Paul Weller
John William Weller is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Weller achieved fame in the late 1970s as the guitarist and principal singer and songwriter of the rock band the Jam, alongside Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler. The band gained significant critical and commercial success in the United Kingdom, and were the most influential band of the mod revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Following the dissolution of the Jam at the end of 1982, Weller formed the Style Council with Mick Talbot, where he explored a wide variety of other musical styles, including pop, jazz, soul, hip hop, folk and classical. Although initially successful, the band's popularity declined in the late 1980s, leading them to break up in 1989. Weller began a solo career in the early 1990s, slowly re-establishing his commercial standing across his first four solo albums, Paul Weller, Wild Wood, Stanley Road and Heavy Soul.
Although Weller has received international critical recognition as a singer, lyricist and guitarist, he is most famous in his native country, as his songwriting is rooted in English society. Many of his songs with the Jam had lyrics about working class life. He was the principal figure of the 1970s and 1980s mod revival, often referred to as the Modfather, and an influence on many subsequent British alternative rock and Britpop artists, such as Oasis. He has received four Brit Awards, including Best British Male three times, and the 2006 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.
Early life (1958–1975)
Weller was born on 25 May 1958 in Woking, Surrey, to John and Ann Weller. Although born John William Weller, he became known as Paul by his parents.Weller's father worked as a taxi driver and a builder and his mother was a part-time cleaner. He started his education at Maybury County First School. His love of music began with the Beatles, then the Who and the Small Faces. When Weller was eleven he moved up to Sheerwater County Secondary school and had started playing the guitar.
Weller's musical vocation was confirmed after seeing Status Quo in concert in 1972.
He formed the first incarnation of the Jam, playing bass guitar with his school friends Steve Brookes, Dave Waller and Neil Harris, playing sets at school and their local youth club. When Harris and then Waller left the band, two more school friends replaced them: Rick Buckler on drums and Bruce Foxton on rhythm guitar. Weller's father, acting as their manager, began booking the four-piece into local working men's clubs, and the band began to forge a local reputation, playing a mixture of covers and songs written by Weller and Brookes. After Brookes left the band in 1976, Weller and Foxton decided to swap guitar roles, with Weller now the guitarist.
Weller became interested in 1960s mod subculture in late 1974, particularly after hearing "My Generation" by the Who. As a result, he began riding a Lambretta scooter, styling his hair like Steve Marriott and immersing himself in 1960s soul and R&B music. At his instigation, the Jam began wearing mohair suits onstage and he and Foxton began playing Rickenbacker guitars. He has been a committed mod ever since, declaring in a 1991 interview that, "I'll always be a mod. You can bury me a mod".
The Jam (1976–1982)
The Jam emerged at the same time as punk rock bands such as the Clash, the Damned, and the Sex Pistols. The Clash were early advocates of the band, and added them as the support on their White Riot tour in May 1977.The Jam's first single, "In the City", took them into the UK Top 40 in May 1977. In 1979, the group released "The Eton Rifles" and first broke into the Top 10, hitting the No. 3 spot in November. The increasing popularity of their blend of Weller's barbed lyrics with pop melodies eventually led to their first number one single, "Going Underground", in March 1980.
The Jam became the first band since the Beatles to perform both sides of the same single on one edition of Top of the Pops. They also had two singles, "That's Entertainment" and "Just Who Is the 5 O'Clock Hero?", reach No. 21 and No. 8 respectively in the UK singles chart despite not being released as singles in the UK—on the strength of import sales of the German single releases. At that time, "That's Entertainment" was the best-selling import-only single to date in the UK charts.
Having already told Buckler and Foxton that he was leaving the band, in October 1982 Weller announced that the Jam would disband at the end of that year. Although Weller was determined to end the band and move on, the action came as a surprise to Foxton and Buckler who both felt that the band had scope to develop further professionally. Their final single, "Beat Surrender", became their fourth UK chart topper, going to No. 1 in its first week. Their farewell concerts at Wembley Arena were multiple sell-outs; their final concert took place at the Brighton Centre on 11 December 1982.
The Style Council (1983–1989)
In 1983, Weller purchased PolyGram's London recording studio where The Jam had previously recorded, and renamed it Solid Bond Studios. The same year, he teamed up with keyboardist Mick Talbot to form a new group called the Style Council. Initially a core duo, augmented by various guest musicians and singers, over time the core grew to also include drummer Steve White and singer Dee C. Lee. Previously a backing vocalist with Wham!, Lee eventually became Weller's girlfriend and then wife.Free of the limited musical styles he felt imposed by the Jam, under the collective of the Style Council, Weller was able to experiment with a wide range of music, including jazz, blue-eyed soul, and house; he also brought in musicians and vocalists to produce a different sound on each track. The Style Council also used synthesizers and drum machines to create their musical style, which would later be labelled as sophisti-pop.
Many of the Style Council's early singles performed well in the UK charts, and Weller would also experience his first success in North America, when "My Ever Changing Moods" and "You're the Best Thing" entered the US Billboard Hot 100.
Weller appeared on 1984's Band Aid record "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Style Council appeared in the British half of Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985.
In December 1984, Weller formed his own charity ensemble called the Council Collective to make a record, "Soul Deep", to raise money for striking miners, and the family of David Wilkie, a Welsh taxi driver who was killed during said strike. The record featured the Style Council and a number of other performers, including Jimmy Ruffin and Junior Giscombe, and peaked at No. 24 on the UK singles chart.
As the 1980s wore on, the Style Council's popularity in the UK began to decline, with the band achieving only one top ten single after 1985. The Style Council's death knell was sounded in 1989 when its record company refused to release its fifth and final studio album, the house-influenced Modernism: A New Decade. With the rejection of this effort, Weller announced that the Style Council had split. It was not until the 1998 retrospective CD box set The Complete Adventures of the Style Council that the album would be widely available.
Solo career (1990–present)
Early solo career (1990–1995)
By the end of 1989, Weller found himself without a band and without a recording contract for the first time since he was 17. After taking time off for most of 1990, he returned to the road late in the year, touring as "The Paul Weller Movement" with long-term drummer and friend Steve White and Paul Francis. After a slow start playing small clubs with a mixture of Jam and Style Council classics, as well as showcasing new material, he released his debut solo single, "Into Tomorrow", which peaked at No. 36 in the UK Singles Chart in May 1991. His next single, "Uh Huh Oh Yeh", reached No. 18 in the UK Chart in August 1992, followed by his debut solo studio album, Paul Weller, peaking at No. 8 on the UK Chart in September that year.Buoyed by the positive commercial and critical success of his debut solo studio album, Weller returned to the studio in 1993 with a renewed confidence, recording most of the tracks on his next album in one take. Accompanied by Steve White, guitarist Steve Cradock and bassist Marco Nelson, the result of these sessions was the Mercury Music Prize-nominated Wild Wood, which included the singles "Sunflower" and "Wild Wood". Weller's first solo live album, Live Wood, was released in 1994, peaking at No. 13 in the UK Albums Chart.
Weller's third solo studio album Stanley Road took him back to the top of the British charts for the first time in a decade, and went on to become the best-selling album of his career. The album, named after the street in Woking where he had grown up, marked a return to the more guitar-based style of his earlier days. The album's major single, "The Changingman", was also a big hit, taking Weller to No. 7 in the UK Singles Chart. Another single, the ballad "You Do Something to Me", was his second consecutive Top 10 single and reached No. 9 in the UK.
Weller found himself heavily associated with the emerging Britpop movement. Noel Gallagher of Oasis is credited as guest guitarist on the Stanley Road album track "I Walk on Gilded Splinters". Weller also returned the favour, appearing as a guest guitarist on Oasis' hit song "Champagne Supernova" from their second studio album Morning Glory?.
The Modfather (1996–2007)
Heavy Soul, the follow-up to the million-selling Stanley Road, was a 'rootsy', 'stripped-down' change in Weller's musical style, compared to its predecessor. The first single "Peacock Suit" reached No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart, in 1996 and the album reached No. 2 in 1997. Success in the UK charts also came from compilations: "Best Of" albums by the Jam and the Style Council charted, and in 1998 his own solo collection, Modern Classics, peaked at No. 7.In 2000 he released his fifth solo studio album, Heliocentric, which debuted and peaked at No. 2 in the UK Albums Chart. On his worldwide Days of Speed acoustic tour, Weller performed songs from the back catalogue of his solo career and from his Jam and Style Council days, giving rise to a second successful live album of the same name; containing live solo acoustic recordings from the European leg of the tour, the album reached No. 3 in the UK Albums Chart in October 2001.
Weller released the No. 1 hit album Illumination in September 2002. Co-produced by Noonday Underground's Simon Dine, it was preceded by top 10 hit single "It's Written in the Stars". Weller also appears on Noonday Underground's second studio album called Surface Noise, singing on the track "I'll Walk Right On".
In 2002, Weller collaborated with Terry Callier on the single "Brother to Brother", which featured on Callier's ninth studio album Speak Your Peace. That same year, he teamed up with electronic rock duo Death in Vegas on a cover of Gene Clark's "So You Say You Lost Your Baby", which featured on their third studio album Scorpio Rising.
Weller's album of covers entitled Studio 150, debuted at No. 2 in the UK charts in 2004, and included Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" as well as covers of songs by Gil Scott-Heron and Rose Royce, amongst others.
Weller's eighth solo studio album As Is Now featured the singles "From the Floorboards Up", "Come On/Let's Go" and "Here's the Good News". The album was well-received, reaching No. 4 in the UK charts, though critics noted that he was not moving his music forward stylistically.
At the Brit Awards on 14 February 2006 at Earl's Court in London, he was the latest recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award. Despite a tendency to shun such occasions, Weller accepted the award in person, and performed four songs at the ceremony, including the Jam's classic "Town Called Malice". Double live album Catch-Flame! was released in June that year, featuring songs from his solo work and his career with the Jam and the Style Council. Compilation album Hit Parade, released in late 2006, collected singles from the Jam, the Style Council and Weller's solo career. Weller was offered appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 birthday honours, but rejected the offer.
In 2007, Weller was a guest vocalist on the song "John Barleycorn" by the folk music project the Imagined Village, with Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy also being credited as main artists. It was released on the band's eponymous debut studio album.