PAUL WELLER

As PAUL WELLER plays his first live shows in over two years, Uncut visits the guv’nor and his band during tour rehearsals in South London, for fish and chip suppers at the storied Black Barn studios and, finally, as he makes his triumphant return to the stage. Along the way, Pete Paphides digs deep to locate the source of Weller’s current seam of inspiration. “When you go out, you go out with nothing,” we learn. “We’re not the fucking pharaohs. You don’t get buried with your gold, and even if you did… what good did it do them? The most important things you hand down aren’t material things…”

PAUL WELLER

Photo by MARY McCARTNEY

YOU can hear Paul Weller and his band a good few minutes before you see them. But then again, on an otherwise empty Wimbledon industrial estate in mid-November, there aren’t many competing noises. Directions on a text message – right now only Weller’s texting is more prolific than his musical output – won’t be needed. “The world’s oblique”, rasps a voice that few British ears could mistake. “It’s Saturn’s turn/Cut it clean/The pattern’s good”. If there are better ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than an (almost) private preview of Weller’s first gigs in over two years, then Uncut can’t call them to mind right now. Dressed in brown merino sweater, blue jeans and chestnut loafers, Weller and his band are a third of the way through a set whose oldest song, “That’s Entertainment”, entered the British chart on the same week as Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime” and Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face”.

Within minutes of its famous staccato intro, a combustibly charged rendition of “Shout To The Top” is blown into the blue by a stellar sax solo from Jacko Peake. Back in 1993, it was Peake’s woodwind ornamentation on the Wild Wood album that underscored comparisons between the resurgent Weller and folk-soul legends such as Terry Callier and Jon Lucien. Indeed, these are the names that most readily come to mind when Weller leads his band into the contemplative terrain of his recent albums: 2018’s True Meanings, 2020’s On Sunset and the acclaimed lockdown labours of this year’s Fat Pop Volume 1. As Weller sings “Aspects” –a song from the first of those records – your gaze is somehow alerted to the sight of Weller’s veteran ex-tour manager Kenny Wheeler. Now the sole survivor of the Jam years, Wheeler is utterly transported by the acoustic reverie being played out by the singer who was still in his teens when he first started working for him. The spell is broken for all by the words that resound from Weller’s mouth on the song’s concluding chord.

“AWOIGHT PETE!” he bellows at me from 50 feet away. “HOW YOU DOIN’?! THERE’S SANDWICHES IN THAT ROOM!”

Moments later, it’s decreed that this is as good a time as any for a break, which is just as well. Run-throughs like this are as much for the benefit of Weller’s wardrobe as his musicianly chops, and the singer has decided that these shoes aren’t going to make the grade. Wandering over to the packing cases that house his wardrobe, he picks out a box-fresh pair of Converse hi-tops and jumps up and down a few times to assess their “springiness”. If any of his Jam and Style Council threads were in here, he’d comfortably fit into those, too. Since his mid-forties, he’s been enjoying regular workouts with his personal trainer Shane – in the gym at first, but since lockdown they’ve been strictly Zoom affairs, which suits this client just fine. “None of that fucking boom bang-abang music going on in the background,” he elaborates, before pitching a new business idea to no-one in particular. “Wouldn’t it be great if you had a gym where you actually had decent music to work out to? I mean, it ain’t got to be shit, has it? It could be, like, Little Richard! Stick on his Greatest Hits and you’re sorted! Or The Undisputed Truth. A bit of Norman Whitfield. Or The Dells. Do you know ‘Wear It On Our Face’? You could either do 500 crunches to that one or happily die trying.”

IT’S a contradictory thing, a full production run-through. For an established artist about to embark on a long tour, these “phantom” gigs exist to allay nerves, ensure that the band, the setlist and the light show all converge to exceed the sum of their parts. And yet somehow the no-going-back-now proximity of that opening night has the opposite effect, ramping up the tremulous sense of anticipation. What you realise is that the component you really need for everything to exceed the sum of its parts is an audience. And no-one is more surprised by how much they’ve missed an audience than Paul Weller. Two weeks previously, I’m at his Black Barn studio in Surrey, gazing on at a group of musicians whose interpersonal cordiality can’t quite disguise the jangling sense that they absolutely have to do justice to all these new songs. A sense that comes from the top down. They have been at this for a fortnight already – 11am starts; late finishes. “The thing is,” says Weller, “I just really, really want people to see that these songs are right up there with some of the best I’ve ever written.” As the small hand edges past seven, this commitment to getting it right is all the more extraordinary for the fact that a delivery of fish and chips from the nearby Sea Salt chippy arrived 20 minutes ago. After a mellow, mellifluous amble through “Amongst Butterflies” from 1992’s self-titled solo debut, collective resistance to the saltand-vinegar fumes finally collapses.