Anyway, he cut a version of it, but it was funny to hear a proper American singer doing this tune that I wrote when I was a kid, trying to ape this soul R&B thing, and then hearing it done properly, you know? But that was probably the first proper song I wrote. And then years later, Dean Parrish, who was really famous on the Northern soul circuit, he did ‘I’m On My Way’, a big Northern tune. That was probably the best song I’d written up to that point. “I wrote this soul-sounding tune in my mind, called ‘Left, Right And Centre’. “There’s a good song I did when I was about 16 and I was going for a heavier Otis Redding phase,” he told me. He still has no interest in suffering fools gladly, but his recall, when asked nicely, is terrific. Accused of being “difficult” by music journalists when he was young, all he really was was shy and inarticulate. Weller is one of the most self-aware artists of his age. Then we had to start really thinking about the set and we had to play some covers, because I only had a few tunes, but it made me concentrate more on the songwriting and try to play our own songs.”
And then we got into the London pub rock circuit, we managed to get a few gigs, we did The Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road, the Hope & Anchor up in Islington and The Kensington in Olympia. I was never in any doubt that it would happen. But, you know, at that time I thought anyone over 25 had had it.
I was always very proud that my first record came out when I was just 18, as most of my heroes were kids when they started. And I always said to myself, ‘If I don’t make it by the time I’m 20, I’m going to pack it in,’ because I thought it would all be over by that time.
“I was kind of pretentious enough and arrogant enough, or whatever it was, to think it was only a matter of time. “I never had any doubt about it,” he told me recently. ‘I was pretentious and arrogant enough to think was only a matter of time’ “Why should we ever want to go back? That would be soft”), but it has also shared equivalences with the career of an artist Weller was previously equivocal about (“For years I only liked Low”), David Bowie.
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This desire to dabble and evolve has not only mirrored the professional playfulness of The Beatles (“After ‘Please Please Me’, we decided we must do something different for the next song,” Paul McCartney told the band’s biographer Hunter Davies. His solo career has been testament to that, a three-decade cavalcade of experimentation that, in the past ten years or so, has seen him develop an extraordinary desire for experimentation. Weller’s way of dealing with this was to ignore them and to push ahead, coaxing himself through the tributaries of the music industry, leading where others wanted him to follow. While other artists were encouraged to experiment and dabble, Weller’s constituency, both in concert halls and in the media, seemed determined to create their own kind of creative cell for him, damning him whenever he decided to leave it, which was often.
He had to drag many of the diehard Jam fans with him to The Style Council (many of whom were blindsided by Weller’s understandable desire to move on) and those who came with him were repeatedly assaulted by changes in direction. ‘Your dad’s band was the catalyst for all of it’Ĭonversely, he has seemingly gone out of his way to persistently challenge them, in the way that great artists often do, be they Bob Dylan, David Bowie or Weller’s own North Star, The Beatles.
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