![]() I think of the words of another melancholy twenty-something artist, William Wordsworth, who described “that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” But at age 19, I thought Weller had read my mind. #The style council soul deep update#On the single’s flip side, “ The Paris Match,” Weller (or Tracey Thorn, in a later version) sings, “I’m only sad in a natural way / And I enjoy sometimes feeling this way.” The literary scholar in me hears in those lines an 80s update of the eighteenth-century fad of sensibility. Its chorus, with a frustrated repetition of “no matter what I do” finally resolves with the inevitable confession, “I end up hurting you.” A spare drum machine and shimmer of 80s synthesizers provide the aural update to its American soul inspirations (the Dramatics’ 1972 “In the Rain” comes to mind). The atmospheric “Long Hot Summer” (1983), with a title that hints at both romance and politics but a lyric of personal anguish, is probably the band’s most successful foray into this field. Along the way, Weller employs some zeugma-esque lyrics worthy of Dickens: “We used to chase dreams now we chase the dragon.”īut there was also melancholy. “ Walls Come Tumbling Down!” (1985), a top ten attack on Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, opens with the memorable line, “You don’t have to take this crap.” “ Come to Milton Keynes” (1985), a missing link between the Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society” and Blur’s “Country House,” is a dark commentary on one of the last of the new towns, where the opening stanza’s “May I walk you home tonight?” mutates into “May I slash my wrists tonight?” in the last. If the image and sound were cool and sophisticated, the lyrics were more often angry and urgent. If the Who, the Kinks, and early rock and roll informed the musical character of the Jam, it was this other ’60s - along with a dollop of Philly and Motown soul - that shaped the Style Council. I discovered the Style Council at the same time I discovered cool jazz, bossa nova, and the soundtracks (and fashions) of French nouvelle vague and Italian Neorealismo cinema. What was it about the Style Council that spoke to a bookish teenager in middle America? Weller and Talbot embodied a cosmopolitan European outlook that seemed to include everything I thought was missing from my own life. I well remember waking up at sunrise on July 13, 1985, at my parents’ home in Omaha, Nebraska, just to watch the Council perform at Live Aid - they were second on the London bill, after Status Quo - only to have MTV cut away after one song for an interview. His first band, the Jam, produced a string of UK hits between 19, and there was widespread consternation in the British press when Weller left to form the Style Council with keyboardist Mick Talbot.Īcross the Atlantic, neither the Jam nor the Style Council received much notice from that then-new source of everything musical, MTV. And as the Long Hot Summers anthology makes clear, the best of those songs stand up to any British or American pop music of the 1980s.Ī musical icon in Britain, Weller has never had a broad following overseas in fact, The Style Council’s “My Ever Changing Moods” (1984) remains his only composition to reach the US Top 40. More than any other music of the era, they shaped my social and political as well as my sonic outlook. While I’ll happily listen to anything Weller produces, I will always have a soft spot for those Style Council records. It seems the perfect time to raise a cappuccino to Weller’s other great band. Fittingly, a new anthology of Style Council recordings, Long Hot Summers, recently reached the UK top ten, and a documentary of the same name will appear on Showtime this month. While this encouraged some listeners to wax nostalgic for Weller’s earliest success with his mod-revival band the Jam, On Sunset has far more in common with the eclectic, soul-inspired records of his Style Council years. In July, when On Sunset debuted at the top of the UK charts, Paul Weller achieved the remarkable feat of having a number one album in five consecutive decades. ![]()
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