In October 1977, Sid Vicious, bass player with the Sex Pistols, shoved Paul Weller, lead singer of The Jam, up against a wall at the Speakeasy Club in Soho. A brawl broke out when he told Weller how the Pistols had replicated the riff from The Jam’s first single ‘In the City’, released in April of that year, for their then-new single ‘Holidays in the Sun’. He headbutted Weller.

The then 18-year-old singer retaliated with a verve that characterised his music. According to Glen Matlock of the Pistols: “Vicious finished the evening in the casualty department of the local hospital.” 

“I don’t regret it,” Weller said later. “I got lobbed out the club. It was Sid being a dick. He was used to people going, ‘Yes, Sid’, ‘No, Sid’, and I didn’t do that. A lot of youth in the 1970s were angry.
It was a violent time.”

Weller channelled his pent-up rage into post-punk power-pop classics about the gap between the ruling classes and the working class beneath them in Britain.

On ‘Mr Clean’ from 1978, he could barely contain his venom about the faceless Tory robots in suits who, “went to Cambridge too… And Mum and Dad are very proud of you”. “I hate you and your wife/And if I get the chance I’ll f**k up your life,” he raged.

‘The Eton Rifles’, released in October 1979, was about a left-wing Right to Work march through Slough that went past Eton college. The well-heeled students jeered the unemployed marchers. “All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,” Weller sang. “What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?”

Fifty years later he is singing on ‘In Better Times’ – from his new album, Fat Pop (Volume 1) – about his mellowed mood, thus: “What you need to see/It’s okay to be yourself/And that with belief/The world will do the rest.” This
philosophy might have caused the angry young man he once was to throw up on his socialist marching shoes.

In 2007, when his former friend Paolo Hewitt published The Changing Man, claiming that the teenage Weller “would hate the Paul Weller of today”, the star was not happy. “That’s b*****ks,” he said. “He can f**king shove the book up his arse.”

Not that Weller has lost his edge with Fat Pop (Volume 1).  

 

Weller was born on May 25, 1958, of good working-class stock, as they say. A Victorian terraced council house at number 8 Stanley Road in Woking, Surrey, was home to the Weller family. It had no bathroom or heating, and the toilet was outside in the yard.

“Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can?” Paul once half-joked, referencing ‘Imagine’ by one of his heroes, John Lennon. “Well, yes, I could, quite easily, because there weren’t any.”

His father, John, worked on building sites by day and drove a taxi in the evening. His mother, Ann, was a part-time cleaner who spent her wages on buying him 45s by The Beatles (and the Small Faces, The Kinks and The Who) and taking him to see Beatles movies. His father bought him a guitar when he was 12. He would play along to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on his record player in his bedroom.

He cried in the local newsagent’s in April 1970 when he saw the headlines: The Beatles split.

Three years later, he started The Jam with his school friend Steve Brookes on guitar. Paul’s dad would get them gigs at local working men’s clubs. When Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckley joined, Steve left.

In 1977, Paul moved to London. His family were hands-on back in Woking. John managed the band and Ann ran the fan club with Paul’s only sibling, younger sister Nicky. The band went on to have 18 consecutive Top 40 singles in the UK, their songs connecting with millions of young fans because of Paul’s poetry of the street and the punk-soul of the music. The Guardian’s John Harris compared Weller’s lyricism to the poet Philip Larkin.

Two of his greatest ever songs – ‘Going Underground’ and ‘Town Called Malice’ – were class war tirades, set to a post-punk Northern Soul groove, against the powers that be. The working-class lad from the sticks was a spokesperson for his generation – but he hated the tag. He hated being pigeonholed in his music.

 

In October 1982, at just 24, he walked away from the biggest band in Britain. He was interviewed on the ITN News. “I’d hate us to end up old and embarrassing like so many other groups,” he said. 

Uncut magazine would later write: “With the exception of The Beatles, no one had ever broken up such a successful band before.”

Noel Gallagher was to recall: “The Jam were my Beatles.”  

The band he broke up The Jam to form was a loose jazz-soul collective called The Style Council, fronted by himself and Mick Talbot, ex of the Merton Parkas. Released in March 1983, their debut single ‘Speak Like a Child’ was Paul’s song of freedom. Many of their tracks, and the album My Favourite Shop, were different and exciting. And then, it got awful. 

In the summer of 1988, Melody Maker, reviewing The Style Council’s Confessions of a Pop Group album, described Weller and Talbot as “the Don Estelle and Windsor Davies of supine albino funk”. The record company dropped the band and Weller was left in the wilderness. He re-emerged with a self-titled solo album in 1992.

By 1993, he was back on track with the majestic Wild Wood and then, even better, Stanley Road in 1995. Suddenly, he was being hailed as the godfather of the Britpop movement, feted by Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn. He wrote great songs like ‘Changing Man’ and ‘You Do Something to Me’. But fame is fickle – not long after that, he was derided as the king of dad rock, as if he was some sort of delusional Eric Clapton of the ageing mods.  

He turns 63 in a few weeks. The fire in his belly still burns, maybe not quite as fiercely as in the past. But on the retro soul swagger of ‘That Pleasure’, he sings about the Black Lives Matter Movement with a passion that his teenage self would surely have admired.

Paul Weller still matters.  

Sunday Independent