Album Review: Paul Weller - 66

Even before you put it on the turntable, that striking cover art, which even a casual pop fan might guess - although he's signed it, which helps - comes from the hand of Peter Blake, the man behind the collage that adorns Stanley Road (as well as obscure curio Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) indicates that Weller means business. He always has and he always does. The Woking Wonder is one of the few artists, alongside Nick Cave and a precious one or two others, who might actually be getting better as he gets older.

If, like me, you are inordinately fond of 2020’s superb On Sunset then you may proceed to your local record emporium with confidence, as 66 shares its winning combination of tradition and experimentation. There are song writing collaborations with several prominent pals - not something Weller has gone in for much before, although 'The Soul Searchers', the lovely opener to 2018's True Meanings, written with Villagers man Conor O'Brien, springs to mind. Suggs chip in to the rat race bemoaning ‘Ship Of Fools’, a gentle opener with a Traffic-like flute solo. Noel Gallagher helps with the parp and clang of the “checking news for conspiracies” ‘Jumble Queen’, a cut that bubbles with the class of vim that Mr G.'s solo records would benefit from. And even Bobby Gillespie gets it right with the acoustic guitar and Hammond driven groovy single ‘Soul Wandering’, which would have served as an appropriate alternate album title.

The sound - his ever changing modes - ranges from the widescreen disco-ish groove of ‘Flying Fish’, which then goes Telecaster twang with Weller gleefully telling us to "Look out", to the Bowie/’Sons Of The Silent Age’ melancholia of closer ‘Burn Out’. There’s the orchestral swell behind the choruses of the waltzing ‘My Best Friend’s Coat’ and the beautiful ‘I Woke Up’, the glorious “so glad I opened my eyes” starburst – with harp - of ‘Rise Up Singing’, and the breeze that ‘A Glimpse Of You’ floats upon. There's something of the artistic triumph of 2021’s An Orchestrated Songbook, in all this thanks to musical polymath Hannah Peel, who’s been chipping in since 2017’s A Kind Revolution, and her heavenly string arrangements. The horn charts, inventive and driving, are even better.

‘Nothing’ has the same kind of reminiscent longing for places and faces gone that featured on the title track of On Sunset. If there's lyrical looking back, and contemplating where he is, throughout - not his usual M.O. - as when he takes a seat in the garden to "wait 'til the end of the world" in 'A Glimpse Of You' or the opening lines of 'I Woke Up' where he awakes to find everything gone, everything changed, and nothing remaining the same, then that's surely allowable, given that he's getting on, a bit (he turns the 66 of the title this week). Still, this is Weller we're talking about, so he can follow the lullaby soul of 'Sleepy Hollow' (more dancing flute, and what sounds like a vibraphone) with ‘In Full Flight’, which is lifted by the voices of psychedelic soulsters Say She She, because the mod master always has his lugs out for something different.

“If I can do it, I can do it clean” the guvnor, who's "still searching" and imploring us to "bring back revolution", sings. Who does it better?