Paul Weller, Primal Scream and Beady Eye stage gig to support victims of Japan tsunami

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/22/paul-weller-japan-tsunami-gig

(The Guardian)

Hastily arranged show in aid of the British Red Cross appeal will also feature Richard Ashcroft, Graham Coxon and the Coral

Paul Weller, Primal Scream and Liam Gallagher’s new band Beady Eye are among the acts billed to play a London gig in aid of the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami appeal.

Primal Scream said they are: “humbled to play Japan Disaster benefit in their contribution to the relief efforts and as Mani is unable to attend due to prior family commitments, are pleased to announce they will be joined for one night only by Sex Pistols legend Glen Matlock.”

Also on the bill are Graham Coxon, Richard Ashcroft and the Coral. The show has been hastily arranged to help benefit those who have been affected by the recent earthquakes and subsequent tsunami. The Japanese Red Cross has been working on the ground since the disaster struck, mobilising 85 teams made up of 700 doctors, nurses and support staff. They have provided first aid, healthcare and assistance in assessing the damage and the needs of the communities affected.

The show will take place at London’s Brixton O2 Academy on 3 April. Tickets go on sale on Friday 25 March at 9am.

Mercury prize: Paul Weller at centre of ‘biggest turnaround in music betting for 40 years’

(The Guardian)

Fifty-two-year-old musician’s odds slashed from 20/1 to 1/10 after ‘huge surge’ of bets placed in his favour

Mercury prize favourite … Paul Weller.

Paul Weller: Wake Up the Nation

(The Guardian)

The dad-rock king’s discontent with modern life should come as no surprise. But what is shocking – and thrilling – is that his avant-garde phase continues apace, says Alexis Petridis

Royal grumble … Paul Weller.

On his 25th studio album it takes a matter of minutes for Paul Weller to slip into grumpy old codger mode. “Get your face out the Facebook, and turn off the phone,” he grumbles, which rather suggests that, like Peter Kay’s grandmother insisting on the existence of something called the “tinternet”, Paul Weller thinks Facebook comes with a definite article attached. “What with the death of the postbox,” he adds, “nowhere feels home.”

Taken out of context, the lyric seems to confirm your worst fears. Perhaps 2008’s remarkable, turbulent, chaotic 22 Dreams was merely a temporary blip, a clearing of the avant-garde pipes before a return to what came before it, when his albums resembled the kind of TV dramas you get at 8pm on a Sunday – cosily undemanding, so predictable you could set your watch by them, riven with rose-tinted nostalgia for an oddly non-specific era of the past in which everything was supposedly better than it is now. You could see why it happened: with the Style Council, he nearly succeeded in wrong-footing himself out of a career, with all but the most ardent of fans manning the lifeboats around the time of the film JerUSAlem, which featured among its many knuckle-gnawing moments Weller as the Canute-like “Paul Welly”, loudly protesting the sea’s effect on his genitals (”Go back! For my parts do freeze!”). Nevertheless, that didn’t make the combination of grunty man-rock and reactionary sentiment that has been a staple of his solo career any more edifying.
But no: the complaint about “the Facebook” is set to a backing so excitable it sounds less like a fiftysomething’s grumble than a strident call to arms. If anything, Wake Up the Nation – 16 songs in under 40 minutes – ventures even further out than its predecessor. You can tell as much from the credits: there are guitars by My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields and vocals by the Woking Gay Community choir, the latter, alas, merely a pseudonym for Weller’s daughter. The fearless try-anything spirit of Paul Welly, it seems, is still alive and well.
At the height of his water-treading, Weller famously decried David Bowie’s output as “pish”, which seemed to sum up the problem: a kind of trenchant, wilful dreariness, informed by the steadfast belief that anyone who wasn’t set on boring everyone else to death simply wasn’t doing things properly. You could find antecedents for Wake Up the Nation’s spikier moments in the avant-garde end of the Jam’s output – Pop Art Poem, Scrape Away, Music for the Last Couple – but it’s most obviously in thrall to Bowie. Its zippy structure recalls side one of Low. Fast Car/Slow Traffic arrives decorated with piano that sounds remarkably like Mike Garson’s free contributions to Aladdin Sane. Andromeda not only sounds like Bowie, it features a lyric in which Paul Weller mans a spaceship and flies away from earth, perhaps the least likely astronaut since the US blasted Enos the chimp into orbit on the Mercury Atlas 5.
Occasionally his usually sure hand on the songwriting slips and it sounds unfinished, as if he started experimenting, then stopped without actually reaching a conclusion. Nevertheless, that seems a small price to pay for having this many ideas flying past you at a breathless pace: funk decorated with autoharp; chaotic, sprawling guitar topped with Jerry Lee Lewis piano; a Dusty Springfieldish ballad augmented by woozy, off-kilter strings; an instrumental influenced by Broadcast. The track 7&3 Is the Strikers’ Name sees Weller returning to politics, albeit of an even less considered and nuanced variety than in the Red Wedge era, when he was wont to write things like “see how monetarism kills whole communities, even families”. Here, he explores how republicanism would advance the egalitarian cause of a meritocratic democracy thus: “Them fuckers in the castles, they’re all bastards, too.” This clearly isn’t going to win the Johan Skytte prize in political science, but there’s something about the gusto of it – not to mention the fathomless layers of feedback beneath it – that’s hugely exciting.
The latter is also true of Trees, a five-part suite that flails wildly from piano ballad to psychedelia to electronica to hoary soul and features Weller singing: “Once I was a man, my cock as hard as wood.” It looks ridiculous on paper, and, in fairness, sounds pretty ridiculous coming out of the speakers, but the sheer conviction with which it’s performed carries you along despite yourself, wearing the astonished expression almost all of Wake Up the Nation provokes. As the title of one instrumental has it, Whatever Next?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/15/paul-weller-wake-up-cd-review

Paul Weller: I am aware of the words ‘national treasure’ being attached to me

(The Guardian)

He’s recently turned 50, but the former angry young mod hasn’t lost his edge. With a new album on the way, he talks about politics, the recent death of his father and a notoriously boozy night out in Prague

Paul Weller is having his photo taken. Which he doesn’t mind, as he is self-confessedly vain, but which he does mind, because he’s vain. “I look all right from a distance,” he grins, “and I feel the same in myself as I did when I was 30. But close up… I’ve not had Botox, no. I thought about fillers but I got talked out of it. Sunbeds? Well, this tan is from my holiday, but I’ve been thinking I might top it up…”

Of course, he looks great: a steel-grey silver fox, these days, but still flash in light parka and kick flares, quite the dandiest man in Blacks, the Soho club where we meet. What was the last item of clothing he bought? “Some shoes and a jumper from YMC on the way to this interview. So, do you want a cup of tea?” It’s a polite request, delivered with Weller’s usual abrupt impatience. Yes please, Paul. Don’t get cross.

Everyone knows Weller. He’s a pop music constant, with his undying stylishness, his unfading anger, his never-ending devotion to what he deems “proper” music, whether soul, rock, house, folk or R’n'B. And yet his career has seen him flicker in and out of favour, mostly through his own wilful refusal to dig the same musical furrow. “Going Underground”, “My Ever Changing Moods”, “Wild Wood”, “You Do Something to Me”: all great, all completely different. How strange that he was once blamed for the stultification of indie music, for being boring and predictable and directly responsible for Britpop’s tedious successor, Dadrock.

Just in the past two years, as he turned 50, he has brought out two thoroughly surprising LPs: the lengthy, romantic, critically lauded 22 Dreams, which he describes as “us trying to be as indulgent as we could, really”; and now Wake Up the Nation, compact, dense, whirling with off-beat sounds. There were a few album playbacks late last year, he confesses, where he could see that, “by the end, people were a bit like, ‘Oh fucking hell, I’ve got to get some air.’

“It’s challenging,” he admits,”but there’s nothing wrong with challenging your audience. It shows respect, rather than putting out the same shit every year.”

Wake Up the Nation is different, because it was made differently. Instead of Weller turning up to record his own compositions, co-producer Simon Dines, who worked on 22 Dreams, sent him some musical ideas: “sound collages, little mood pieces”. Weller, who wasn’t planning on making another LP, found himself inspired. So he and his band went into the studio and built up Dines’s tracks through playing. “Then they’d go, ‘All right, time for a vocal.’ I’d be bricking it because I hadn’t even got a melody or words, but I’d think, ‘Right, just open your mouth and see what happens.’ I hadn’t really done that before.”

The result is intriguing: Weller’s voice is often less dominant, lower in the mix, with him playing around with the tone. On “Aim High”, he tries out a falsetto; on “Andromeda”, about a man leaving a dying planet, he sounds like David Bowie (unintentional, he says, though he’s a recent Dame David convert). And, from a man who has often mangled his lyrics, worked hard to get them to rhyme, or to reason (think of “no bonds can ever tempt me from she” from the Jam’s “English Rose”, or “I really like it when you speak like a child” from the Style Council’s “Speak Like a Child”), it’s surprising to hear the admission that “sometimes it’s nice, as a singer, just to sing words that have a flow and a rhythmic feel to them; they haven’t always got to make sense”. Which goes some way to explaining the anatomically and alcoholically puzzling: “Two fat ladies at my door/Over the hills and far much more/Seeking the teats of mother and child/Some marked bitter others mild” (”Two Fat Ladies”).

Though only four tracks of Wake Up the Nation’s 16 are over three minutes, there is a world of different types of music in there, many varied moods: “No Tears to Cry” is like Dusty Springfield; “Fast Car/Slow Traffic” is very Jam; “Moonshine” is Weller’s favoured driving R’n'B; “Pieces of a Dream” has cascading piano, Doors-style organ, rock riff guitar. There are flashes of Blur, Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, even prog; on “Trees”, there are five separate pieces of music underpinning a lyric – experimental prose, really – that has Weller assuming different characters, including a young woman and a mother.

“Trees” was inspired by the visits Weller made to his dad, John, when he was in a respite home. John, a determined, loyal man who managed Paul for his entire career from the mid-70s, died in April 2009 after four years of illness. Paul’s mum, Ann, cared for him while he was ill, but he stayed for two weeks in a home to give her a break, around Christmas 2008. There were many older people than him there – two old ladies on Zimmer frames were constantly wobbling into his room, thinking it was theirs – and Paul remembers the residents as “little fossilised trees, all gnarled and curled up. But there were pictures on their doors of when they were young. They were mothers, beautiful young women, strong, proud, young men… reduced to this strange level, this in-between world where they’re just waiting to go, waiting to die. ‘Trees’ was me imagining what their lives were like before.”

He says that he dealt with his dad’s death “all right”: he found it a relief. “Seeing him when he was dead, laid out in hospital, wasn’t as bad as when I saw him a few weeks before, when he was a man in anguish and torment. Awful. He hadn’t been himself mentally and that was harder to deal with.”

You might have expected Wake Up the Nation to be an elegy to John, but Weller didn’t want to do that. Instead, he wrote a poem that was read at the funeral. “My dad’s spirit is still with me… I haven’t really worked out what happens when we die. I think we go into the ether, into the earth, into the air, people’s minds. But the whole notion of heaven and hell is man-made: you can live in either here on Earth and sometimes it’s your fault and sometimes it’s put upon you.”

Naturally, with his dad’s death, Weller has become more conscious of his own mortality (”I am aware of the words ‘national treasure’ being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old”). Now 52, he finds himself wanting to make more and more music, to leave a body of work behind when he does go. “So many bands aren’t around any more and the only thing you can look back on is one or two records. You don’t get any real perspective on them, there’s not enough to go on.” He feels happier now he’s older, “not out to impress anyone particularly, just doing my thing and comfortable with that”.

Not that he’s always what you might call age appropriate. Recently, there was an excruciatingly hilarious YouTube video of him drunk with his new girlfriend, Hannah Andrews, in Prague. Weller gatecrashes a pub singer’s gig, to sing his own songs like, well, a pub singer, and, later, Hannah and Paul end up blotto on the pavement. “Well… whoever had that camera made a few bucks,” he shrugs. “I’m not proud of it – my kids were embarrassed – but I don’t give a fuck. Plenty of people get pissed and fall over and end up on the cobbles. And it won’t be the last time for me.”

The Prague palaver came after the stick he got for getting together with Hannah at all: he left Samantha Stock, his partner of 13 years, for her 16 months ago, and at 25, she’s less than half his age. Now they live together, in Maida Vale, north London, and Paul is very happy, despite the headlines. “Because she’s so much younger than me, the press was all, it’s a midlife crisis. ‘Wrinkly Rocker’, ‘Mutton dressed up as ram’, ‘Old enough to be her Modfather’. But it isn’t like that. We’re really in love and that’s that.”

Weller has five kids from three women: budding musicians Natt and Leah, 22 and 18, from his relationship with DC Lee, 14-year-old Dylan, who lives with her mum in LA, and Jesamine, 10, and Stevie Mac (nearly five) from his time with Sam. Has he ever been dumped? “No. I’ve always done the leaving.” He partly puts this down to his never-ending touring; his band and crew become his family while he’s away and he finds it hard to readjust to everyday life when he’s back, though he’s a devoted father and often spotted on the school run. At one point, I call him ruthless, which he doesn’t appreciate, but he reconsiders and admits that he’s always been single-minded.

“Right from the start with music, I was like, I’m just going to do this and I don’t care about anything else. There are certain things you have to give up, even at 13, 14: your Friday and Saturday nights, having a regular girl, lots of things like that. I look at Amy Winehouse and I think perhaps she just don’t want to do it that much. It’s hard being out on the road, especially for a young woman. She’s a god-given talent but maybe she just wants to watch TV with her boyfriend or hang out with her mates in Camden.”

Since Hannah, he’s been living a quiet life, going to the gym, avoiding the computer (he hates it: there’s an anti-Facebook lyric on Wake Up the Nation). But even now, he’s anything but a quiet soul. Get him on to politics and you can see the firebrand youth again. He’s going to vote this time – Labour (he hates the Tories and thinks it’s a waste voting for anyone else) – but, having turned down a CBE and refused to let New Labour use “The Changing Man” as a campaign tune in 1997, he doesn’t really see anyone he truly wants to be his government. There’s no one good enough.

“I think generally speaking, in the last 15, 20 years, English people have become quite forward-thinking. We’re open, quite welcoming, much less xenophobic and racist. I think it’s the politicians who are out of step with us and I still see the royal family as top of that horrible rotting pile that is the establishment. It’s a shame we haven’t got anyone who can stand for us. It’s really sad when you see a million people on the streets demonstrating against war – well-meaning families, proper people, not mad anarchists – but it’s like, look it’s a nice idea but we’ve made our plans anyway.

“People say that if you’re still angry at 52, you’re not an angry young man, just a grumpy old git. But why should I get to a certain age and go, yeah that’s OK? Why do I have to accept everything? If you don’t want it, say so and if you want to kick against it, you should do that as well, whatever age you are.”

Like the man says: wake up the nation. We move on to less frustrating topics: how chuffed he is that his two eldest kids are musicians. “Natt joined us on stage in Leicester and it was one of the proudest moments of my life. Being a musician is a noble profession. Much more noble than an accountant or a lawyer, though I like my accountant and my lawyer.” He does: he still has the same team around him that he’s had for years, so that, post-John, he can function without a manager. When his record deal comes up (which will be soon), it will be Weller and his lawyer who meet the record company execs. And if there’s no deal, then he’ll be happy to go independent again, as he did after Polydor refused to release the final Style Council record in the late 80s.

Which gives us an excuse to talk Style Council. Hooray! I loved that band: much less boysy than the Jam, all summer joy, camp promos and Euro-fop fashion. At the time, they were critically derided, mostly because they lacked the Jam’s anger-fuelled energy, though they seem to have come back into favour now.

“Everyone really hated us,” Weller says. “But what was worse was history being rewritten to say that no one ever liked the Style Council. From 83 to 85, we were big, every record was top five, number one albums, massive gigs… the balance has been restored a bit recently. For 22 Dreams, some reviews said, ‘Weller at his most experimental since [the Style Council's] Confessions of a Pop Group’. I don’t remember anyone liking that. No one said it was an experiment, they just said it was shite.” 

Of course, the Style Council was all about Weller shucking off the Jam, stopping dead because he felt hemmed in. He did everything he could to annoy Jam fans; playing pretty soul, getting lyrics translated into French, rolling around with Mick Talbot in some of the gayest videos ever. “It was fun at the time,” he says. “I was trying to smash whatever preconceptions people had of me, destroying them.”

Is that what you’re doing now, with 22 Dreams and Wake Up the Nation?

“No, it’s different now. Then I was just too horrible, nasty about it, like, don’t box me in! Lashing out. Now I’m trying to challenge people but say, come with me, it’s going to be good. It’s great to be able to change, go on a journey, develop and take an audience with you. Because if it works out, then we’re all going to be happy.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/28/paul-weller-interview-miranda-sawyer