Paul Weller - Jam - Style Council

“Every time I discover a new kind of music, it completely takes me over. I want to write in that style, explore it fully. There's no further thought involved, I just have to do it.” That's what Paul Weller told Mojo in May 2010, and looking at his résumé, it's hard to disagree: he was the angry, working-class rocker of the Jam, the sophisticated dandy of the Style Council, but also the polished singer-songwriter that Oasis turned to when they needed a godfather for britpop.

He's also the one who, in 2010, came out of nowhere with an album called “Wake Up The Nation”, featuring the surprising collaboration of Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine.

Of all these experiences, the most controversial was the one with the Style Council, born out of a startling about-face. In 1982 Weller disbanded the Jam at the peak of their success, plunging into despair a fanbase that worshipped him like a messiah, and formed a duo with keyboardist Mick Talbot (already a collaborator with the old band) to start making soul music. Preceded by the mini-album “Introducing The Style Council”, the true manifesto of this new direction is 1983's “Café Bleu”, an album whose cover shows the two musicians wandering among the tables of a Parisian café like existentialist intellectuals. It's a big leap from punk and the English clubs where enthusiasm regularly degenerates into brawls, but Weller had understood that the wind was changing, and decided to take refuge somewhere beautiful.

The turn wasn't pure madness: Weller, like most working-class kids tied to mod culture, grew up listening to Motown records and dancing to Northern soul in the clubs. Struck down on the path of punk, he hadn't skimped on soul covers and references on the Jam's records (especially on their last one, “The Gift”). But this wasn't just a nod to the black canon of the Sixties: Paul had heard Michael Jackson's “Off The Wall” and decided to dive into contemporary black music, an operation with few precedents: certainly Bowie's “Young Americans” (1975) and Scritti Politti's “Songs To Remember” (1982), a former post-punk band converted to American black music. These were hugely influential episodes, and from the release of “Café Bleu” onward Weller would find himself at the head of a whole platoon of English new-soul acts.

But just listen to the Style Council's manifesto, the gorgeous piano ballad “My Ever Changing Moods”, with its popular melody that could just as easily have been sung by a George Michael, to realise that no one actually sings soul quite like Paul Weller. However relaxed he gets, his voice remains scratchy, at times harsh, a timbre no black singer would ever use. But that's precisely the beauty of it, the contradiction of a white man making black music while claiming that in the Eighties black artists are “the only ones making good music, as it's always been.”

This new soul direction is thus explored in all its shades: danceable with the electronic funk of “Strenght Of Your Nature”, acoustic with a horn-lit “Headstart For Happiness” and a “Here's The One That Got Away” that still sounds remarkably fresh today, ultra-pop with a chart-bound “You're The Best Thing”. They even venture into a rap tirade with “A Gospel”, perhaps the album's boldest moment, but also the one that has aged worst.

With the crystalline sweetness of “The Whole Point Of No Return”, though, an awareness emerges: Weller does black music his own way, and so if with Bowie one could speak of “soul where something else is going on”, if Scritti Politti could afford to mix Michael Jackson with the philosopher Derrida, here instead it's about carrying out a political attack on the English class system. The operation had already begun with the Jam, but in 1983 Weller found rock too ambiguous and compromised to say what needed to be said, so he sought out a new language: it's essentially the same attitude already found in post-punk, except here rock isn't radically altered, it's replaced altogether.

After “Café Bleu” Weller would join the “Red Wedge” collective in support of workers hit hard by Thatcher's policies, and would fire off even more devastating broadsides against the government with warrior-soul masterpieces like “Walls Come Tumbling Down” and “Internationalists”, on the Style Council's second LP, “Our Favourite Shop”.

That said, the sublime contradiction of “Café Bleu” is that a good half of the album, true to the Fifties Parisian inspiration of its cover, isn't soul at all, but instead immerses us in the smoky atmosphere of a nightclub where the small hours are spent listening to jazz. The gorgeous guitar of the instrumental “Blue Café” draws us into this sophisticated mood, later heightened by the elegant bebop of “Dropping Bombs On The White House”.

The contemporary reference point here is the English scene revolving around London clubs like The Wag and The Mudd, which includes bands like Animal Nightlife and Everything But The Girl. The latter are in fact invited to contribute to the album, so that the wonderful Tracey Thorn can turn “The Paris Match” into an enveloping torch song, undoubtedly one of the album's peaks alongside “My Ever Changing Moods”.

The elegance of the music is matched by a sense of style in dress (of which Weller, a true mod, has always been a champion); the cover bears a quote from Jean Paul Marat and liner notes signed by Paul under the pseudonym “The Cappuccino Kid”: the Style Council present themselves as the standard-bearers of the “new cool” movement, which also includes other artists united by the same pop-soul-jazz approach and equally “mature” attitude, such as Sade, Matt Bianco, Working Week and the aforementioned Everything But The Girl.

Talbot and Weller, then, don't merely reproduce a genre by rote, but present a fascinating mix of influences, unafraid to blend fashionable electronic sounds (the programmed rhythms of “Strenght Of Your Nature”, not too far from the dance sound of Heaven 17), Blue Note-style atmospheres, and even Latin rhythmic influences (just listen to “Me Ship Came In”). They're also remarkably modern in presenting themselves as an open group prone to collaboration. Besides Thorn (whom you'll find triumphing in the Nineties with Massive Attack's “Protection” and the hit “Missing”), the album also features saxophonist Billy Chapman (on the jazz instrumentals), bassist Chris Bostock of the Jo Boxers (on “Here's The One That Got Away”), and black vocalist D.C. Lee, who would later become Paul's wife, while drummer Steve White is effectively the group's third member.

This omnivorous, experimental streak would continue throughout the Eighties, earning the Style Council as much acclaim as bewilderment from Jam nostalgics who now found their old rocker unrecognisable. Things came to a head with the notorious episode of "Modernism: A New Decade", when the Council attempted to ride the wave of Chicago house, only to have the album rejected outright by their record label. In the wake of this debacle, Weller launched a solo career that would instead bring him renewed success as a Britpop guru and champion of classic Sixties and Seventies rock, becoming, in a word, the "Modfather" - a bona fide national institution alongside bowler hats and double-decker buses.

No more radical chic and back to being a working class hero, in keeping with the very English notion that a singer born poor shouldn't write poetry (Weller published some on "December Child"), shouldn't love France, Debussy and Satie (paid tribute to on the Style Council's fourth album), and should instead be drinking in pubs and sticking to the kind of music the public expects of him.

Paul Weller proved himself a master of that too, still delivering plenty of fine songs and even the odd unexpected jolt, like "Wake Up The Nation" - but his true revolution had already happened with the Style Council.

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17/04/2011