Paul Weller occupies a strange place in the cultural sphere. Especially since he was adopted as an elder statesman of Britpop in the mid 1990s, he’s been particularly beloved of a core audience whose tastes are extremely conservative. So much so, in fact, that middle-aged men who ape his classic mod haircuts are now a shorthand for meat-and-potatoes, Brexity, red-faced, pub-coke bloke-rock. Yet Weller himself is anything but conservative.
From the beginning he understood the “modernist” mission of mod, his ditching of the youthful energy of The Jam for the sophistication of The Style Council was a master stroke, and even as he embraced “classic” 60s songwriting more and more he never adhered to the tedious white rock canon. For all that he sometimes slips into straining-as-authenticity a la Springsteen or Joe Cocker, he has always been ready to incorporate dub, krautrock, jazz-funk, and right up to last year’s 66 there has been a whole lot of cabaret elegance and theatricality filtered via Bowie and Scott Walker.
Thankfully this album of cover versions is for the most part laid back and vaudevillian, so for the most part when he does want emphasis he goes for a Bowie / Ferry warble, not a grunt. It’s a wonderfully idiosyncratic selection, too: Richie Havens, 60s Bee Gees, proto-metallers Mountain, The Incredible String Band’s Clive Palmer are hardly lad-rock canon, after all. OK, I was hoping the track “El Dorado” would be ELO, but the crying-into-your-beer, countrified take on Northern Irish songwriter Eamon-Friel is pretty fine.
It’s all pretty fine, really. There’s West African kora playing, swooping strings and dreamy pedal steel to keep things sonically interesting, the songs are strong, and it never really dips as such. But occasionally you get glimpses of something else. Lal and Mike Waterson’s “Never the Same” done as a stripped back chamber ballad shows how great a singer Weller is when he really sits back on it and just sings, while The Kinks’s “Nobody’s Fool” shows that, again with minimal backing, he can hit hard while being super expressive too.
In contrast, he does over-egg some of the other vocals. Is this a hint that Weller has a godlike acoustic / orchestral album in him? Just possibly. It’s certainly proof that the further he strays from guitar rock, the more interesting he gets. This is a great tour of the record collection of a man with clearly outstanding and very coherent tastes, a very decent album in his own right, but also a definite glimpse of the potential greatness of exposing his mature voice.
Listen to "I Started a Joke":
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