REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS

THE STYLE COUNCIL

Café Bleu Special Edition UNIVERSAL

Messy but rewarding rebirth for the reluctant Modfather.

By John Lewis

“I felt so sick I spat on their lifestyles with a runaway pride”

REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10

PETER ANDERSON

THERE’S a live recording in this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Café Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.

“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, introducing a bossa nova called “The Whole Point Of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “The Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired variously by Antônio Carlos Jobim, Michel Legrand and Erik Satie, you can hear sections of the audience lustily chanting a line from the film Quadrophenia: “We are the Mods, we are the Mods/We are, we are, we are the Mods!”

As Flaubert once wrote, inside every revolutionary is a policeman. Only a few years earlier, Weller had been the rabble-rousing king of the Mods; now, here he was telling his lairy disciples in Fred Perrys and Bass Weejuns to pipe down as he introduced them to French chanson and jazz waltzes. It brings to mind Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl getting a phone call from Weller in January 1983, asking them to come and guest with him at the ICA. “At the time, it was a bit like getting a phone call from, I dunno, David Lee Roth,” said Thorn. “I loved The Jam and worshipped Paul but I was amazed that he wanted us to come on stage and sing ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ with him.” By the early 1980s, Weller was about as big as any British pop star had been since The Beatles. The Jam regularly entered the singles and albums charts at No 1. Record shops opened at midnight to sell their albums. A million people applied for tickets for their final tour. Long before the arena circuit had become established, tour promoters were having to temporarily reinvent sports halls and swimming pools to host Jam gigs.