forward is to break what you already have and start again and reassemble the pieces. So I think it was confusing for a lot of Jam fans. Don’t forget that The Style Council were massive for sort of three years. The history books get rewritten a little bit. We had number ones and top ten records, we played massive gigs.
You were absolutely huge between ’82 and ’85. But your label refused to put out your fifth album. Did it all go downhill from there?
It was kind of going downhill anyway. I think we just lost interest, me and the rest of the people in the band. Other things took its place: having children, getting married and falling in love. You can’t always just be in that gang, you have to grow up. And I think that’s what happened for us. We were all victims of the ’80s technology revolution, and that’s why we all ended up sounding the same after a while. It was the same horrible glassy keyboards. After the ’80s, for me personally, I just wanted to get back to an organic sound, back to drum kits and guitars and proper keyboards. I wanted to get back to organic music.
When you were writing songs, you went to see The Smiths in Newcastle around 1986. You were struck by the way they connected with fans.
I realised how little I was connecting, after seeing them. We just lost track of our audience, we got totally out of synch with them. Seeing The Smiths it reminded me of how The Jam used to be.
In getting back to organic music, you rediscovered the guitar, but you also rediscovered the fact that you were starting off again. How scary was that?
I don’t know if it was scary. It was thoroughly depressing really. It was like, ‘God, I’ve done all this work and sold all these records just to end up starting from scratch again.’ I mean, in hindsight it was one of the best things that could have happened to me, because it taught me a great lesson. But at the time, it was depressing playing clubs again to a few hundred people. I didn’t have a record deal and a publishing deal and all those things. And I got through that by playing live, just by carrying on working, getting out on the road. We played in the UK obviously, but we also went to America quite a few times and we went to Japan, which has been a lifeline for a lot of people. I kept on playing and through that process I found my music and got re-ignited again.
Are you re-energised by new music all the time? The amount of bands, from Arctic Monkeys to The Enemy, who cite you as an influence... are you chuffed with that?
Yeah, I think it’s a great compliment, ‘cos I know how much people have influenced me, so if I can pass that on to other people – fantastic. I take it as a great complement, and it does re-energise me. It’s always great to be inspired by new bands and young artists, it just makes the whole thing continual, and means the music’s still alive and it’s ongoing.