Middle-age kicks

Paul Weller was out until 3 o’clock this morning with his superstar rock chums, can remember every moment of it and doesn’t even have the faintest trace of a hangover. What’s happened to the man who once scored a whopping nine out of ten on the ‘Noel Gallagher Mad Bastard-ometer’?

“Noel, bless him, always overestimated my partying powers!” the disgustingly well-preserved 53-year-old cackles over a cuppa. “I knocked drinking on the head about a year-and-a-half ago, so I’m not waking up any more going,
‘Shit, what happened… and was there a photographer there?’”
The Modfather may be referring to the widely circulated 2008 snap of him and his then 22-year-old fiancé/now wife Hannah Andrews conked out on a Prague pavement after a busy night, er, sight-seeing. Who were the equally sober and restrained musicianly folk he was supping Kaliber with last night?
“I did the Teenage Cancer Trust gig in the Albert Hall, which is put on every year by Roger Daltrey who also headlined this time round. I did four songs with a string quartet – I know, very highbrow of me!; Amy MacDonald did a great version of ‘Born To Run’; Steve Winwood played a few and Kelly Jones did The Faces song, ‘Ooh
La La’, with Ronnie Wood who was in really
good form last night and looked well. It was wicked, man!”
I know they’ve met before, but does Paul still feel like the ten-year-old chain-listening to Quadrophenia in his bedroom when he encounters Mr. Daltrey?
“Yeah, I suppose so but he’s just such a nice man, a very welcoming, down-to-earth fella. I’ve got tremendous respect for him. It takes a lot of energy to organise that week of Teenage Cancer Trust gigs. It’s a tall order and he does it really well. He’s always got that enthusiasm and energy for the job he loves.”
Weller may be able to keep a secret, but thankfully Daltrey isn’t!
“Paul Weller’s been talking about an idea that he’s been working on, which I’d love him to do,” the ‘orrible ‘oo mainman said last week. “I’ve been very bad at finding material and he’s got this idea and he’s always said to me, ‘Why don’t you sing more?’ and I always say, ‘Find me some material.’ So we’ll see if we can come up with something.”
Another good reason for giving up the gargle is that Paul has recently become the proud father of four-month old twin boys, Bowie and John Paul. Who picked the names?
“I came up with John Paul and Bowie was down to my lovely wife,” he reveals. “Does David know? Yeah, he sent flowers and a card, so that was really cool.”
Has the arrival of not one, but two bundles of joy been a shock to the system?
“I suppose so at first, but then like the old age of riding a bike, you never really forget. Whether it’s one or two, you just get back into it. We’ve had a few sleepless nights but it’s alright.”
Paul now has seven kids in five households – the others being male model Natt (23), singer Leah (21), and the still-at-school Dylan (16), Jessamine (11) and Stevie Mac (6).
Two of the brood were pressed into service on Weller’s new album, Sonik Kicks, which Mr. McFee of this parish rightly commended for its “pure unadulterated pop thrills.”
“Yeah, Jess and Mac sing on the last track, ‘Be Happy Children’,” he coos. “I was thinking about my dad’s passing and wondering what he’d say – which would probably be, ‘Don’t shed too many tears for me because I’m still here with you. I’m still inside you.’ The strength of their character comes through you and your own kids too. Mac was very professional. He had his headphones on, but he wasn’t happy with his performance. He stormed out of the studio! If I play it in the
car now he makes me turn it off. He’s going to
be a superstar.”
Is he on a percentage?
“Nah, he’s not on royalties, man! He’s too young, but I’ll look after his money and I’ll give it to him when he’s 18… honest!”
Did he ever think back in the Jamtastic ‘70s that one day he’d be making records with his kids?
“No, not at all. I mean, I thought it was all over at 25. The 18-year-old Paul Weller wouldn’t imagine being 53, yet alone being 53 and still making music. You go with the differences in life. Change is good, you know? You have to go along with your stage in life; you have to be at one with it. I really like being in my 50s, although I don’t know how long that will go on for! I’ve become accustomed to myself and I feel more confident and comfortable in who I am. It’s been a real benefit for me.”
Unless I’m remembering the ‘70s wrongly, you didn’t have young musicians respecting the Leonard Cohens and Seasick Steves of the day for the shift they’d put in.
“It was that whole punk scorched earth policy thing,” he proffers. “I felt incredibly let down by the kids and the generation that went before me. Everyone that I dug in the ‘60s and ‘70s just lost their way, really. I thought punk was what our generation needed at the time, but 30, 35 years later you look at it from a different perspective. It’s far healthier now; my kids will play new stuff, whether it’s R&B or whatever, but they’ll also listen to a Beatles track or a Loving Spoonful track. They don’t really look at it in terms of what era it comes from or how old the people are making it. They either like it or they don’t.”
Now that’s what I call good rock ‘n’ roll parenting. Jess and Mac aren’t the only special guests on Sonik Kicks, which in case you’re wondering, picks up where Wake Up The Nation left off in terms of innovation and Weller having a veritable blast in the studio with his bezzies.
“Whoever comes down and plays always adds something else to it,” he ventures. “If you’re lucky the song will take off in a different direction and you follow that. It’s trial and error really. Noel (Gallagher) plays guitar and bass on a few tracks, Graham Coxon came and played guitar. Steve Craddock plays quite a lot of drums. You’re always going to get something good out of them.
“I’m very happy with the feel of Sonik Kicks. It’s got intensity, but it’s also got breathing space. I think it’s better than Wake Up The Nation, particularly lyrically.”
I remember Pete Doherty saying that Stephen Street insisted on getting Graham Coxon in when they worked together, telling him, “This is a professional person, behave like him!”
“I don’t know if I’d hold Graham up as the pinnacle of professionalism,” Weller laughs, “but he’s a great guitarist and all-round musician.”
Has he copped an earful of Coxon’s A+E album yet?
“No, but I’ve heard some of the songs because he played with us live before Christmas. We did a thing for Shelter, which was us and a load of comedians
like Ross Noble, Jo Brand and Tim Minchin. It was good fun.”
Another of Sonik Kick’s standouts is ‘Paper Chase’, a haunting slowburner that I hear tell is about Amy Winehouse and designer Alexander McQueen.
“The names you just mentioned were suggested by other people. My wife thought it was about Alexander McQueen and someone else thought it was Amy. It could apply to a few people I suppose. I was thinking more about myself, really. When you’re into drink and drugs, you create a bubble around you, which you can’t see out of. You miss the problems closest to you. There’s a bit of Icarus imagery in there as well.”
Ah, so Weller was paying attention when they did Greek mythology at Sheerwater County Secondary! Did he ever meet Amy?
“Yeah, a couple of times,” he notes. “She played the Electric Proms with us in 2006 and we did Jools Holland together too. She was the real deal and you don’t see too many of those people. In some ways things probably came too easy for her. She had such a god-given talent.”
At this point I’ll allow you a ten-minute YouTube break to check out the clips of Paul and Amy performing ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ and ‘Don’t Go To Strangers’ together. Incidentally, I never appreciated until watching the latter just how adept Weller is at tickling the ivories. Connoisseurs of album small print will also notice the supplying of strings and arrangements to Sonik Kicks by Sean O’Hagan, he of Microdisney and High Llamas fame.
“I’m a big fan of his work. He has amazing arrangements on a lot of his records. I thought straight away when we needed orchestration that Sean was the man for the job. I didn’t have too many plans beforehand apart from the fact that I wanted it to be a really exciting sonic journey to listen to. Hence the title!”
Despite Paul’s earlier insistence that being within touching distance of a senior citizens’ travel pass doesn’t bother him, ‘The Dangerous Age’ seems to hint at a bit of a midlife crisis.
“It came out of a lot of the gyp that I had after I got with Hannah, my wife now, because of the age difference between us – how shocking! – and the inference that I was going through a midlife crisis,” he notes. “Which I found really amusing: the clichéd notion of it. And that was the impetus for it even though the song isn’t really about that. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, too. I guess it’s also about how society views people of a certain age. For me, does it really matter what age you are? It’s what’s up there in your soul that matters.”
As somebody who put his money where his politics is during the ‘70s and early ‘80s by helping to found the Red Wedge movement – other participants included Billy Bragg and Communards man Jimmy Sommerville – is Weller as disappointed as Bruce Springsteen and President Michael D. Higgins that there’s so little activism these days in music?
“I don’t know if I’m surprised or disappointed, but I think it’s a shame that there’s no-one commenting on our times or their times. That’s the property of young bands – to reflect the times they live in. But unless it happens naturally, what’s the point of it? Personally, if I wrote any kind of protest or political song it would have exactly the same words and imagery that I used 30 years ago because I don’t think that anything has moved on too much. A lot of people, me included, are thinking, ‘Well, what the fuck?’ There’s a feeling of disenfranchisement from politics. It’s not so much giving up as not knowing who to turn to. The longer you live, the more you see that they’re all the same people and the establishment is what it is. In England anyway, the people have moved on but the establishment has stayed as it is and dragged ‘em back.”
How does he perceive Red Wedge, which had Maggie Thatcher as its bête noire, from distance?
“To be quite honest with you, I thought it was a load of bollocks. There were never any ego problems among the musicians – they were there for the right reasons – but the people behind it were all fucking careerists. The bands I related to, but the politicians were just tossers.”
Tony Benn included?
“No, we didn’t meet Tony Benn. He’s a grand fella, really. I like his attitude and his politics, but there ain’t too many Tony Benns. The rest are all posh careerists and I’ve absolutely fuck-all in common
with any of those people and I wouldn’t want to mix with them.”
Has he had any more problems with David Cameron liking his tunes – in his last Hot Press chinwag Paul enquired as to which part of ‘Eton Rifles’ the British PM “didn’t fucking get?”
“I really don’t understand it,” he says with a shake of his immaculately coiffed head. “If anyone was a fan of The Jam and wanted to go into politics, I would have thought they’d have gone completely the other way. Tory politics… it doesn’t compute with me.”
I know a reunion is as likely to happen as yours truly being selected for the next space shuttle mission – alas, it appears all the weightlessness training I’ve done has been in vain – but are there still speculative £20 million offers for Paul to get The Jam back together again?
“I don’t know about £20 million,” he chuckles, “but I’ve been offered a lot of money in the past, yeah. There ain’t enough money in the world for me to want to do that, mate.”
Weller played Sonik Kicks in its entirety at a recent London gig, suggesting that he still considers an album to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
“Because I’m old-school I do, yeah,” he nods. “I still think it’s important and when I’m making a record I look at it as Side One and Side Two regardless of how it runs in the digital world or CD or whatever. Like a good story, you have a start and a middle part to get the dynamics right and you have a good ending. I always think in those terms and the sequence of the record is really important. I spend a lot of time on that, a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to get it right. It was a challenge though to do that set. There were a couple of moments when I was on stage thinking, ‘This is either really brave or fucking stupid!’ Or a bit of both! But I think we rose to the challenge and our audience did as well. I wasn’t expecting them to go bonkers at the end because it’s 14 brand new songs they ain’t heard before, but I thought they were very gracious just taking it.”
Has he come across our great Irish white hope, Maverick Sabre?
“No, what’s he like?”
Stax, Motown, President… all the good stuff!
“I’ll have to check him out. Music-wise at the moment, I’m a big fan of Erland And The Carnival. They’ve not really had much success, which surprises me ‘cos they’re out there on their own doing something different. I loved Baxter Drury’s album last year – his dad would be proud of him. I do try and go out and listen to new stuff but I get so disappointed by it. There’s still so much of that post-Libertines, indie kids, skinny jeans band thing. It’s fucking boring now. It’s ten years later, time to
move on!”
Although by his own admission an arch-traditionalist, Weller has allowed two of his new songs to be made over by two very different
Gok Wans.
“Michael Rother from Neu! has remixed ‘Around The Lake’ as a bonus track. He put on some guitars with the effects he uses, very textural. We’ve got percussion on it, but it’s their style and sounds great. Matt Helders has done ‘The Dangerous Age’. That came from the record company. I didn’t know he was doing remixes but I like his mad, electronic, industrial stuff.”
Where does this newfound interest in Krautrock come from?
“A reviewer said that one of the tracks on 22 Dreams sounded like Neu! which made me think, ‘Oh, I better go check it out then’ and I ended up really liking that sort of music – particularly Neu! It was a bit of an unknown world to me. The same with electronic music, which is another influence on
this record.”
I asked Bono a few years ago who the competition was and instead of the expected “Bruce and the Stones”, he answered, “The Killers and Franz Ferdinand.” Is Weller still trying to prove that he’s at least as good as the youngsters?
“I’m not in competition with other bands,” he insists. “Most people I come into contact with from that world are all really nice people and very complimentary. I think we’re all on the same sort of journey, really. I have got a big competitive streak, but it’s mainly internal, just trying to better myself every time. It’s not possible over the course of 35 years to always do it, but every now and then you make a leap forward. Regardless of how long I’ve been doing this for, it’s remained interesting and fun.
“I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I’m interested in what’s next. I want to be relevant now, in 2012. I’ve done my bit for the past. I’ve only ever been about what’s next, really, and I’ll be that way until I
keel over.”
I’ve saved the most important question for last – when can we expect to see him strutting his stuff again on an Irish stage?
“There’s an outside chance we’ll do something beforehand, but probably December. Bit of a wait I know, but we’ll have the set nailed by then!”