Amongst The Butterflies With The Modfather...

Since the birth of the Mod father in May 1958 in humble Woking in Surrey, it wasn’t long before it wasn’t just his doting parents looking admiringly at him for in around 1983, he came to the for with the unsurpassable Style Council and since then, he has been not just an icon in the Mod movement of the late Seventies , but a political spokesman on the very important social issues of the eighties with his band.

Calming down the tone somewhat on his venture into solo-ism, his music changed again, into deep, reflective themes. Not at all what we had first remembered him for in The Jam and then into the pastel coloured clad brass musicians in The Style Council.

Still very much mop haired and slightly rebellious in his scruffiness, this middle aged man still can throw a large crowd together in complete silent harmony. Where their fathers and mothers jumped and hopped around in drain pipes and minis, their children now stand, silent in front of the same man but in reflective thought of his words, rather than his music.

After the surprising success of the start of his solo career, (and let’s face it, we didn’t think he would ever appear again after the break of The Style Council) he bought us strong albums with guitar in hand. In the shape of ‘Paul Weller,’ ‘Wild Wood,’ but it was only with the giant storm of a live album, simply titled, ‘Live Wood,’ in September 1994 that he had stumbled across something that other bands find incredibly hard to do, and that’s release a pleasing live LP.

Jumping back into the studio for a brief while, he didn’t dip his toes into the waters of live audience participation again until, ‘Days Of Speed,’ in 2001. Complete with all the chattering back ground noise of a Darts Final, this album was to the highest positioning album for Weller on the live front in his career. Reaching number three, this album fails to inspire anyone to get up behind a microphone stand and give it a go themselves. Complete with man in question and a guitar, this album will take you through a collaboration of gentle songs, thoughtful moods and the odd wolf whistle from the audience, who I have to admit, are pretty well behaved throughout the whole set.

Showing the three poses of a black and white Weller on stage, the album cover will not amaze you by any stretch of the imagination, what will become apparent on listening to the album though, is the wonderment that Weller hasn’t dabbled in a live album thing too much before and why he had left it so long to do so in between.

Fear not, this album sets a simple situation in front of you. A man, with a guitar that will show you all the styles a guitar can achieve and a voice which will enlighten you, sadden you at times, and create atmosphere’s making you wish why the hell you hadn’t bought tickets to go and see this guy when you had the chance. An irritating album in this sense, yes. As a piece of uplifting and generous noise, you will only want to play the album over and over again.

Could it be possible to understand an artist more by listening to one album that paying only half attention to the rest of the his career past him? I speak on experience here and being of the hardened Style Council generation, I had found it hard to recognise Weller in anything other than a yellow cardigan and loafers with a collection of brightly coloured musicians behind him, bouncing around the stage. I have to admit, that this knocking on rocker had to be smacked quickly across the back of the hand and told to grow up a bit. This album, I must say, has led me to believe that there was more to Paul Weller than ‘Shout To The Top’…..

When on thinking as to how I should write a piece to capture the surprising spirit of this album, I had to quickly stop myself from going through track by track in a fairly dull routine which will not just bore you but will have bored me senseless in the process. I guess the idea is it appreciate the album as a whole. There is nothing that stands out on it’s own in this album, as it somehow stands out as a whole. Each track practically melts into the next. The voice it strong, deep, poised at each stressed note and emotional enough to create a sense of the song rather than just a nice musical tune. What we have here is a man who is willing to express emotions and feeling of any ordinary human being and express these feelings into a set which obviously delighted the audience witnessing and will equally delight the listener at home.

There some tracks that you will recognise here; ‘Out Of The Sinking,’ from November 1994, and ‘You Do Something To Me.’ Not to mention some regular classics from my generation, including ‘That’s Entertainment’ and ‘Town Called Malice,’ which, when played on just the a compliment on a guitar, will bring new life and light into these ancient songs. The acoustic effect he gives to ‘That’s Entertainment,’ is not an unusual sound, as it had been done before and still holds the same hard hitting power of those social lyrics just as much. ‘Town Called Malice,’ perhaps might have you reaching for the bucket initially as, with all due respect here, the acoustic set perhaps just doesn’t do it justice. The power behind this track originally was the effect of the musical content. It held aloft a moment in time, which was the early, struggling eighties where money and jobs were hard to come by and property prices went through the roof and a lot of people lost their homes due to the rise of mortgage repayments. Sorry Paul, this last track should have, perhaps been left off.

Whilst you are in a relaxed, soothing mood, you can flick through the inner sleeve where, along side the track titles, are the dates and venues where the recordings took place for each track. The incredible smooth production of the album only comes into light here were, one could truly believe that the whole album was recorded all at the same gig. The album titles where these tracks can be originally found are also mentioned for your interest. The collection of statutory photographs in the sleeve are of the usual live standard. Various poses in bright lights with a small selection of guitars around him at different angles are pictured, but nothing very impressive. I guess the idea was to take away any stunning album cover that may over shadow the creativity if the album within.

With no other credits to anyone other than the producer, it is perhaps a shock that Weller had taken all the credit himself on making this album. I guess it would have been, perhaps, difficult to listen ever single engineer and technician at each concert, but I do think that someone should have been able to take a bow for the sound quality of the album if nothing else. The atmosphere that this album creates is quite imaginable. The idea that a live album should be just as though you are actually there really does come into it’s own in this particular LP. Weller’s clear voice is sharp to the point of any live performance if you happen to be in the front row. For this alone, the album should be appreciated as a classic piece of live history even if you are not a Weller fan.

In September 2002, Weller created his number one album, ‘Illumination’ but seems to have done very little since. In a world where we seem to only judge someone on how they have done rather than what they will be capable of in the future, this certainly has to be an album to treasure as a point in Weller’s career where he can be very much judged as one of the best live performers of his generation…



All songs written by Paul Weller
Executive producer; Pete Mason
Sony Music
Bought on CD for eight pounds HMV
099750471722


©m.duffy (sam1942 and Planet Janet) 2006.