The Style Council

Our favourite record shop turns 40. Yet there's no sign of wear on its sophisticated shelves or among its exquisite specialties. Perhaps because it's one of those timeless records: an alien that landed in the charts of 1985 and, all things considered, remained sufficiently detached from the sounds of the generations that followed. Sure, the shimmering, slightly plasticky sound of certain keyboards, some clever production tricks and the obsessive care lavished on the arrangements all point unmistakably towards the 80's, but everything remains magically suspended in a bubble, the very same one that, ultimately, encloses the entire arc of Style Council's career.

The story is well known: having thrown to the wind the mod neurosis of Jam and the rigid dogmatism of punk, Paul Weller arrived at a new musical language, steeped in soul, jazz, chanson, funk and bossa nova, crafting with keyboardist Mick Talbot (formerly of Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Bureau and Merton Parkas) a musical vision that was both elegant and radical. In a word: The Style Council. A true institution of style in the restless Britain of the Eighties, torn apart by economic contradictions and social conflict under the axe of Margaret Thatcher. But what does the Cappuccino Kid's refined stylishness have to do with the struggles of British miners? Much more than it might seem, since behind the luxurious packaging of his songs, Weller conceals sharp, furious lyrics that scream out all the indignation of a working class that feels betrayed and threatened.

But elegance is beyond dispute — in the sound as much as in the look, of which Weller, a true mod, has always been a champion. Style Council set themselves up as the standard-bearers of the "new cool" movement, which also includes other artists united by the same pop-soul-jazz approach, such as Sade, Matt Bianco, Working Week and Everything But The Girl. All devotees of the best black music, and cool jazz in particular, determined to bring traditional instruments back to the fore after the synthetic binge of the decade's first half. From their wonderful debut, "Café Bleu", a perfect blend of exquisite Parisian nuance and sharp British wit, Weller and Talbot never simply reproduce a genre by rote, but unleash a fascinating mix of influences, presenting themselves as an open group inclined towards collaboration.

The internationalist bazaar

And the horizon of "Our Favourite Shop" is likewise wide open — the second album, destined to consolidate and immortalise the Style Council brand well beyond its own brief existence. Fourteen songs that move within a continuous tension between the lightness of the form and the gravity of the content, between the obsessive care of the arrangements — Motown horns, cinematic strings, syncopated rhythms, warm harmonies — and the rawness of lyrics that hit hard on themes such as alienation, militarism, racism, historical revisionism, bourgeois hypocrisy and post-industrial devastation. It's a militant record, but never a rhetorical or didactic one.

From the splendid black-and-white cover onward, the imaginary shop that gives the album its title — most likely located somewhere around Carnaby Street — becomes the emblem of an ideal community and a worldview. Inside the emporium of dreams, the two partners of the Style Council firm appear impeccably dressed, amid patent-leather shoes, button-down shirts, flashy ties, dark suits with slim-cut trousers and overcoats, as they flick through magazines and unwrap records beneath a poster for "Another Country" (1984), the cult British film by Marek Kanievska starring Rupert Everett and Colin Firth, which became a manifesto against the respectability of the Thatcher era.

Among the collection of objects on display, true fan that he is, Weller lets the Beatles take pride of place, with the poster for "A Hard Day's Night", a famous portrait of Lennon & McCartney, a Rickenbacker guitar similar to those used by George Harrison, and a copy of a magazine with John and Paul on the cover in "Sgt Pepper's" costumes. But a careful eye will also spot Otis Redding (printed on a t-shirt hanging from a hanger bearing model Twiggy's face), Alain Delon, Al Green, footballer George Best, Greta Garbo and Brigitte Bardot, whose photos hang on the wall, alongside vinyl records by Small Faces and the Isley Brothers. There's also a rich collection of books, among which one can recognise, among others, "1984" by George Orwell, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence, a volume by the Marx Brothers, "Prick Up Your Ears" by Joe Orton, "Suedehead" by Richard Allen, "Arms and The Man" by G. B. Shaw, and "The Making of the English Working Class" by E. P. Thompson. A bibliography very much in line with the progressive positions Weller would go on to express across several of the album's tracks.

Inspired by Simon Halfon and photographed by Olly Ball, the vintage artwork echoes the album's concept: "The original idea behind the album is a kind of parallel with a shop in which all our favourite things are mixed together, in the same way our music draws on very different styles", the Modfather himself explained. And who wouldn't want to walk into a shop like that?

Tearing down every wall

Released on 8 June 1985 (in the American market under the different title "Internationalists" and with a different track order), produced by Weller himself alongside Peter Wilson (who had previously worked with Jam), "Our Favourite Shop" brings to the court of Style Council a sizeable troupe of musicians who help make the sound both layered and cohesive at once: Steve White on drums, Dee C. Lee on vocals, Camille Hinds on bass, additional vocalists, horn and string sections. It's the sense of an open collective, as the project has appeared from the very start, though with one man, Paul Weller, firmly at the helm. A project that doesn't openly chase the charts but doesn't shy away from winking at them either: so while the singles "My Ever Changing Moods" and "You're the Best Thing", taken from "Café Bleu", made an appearance on the US Billboard Hot 100, "Our Favourite Shop" would mark the peak of their commercial success, becoming the only album by the group to reach number one on the UK Chart (for one week, at the expense of Dire Straits' "Brothers In Arms"). Credit goes above all to its formidable trio of singles: "The Lodgers", "Boy Who Cried Wolf" and "Walls Come Tumbling Down".

Dee C. Lee's wonderful voice — she would be Weller's wife for 11 years, and the mother of two of his children — lights up "The Lodgers" with supernatural grace; from its acid subtitle aimed at the Iron Lady and her origins — "(Or She Was Only A Shopkeeper's Daughter)" — the song reveals its accusatory intent, pillorying the classism and conformism of the society of the time, with lines such as “There’s only room for those the same/ Those who play the leeches game/ Don’t get settled in this place/ The lodger’s terms are in disgrace”. The packaging, on the other hand, is pure deluxe pleasure: a Motown-school soul-r'n'b, embellished by an exquisite smooth-jazz interlude, with Weller joining in on vocals for a duet worthy of applause.

No less memorable, "Boy Who Cried Wolf" is instead the record's synth-pop peak, with the shadowy — and magnificent — melodic phrase of Talbot's keyboards framing Weller's bitter tale: for the protagonist it's too late, he's no longer believable in his promises to his beloved, just like the boy who cried wolf: “I need you more each day/ Heaven knows why that it goes that way/ Now it’s far too late, an’ I’ve lost this time/ Like the Boy who cried Wolf”. A simply irresistible electro-pop-r'n'b hybrid that shows Style Council's more intimate, introspective side. Sealing the album's more overtly political side is instead the third single, "Walls Come Tumbling Down!", a joyous anthem to solidarity and to the possibility of tearing down together the walls of social injustice: amid beats and shimmering horns, once again duetting with Dee C. Lee, Weller stages a rowdy r'n'b boogie in the style of Earth Wind & Fire, a close relative of the successful "Shout To The Top", all strings and piano locked in tight combat, released as a 45 and included only in the deluxe edition of the album. The call to tear down walls belongs to that stirring optimism that animated so many songs of the 80s — from Bruce Springsteen's anthems to R.E.M.'s "These Days" and U2's "Like A Song" — back when rock still seemed capable of stirring consciences:

Paul Weller:

You don’t have to take this crap

You don’t have to sit back and relax

Dee C. Lee:

(You can actually try changing it)

Paul Weller:

I know we’ve always been taught to rely

Upon those in authority

But you never know until you try

How things just might be

Dee C. Lee:

(If we came together so strongly, yeah)

Paul Weller:

Are you gonna try to make this work

Or spend your days down in the dirt

You see things can change

Yes an' walls came a-tumbling down

Almost a closing of the circle in the name of hope, for an album that had opened with the story of a working-class community's dissolution, filtered through family events, in the opening blues number "Homebreakers", all horns, choruses and Hammond organ. In between, there's the full range of Weller's "ever changing moods", a genuine chronicler of his generation's insidious unease. Shifts of mood, yes, but also of register and style. The record moves effortlessly from the sinuous bossa nova of "All Gone Away" to the sixties nostalgia of "Come To Milton Keynes", from the biting "garage-swing" of "Internationalists" to the tribute to French chanson of "Down In The Seine", from the instrumental funk of the title track, with its gleaming 70's-style Farfisa organ à la Jam, right up to the Beatles-esque strings of "A Stones Throw Away", which sound so much like "Eleanor Rigby".

An emotional rollercoaster that's mirrored in the lyrics too, ranging from the contrite abyss of "A Man Of Great Promise" to the infectious brightness of "Down The Seine" and "Luck". The former, beneath its soft accompaniment and driving rhythm, conceals the story of a suicide: Weller reads in the newspaper obituaries that a childhood acquaintance has taken his own life, and wonders whether something could have been done to stop it ("Oh if I could've changed that, then Lord knows I'd do it now/ Oh but there is no going back – And what's done is done forever"), thinking of what that bright friend might have become ("And I think of what you might have been/ A man of such great promise"). On the flip side, the Parisian flavours of "Down The Seine" – all accordion, piano, Hammond organ and French lyrics – reveal a romantic rapture on the banks of the Seine, while the driving "Luck" is almost an ode from Weller to his love story with Dee C. Lee, the two of them chasing each other vocally, showing the full redemptive power of love.

But the core of the album is political. And the backdrop can only be that of the struggles of the British working class and its deep sense of uprootedness. In this respect, together with the opening "Homebreakers", two songs like "All Gone Away" and "Come To Milton Keynes" form almost a thematic triptych. The first brings back to the fore the theme of an economy that severs the social and emotional bonds of old communities. Weller, in particular, rails against the building schemes disfiguring the face of small towns. Beneath tropical calypso rhythms, marimbas and flute flourishes, the Modfather unleashes his sharpest sarcasm: "Come take a walk upon these hills and see how monetarism kills whole communities even families – there's nothing left so they've all gone away". Completing the picture is the raw post-industrial allegory wrapped in the skipping beats and liquid keyboards of "Come To Milton Keynes", where the facade of "delightful houses" masks the breakdown of entire communities. It almost sounds like an echo of the Kinks' praise of an idyllic old England on "Village Green Preservation Society", except that Weller has in mind the far more contemporary drama of depopulated villages and the impoverishment of the British working class in the '80s (“Let us share our insanity/ Go mad together in Community/ Boys on the corner looking for their supper/ Boys round the green looking for some slaughter – We used to chase dreams now we chase the dragon/ Mine is the semi with the Union Jack on”).

And so it's the young who pay the price too, losing hope as soon as they come of age, left "with everything to lose": "With Everything To Lose". Soul set to a rumba beat and proto-acid jazz, amid flutes and hazy horns, for another venomous invective against discrimination: “From the playground to the wasteground/ Hope ends at 17/ Sweeping floors and filling shelves/ Forced into government schemes… No choice or chance for the future/ The rich enjoy less tax/ Dress the girls in pretty pink/ The shit goes to the blacks/ A generation’s heart torn out”.

"Internationalists", meanwhile, is practically an anthem: jittery funk-rock rhythms, brass, acid-toned Hammond organs, pulsing drums, jagged guitar and an angry spoken word spat into the microphone, calling for moral rearmament against social injustice and racism: "If you believe you have an equal share… If your eyes see deeper than the colour of skin… If you see the mistake in having bosses at all… Rise up now and declare yourself – an internationalist!". Strong words even back then, but today, in an age of ugly nationalism, they resonate even more powerfully: internationalism is the true revolution, because solidarity can have no borders. A concept that returns in a starker guise, dressed in strings, in the moving anti-militarist elegy "A Stones Throw Away", where Weller runs through – like stations on some ideal via crucis – lands that at the time, for different reasons, were grappling with oppression: "In Chile, in Poland, Johannesburg, South Yorkshire/ A stones throw away…..now we're there". But that sense of common cause comes at a cost, because "freedom has a price, it's broken skulls and leather truncheons… wherever honesty persists you'll hear the crack of broken ribs". Words that, too, sound utterly timely today, when, regimes may change (Russia? Israel? Iran? Take your pick…) but the outcomes never do.

"A Stones Throw Away" is so intense and moving that it takes a minute and a half to catch its breath, handed over to the funk fervour of "The Stand Up Comic's Instructions", almost a divertissement to ease the tension (even if, voiced by Lenny Henry, it's actually razor-sharp satire on the cheap racism of certain comedy) before the following "Boy Who Cried Wolf" throws us straight back into the emotional whirlwind.

Forty years on

"Our Favourite Shop" was reissued in a deluxe edition in 2007, with a careful remastering job and an extra CD which, aside from remixes, demos and live tracks, is worth highlighting for the ballad "Ghosts Of Dachau", which digs into historical trauma and the responsibility of memory with an almost liturgical tone, "Whole Point II", more upbeat but semi-acoustic, and the gospel of "(When You) Call Me", not to mention of course the super-bonus track "Shout To The Top", presented in two versions – the "Usa mix" and the "Instrumental".

Today Paul Weller might smile remembering the sincere political fervour of those years, which had also led him, alongside colleagues Billy Bragg and Jimmy Somerville, to lead Red Wedge, the pro-Labour collective that tried to mobilise the music world against Margaret Thatcher's policies. Today, claiming to have no interest in politics anymore, it may all seem to him like the product of naive youthful euphoria. And perhaps even then his "ever changing moods" were already starting to lead him elsewhere, since, after dragging the Style Council project forward without much enthusiasm for two more albums – "The Cost Of Loving" (1987) and "Confessions Of A Pop Group" (1988) – he would soon veer towards a solo career in which those ideas would indeed resurface, but under the banner of a rock sound, drier and more psychedelic. We, however, forty years on, still keep one foot planted firmly inside his old shop of sophisti-pop songs and internationalist slogans. You never know, maybe the walls will finally come tumbling down...

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26/03/2026