Q&A
Paul Weller: “It pushed me in different areas”
You told Uncut in 2007 that you used to be very self-conscious about co-writing.
Yeah, that would have been after working with Graham Coxon. I think that experience showed me it could be done without two blokes sitting in a rehearsal studio with acoustic guitars. We’d send ideas to each other and then rewrite each other’s ideas, slowly coming together. I really like working like that.
Is that how you worked with all the co-writers on 66?
Pretty much. There are a lot of collaborators on this album, but we rarely got together in the same room, we mainly did it over the phone. With Bobby [Gillespie] and Noel [Gallagher], I had a chat with them, sent them a demo for a song, and in both cases, they sent back a finished lyric within a few hours. So those songs were quite instantaneous. One of the problems with collaboration is getting the time – everyone’s got their own things going on, they’re on tour, or doing their own records or whatever. But with the wonders of technology, you can do it really quickly and efficiently.