BLEU IS THE COLOUR

“Stifled” in The Jam, bewitched by jazz and soul, enlivened by the café culture of Paris and Sorrento, PAUL WELLER struck out for new horizons, with an idea for a freewheeling collective instead of a hidebound band. As an expanded reissue of Café Bleu hits the shelves, he blows the froth off the first phase of The Style Council. “It was like life had been coloured in,” he tells TED KESSLER.

Photograph by STEFANIA BOCHICCHIO

Café society: The Style Council’s ever changing dudes, (from left) Paul Weller and Mick Talbot.

Stefania Bochicchio/Shutterstock

IN MAY 1982, SHORTLY AFTER THE Jam’s 24-date Trans Global Express UK tour and the following 10-date European tour, but just before the trio’s 15-date spring tour of the US and their five-date Japanese stand, Paul Weller went on holiday to Italy. He was about to turn 24.

“It was the first holiday I’d ever been on abroad,” he recalls wistfully now, chin in hand as he rests his elbow on the piano in his Black Barn Studio, near Woking, Surrey. “I’d been in The Jam 10 years, just constantly working. Whenever everyone else in and around the band was on holiday, I’d still be writing songs or demoing them. I was always on tour or in the studio, so I just never got the chance to go away. It was overdue.”

He and his girlfriend landed first in Sorrento and then hit the island of Capri. Although Weller had been coming to Europe regularly with The Jam for the previous five years, it now occurred to him that he’d never really noticed it properly before. Suddenly, it made a seismic impression.

“Seeing all the colours, the clothes people were wearing, hanging out in the sunshine, having coffees in cafés and bars… I just loved it. You gotta remember how grey England was in ’82. This was like life had been coloured in.”

Something fundamental inside Weller shifted as he took in the Neapolitan Riviera in the late spring sun. “I began to relax, which hadn’t really happened in the band since we’d started putting records out.” His holiday reading included Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s 1959 beat novel set in west London, after which The Jam had already named a single in ’81 but which Weller says made most sense on holiday in Italy. “It had a profound effect on me, in terms of Modernism,” he affirms. “I had a rebirth of Mod when I read that book, about embracing all cultures and not being xenophobic or suspicious of anything foreign. It was a huge personal influence.”

Dig the new breed: (clockwise from right) Weller, Steve White and Talbot on the Long Hot Summer video shoot, Cambridge, 1983; Weller joins Everything But The Girl’s Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn at London ICA, January 5, 1983; Weller, Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton during The Jam’s final Japanese tour, June 14, 1982.

Allstar Collection, Getty (3), Shutterstock, Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty

A plan started to stir within, to create something less parochial and dogmatic than The Jam, something more open, cosmopolitan and freewheeling, but still intrinsically Mod. “I thought, I want to try some other things, work with different people in a new way. I wanted to breathe a bit. It became stifling in The Jam.”