I Give It a Year (2013)

 

Long Hot Summers – The Story Of The Style Council (2020)

 

30 Day Song Challenge - Day 19

A song that makes you think about life.

I'm nothing if not obvious:

This so easily could have been my choice of song for Day 11. Easily in my top five of songs of all time, but it has to be the demo version because that was the version that I first heard on the Snap compilation.

Round 162: Walking Wounded

Darts Thrown: February 13th 2020

Blog Written: February 13th 2020

Highest Score: 180

Lowest Score: 11

Sixties: 49

100+: 22
180s: 1
180s Missed: 1

Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

A game of two halves.

Avoided playing darts today because of an increasingly painful right elbow and a fucked up left knee (both dart related), but I thought I'd at least throw in one round before I went to bed.

Big mistake. First half the darts were all over the place. Only hit 13 sixties and I thought I was going to end up with my worst round of darts for about ten months. Thankfully I recovered enough in the second half, hitting 36 sixties, and that penultimate line is arguably the best run of darts I've ever thrown.

The get up and go thing to do would have been for me to immediately launch into another round of darts, so I could capitalize on this fleeting rich vein of form but, me being me, I quit whilst I was ahead. It's the hope that kills you.

I'll leave you with a song. Nothing to do with the aforementioned round of darts. It just happens to be in my tabs, and if I don't post it now I will forget all about it. Though the song dates from 2012, it's new to me. Love the keyboards and how the lead guitarist shamelessly rips off The Byrds. Good man.

The Moons feat. Paul Weller - Something Soon

Round 16: Early morning tea . . .

Darts Thrown: January 18th 2019
Blog Written: May 15th 2019

Highest Score: 134
Lowest Score: 7
Sixties: 20
100+: 3

Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

Look at the date this blog was written. A backlog, people. No specially selected book, as a backdrop with the piss-poor excuses for why I haven't read it. Just a the facts, mam. I have a lot of these to steam through. Maybe I'll provide the colour commentary once they are all on the blog.

. . .  And you just know that I will have mislaid at least one sheet.

But I will use the this rush through as a cheap excuse to post music videos from YouTube. Why not? I need a soundtrack whilst I do this. Next up is a Paul Weller album track that I'd never heard before. It's off the 2015 album Saturn's Pattern album, an album which totally passed me by. If this track is anything to go by, I think I've been unfair and I need to seek it out. It's a bit noodly, a bit meandering but he's always had that six or seven minute track on his solo albums. I think if I'd heard it in normal circumstances, it probably would have passed me by but on this occasion I sought it out after reading a thread on a Facebook Paul Weller discussion group about lost album tracks that have been overlooked. From the thread, it appears I'm not the only PW fan who loved the early solo albums only to be a bit hot and cold as the years wore on. The common theme is that we all seem to carry the torch for The Style Council (unlike a lot of Jam fans) and we all feel he took a wrong turn when he fell in with the Lad Rock wankers in the mid to late 90s.

Well, enough early morning verbal diarrhea; here's "These City Streets" by Paul Weller:

The Jam - Snap! (1983)

Imposs-020

Punk Rock: An Oral History by John Robb (PM Press 2006)

Billy Bragg

We read about the Jam. We could relate to where Weller was coming from, so we went to see them and that transformed us. Whereas the Damned and the Sex Pistols seemed like they were like a parody, taking what the Eddie and the Hot Rods were doing and taking the piss - a bit like the Darkness now. The Jam, when we saw them at the Nashville Rooms, seemed to really mean it. Weller had the words ‘Fire and Skill’ on his amp. They had skinny ties and suits; they looked good. We thought they were part of that Wilko Johnson/Barry Masters white working-class suburban music scene, compared to the Pistols being art school tossers really. The Pistols’ fans also wore swastikas - that really pissed me off as well. I didn’t like that idea at all.

The Modfather: My Life With Paul Weller by David Lines (William Heinemann 2006)

Getting inside the Pavilion was like stepping into a furnace. The floor swam in warm beer and the air was thick with smoke. The noise from the chanting, baying crowd drowned out the support act - a skinhead poet who went by the name of Seething Wells. I could hardly believe it, I mean, putting on a poet to entertain The Jam Army? Then I got it. I got it right there and then what Paul was trying to do. He could have stuck anyone on as support and they wouldn't have survived the audience who were so desperate to see The Jam they would have even booed The Beatles off stage. Paul was also trying to make his audience see that by having someone as support come on and recite poetry, he was distancing himself from the 'Jam Army'. Seething Wells, however, was on fire. I don't mean he was on top form, I mean the man had been set alight. The record company were handing out album sleeves on the way in, and someone had set fire to one and sent it, flaming, spinning through the air, skimming the heads of the crowd like a fiery frisbee onto the stage where it caught the sleeve of his green bomber jacket and in precisely three seconds flat the thing went up like a bonfire. Seething was seriously seething and frantically tried to get his jacket off but it had started melting into him, a roadie ran on with a bucket of water and chucked it all over the poor fat poet and then Seething ran off - it was like a trip to the fucking circus - and then, from nowhere, John, Paul's dad, was on stage and a mighty, mighty cheer went up . . . 'For those of you sitting down at the back, please be upstanding for . . . The Jam! The place exploded.

Swift blog tailoring

Only four Weller songs? I'm getting better.

Check out Cornershop's cover version of 'Waterloo Sunset' if you can. It's not half bad.

PS - click pic to enlarge and to be enraged.

Peace in my mind

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (48)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 48th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1252 friends!

Recent blogs:

Success

A Socialist reads the koran

Indian Earthquake: Did it really kill?

This week's top quote:

"The poor complain; they always do, But that's just idle chatter. Our system brings rewards to all, At least to all who matter." From Globalisation by Gerald Helleiner.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Just Who Is The Fifty Year Old Hero?

What sort of wannabe music blogger would I be if I didn't mention that Paul Weller turned 50 today.

Many an hour spent in blissful contentment listening to his music down the years, and one of my major pop kid regrets is that because I was otherwise musically disposed, The Jam only properly crossed my musical consciousness when they were announcing their break up on The Tube. How's that for bastard bad luck? I had to get into Weller thru' Style Council - I'm not complaining too much - and work my way backwards.

Whilst I'm on the subject of missing out on The Jam first time round, is it too sacrilegious to admit that for many years, 'Snap' was my favourite Jam album? I would state for the record that I'm referring to the double vinyl LP version of 'Snap'. (Don't sell yourself short with 'Compact Snap'.) The vinyl version still adds up to my all time favourite compilation album.

Like many of his fans he fell off my radar with Style Council's 'Confessions of a Pop Group' (the late eighties had to a lot to answer for), but as soon as I heard the opening bars of 'Into Tomorrow' by the unfortunately named 'Paul Weller Movement' on the radio one evening* in '91, I knew that the original commie curmudgeon still had it. I've loved his stuff anew ever since (though Heavy Soul was heavy going) and, to bring you up to speed, his last album, 'As Is Now', had more bite and incandescent anger than any other album released in 2005.

As I keep reminding myself, this is only a wannabe music blog so my bare arsed laziness coupled with yet another prematurely busted bandwidth month means that I'm not in a position to post any Wellersque *samples* for your delectation but proper music blog, The Vinyl District, has been doing sterling work this past week combing through Weller's back catalogue with accompanying biographical bits tagged on for good measure. I can't in all good conscious say I would have picked the same tracks album by album and year by year, but as it was Noah who got his finger out and did all the hard work, who am I to carp?

Individual links are as follows for Vinyl District's 'Wellerweek':

Wellerweek: Day One (Best track featured, in my humble opinion, is 'Down in the Tube Station at Midnight'.)

Wellerweek: Day Two (Again, favoured track for me is the rather obvious 'Town Called Malice'.)

Wellerweek: Day Three (Moving into Weller's "blue coffee" with a red wedge on the side period, the best track featured is 'Walls Come Tumbling Down'. Pause a minute to think of Dee C Lee in the video *sigh*.)

Wellerweek: Day Four (Weller's back from the wilderness. Fast forward through unfortunate band names - the aforementioned PWM - . . . . blistering live performances on Late Night With Jools Holland, which had the hairs on the back my kneecaps standing to attention . . . . the Dad Rock accusations . . . and the mid-life crisis. Fav track by the whisker of his wispy 15 minute moustache? 'Above The Clouds'. Controversial winner but I didn't get to pick the original nominees.)

Wellerweek: Day Five (Weller's latter solo career. 'Fraid Noah's selection for day five is the weakest of the batch. If you put a water pistol to my head, I'd have to opt for 'Savages' but that thing better be loaded.)

Wellerweek: Saturday Kidz (Noah's inner voice gets the better of him and he does an extra shift on the Saturday to post a fresh selection of Weller tracks that cover his whole career. Hard going picking just the one track but as you're still waving that water pistol around, I cave in and scream 'Away From The Numbers'. Arguably the track that more than any other in the early days of The Jam sign posted the latter greatness of Weller.)

One last add on before I wrap up this post in anticipation of tomorrow's birthday anniversary tribute to Britain's original axe wielding musical hero on the blog.

Will Rubbish sent me the link to this Paul Weller interview a few weeks back and I meant to post it on the blog before now but never got round to it. Nice piece that can only contribute to you warming to the bloke further. I think one of things that I've always liked about him is that, for all the passion and seeming intensity, he appears to be self-aware of the ridiculousness of life and to have a finely attuned bullshit detector. Couple of quotes from the interview only seem to confirm this:

[On his involvement with Red Wedge.]: "All the artists involved had the best intentions. But meeting the politicians it was like, f***ing hell - I wouldn't be seen dead with these people, let alone drinking with them. They were from a different planet, and their agendas were totally different from ours. They behaved like stars in their own right. On the tour bus there was no hint of ego - it was only when we turned up at gigs or meetings that we'd see these other people who definitely did have the egos."

[On mixing pop with politics.]: "The final death-knell of his political activism was sounded at a press conference in Sweden, where the Style Council were appearing at a festival, 'and every single question was about politics, nothing about music whatsoever.' He shakes his head. 'That's when I thought, maybe I've led myself into this position and its my own fault, but either way I don't like it. Because first and foremost I just write songs and play music. So that really put me off all that."

Of course, what with song such as 'Eton Rifles' and 'Walls Come Tumbling Down', many people have picked up from the interview that he has privately educated his kids and, therefore, knocked him as a hypocrite or a sell out. I'm more disappointed that this interesting interview has appeared in the pages of the Daily Torygraph. All your childhood heroes have feet of clay. Get over it.

'The past is our knowledge - the present our mistake

And the future we always leave too late.'

Out of Step, Out Of Time and Out of Breath

Paul over at Never Trust A Hippy Blog is taking a tube trip down memory lane with his recollections of seeing The Jam play live. Spawny get. I'm jealous as hell, and matters aren't helped when Will Rubbish gets in on the 'spawny get' payroll by mentioning that he's also got to see The Jam play live. I'm sure he told me one time that he didn't even like Paul Weller.

As much as I love The Jam now, I have to admit that I was never into them when they were still a going concern. Too young I guess, too pop inclined when they were at their peak, and I didn't have that older brother or older sister pushing their records my way, telling me why it was important that I listened to them (as I've mentioned before on the blog, my older sister was force feeding me Steve Wonder and The Bee Gees at this point. We've since reconciled.)

If anything I was a bit sniffy about them. Bands seem to be like football teams in those days, and for some reason I couldn't bring myself to like both The Jam and Culture Club at the same time (hangs head in shame). My loss, as I seem to remember feigning indifference to their last live performance on the first episode of The Tube, as if it wasn't a big deal. (takes that head that's hanging in shame and whacks it with a two by four).

Timing's everything in life, and four or five months after 'Beat Surrender' was the final Jam number one in the British charts, I was ranting and raving about 'Speak Like A Child', and poring over the album sleeve of 'Introducing The Style Council' as if it was the Communist Manifesto. It's that scene from 'Stardust Memories' all over again and I had to work my way backwards through Paul Weller's discography via the Snap compilation and then all the original albums around about the same time I thought Style Council's 'Our Favourite Shop' was the best thing since 'Cafe Bleu'.

That's enough rambling from me. To get back to Paul's original post; he makes the outlandish claim that 'Happy Together' is The jam's most underrated track. I beg to differ. Though it was a single, I still think that 'Absolute Beginners' was The Jam's most underrated track and the one that pointed to Weller's future with Style Council.

It also lays claim to having one of the funniest music videos I've ever seen. Funny in an unintentional sense. Look at Weller try to run in the video. Therein lies the mystery of why he had to pick up a guitar at such a young age. Jan Molby could have out sprinted him. Also explains the gulf between him and the other two. Looks like Rick and Bruce were the types that were picked first to play footie in the school playgrounds. Paul looks like he was stuck in goal a la Billy Caspar in Kes. Weller should have joined the SPGB when he was stil political in the 80s. He would have found a natural kinship in the old Islington Btanch.

What's that line from 'Funeral Pyre'?

"I could see the faces of those led pissing theirselves laughing . . ."

That would have been Rick, Bruce and the whole video crew for that day. Weller: Out of step, out of time and out of breath.

Hat tip to Will.