The Whole Point of No Return: the first year of The Style Council
In late 1982, Paul Weller came close to effectively putting The Jam and The Style Council onstage simultaneously. He, Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton were preparing for their final tour, and were short of a keyboard player — and, with Weller having already met Mick Talbot to discuss his post-Jam plans, he called him to find out if he’d be interested. “I said, ‘Is this just down to you? Are you trying to force me on them?’” says Talbot. “He said, ‘No — the other guys just remembered you. They brought you up.’ But I was already committed to do some work with friends in Germany. I was literally sitting waiting for my cab, to go to the airport.”
Talbot — who had briefly served in Dexys Midnight Runners, and is these days the keyboard player and musical director in Kevin Rowland’s relaunched version of the same group — had been on the dole for nine months, and had jumped at the chance of a month-long stint playing R’nB covers with a South London band called The Misfits. So he turned The Jam down — though on his return, he and Weller began working on the project that would be launched in the spring of the following year.
The two had played together before. In 1979, Talbot, then a member of mod revivalists the Merton Parkas, had contributed piano to The Jam’s cover of the Motown chestnut Heatwave, and then guested on keyboards when they played the Rainbow, in Finsbury Park. “We’re the same age; we had a lot of similar influences, from the soul and R’n’B thing, to the mod thing, to daft things — Tony Hancock, and Carry On films — a lot of cultural references we both talked about,” says Weller. “And we both had similar humour — taking the piss out of everything, including ourselves. We got on really well.”
In the summer of ’82, the pair had met up and had an hours-long conversation in a West End café. Talbot recalls talking about their shared suburban roots, such books as Nell Dunn’s novel Up the Junction and the mods-and-rockers oral history Generation X, French cinematic icons like Jean Luc Godard and the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, the TV show The Prisoner, and Colin MacInnes, the author of Absolute Beginners. They also discussed no end of music, not least classic and contemporary soul, and the R’n’B-laden jazz that sat in a similar place: Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Smith, Horace ‘Song For My Father’ Silver.
So it was that the Style Council was born — though Weller was committed to five more months with The Jam. “He said, ‘We can start on stuff when I’ve got gaps,’” says Talbot, who recalls some recording taking place through the second half of 1982: basic tracks for such songs as Speak Like A Child, Money Go Round, and A Solid Bond In Your Heart (also tried out by The Jam, but passed over as their final single in favour of Beat Surrender).
One big idea, says Talbot, was to “cast songs like films”, and bring in an array of different musicians and singers. Joe Dworniak from the British funk band I-Level played biting bass on Money Go Round; Orange Juice’s drummer Zeke Manyika was brought in to play on the first three singles after Weller and Talbot saw his band live, and were bowled over by his playing on their cover of Al Green’s L.O.V.E Love. In time, Style Council recordings would feature talents as diverse as Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl, and the violinist Bobby Valentino, most famously heard on The Bluebells’ Young At Heart — as well as teenage drummer Steve White and Weller’s future wife DC Lee, both of whom would soon be full-time members.
With The Jam having been laid to rest, The Style Council were launched in March 1983, with Speak Like A Child (a title shared with a Blue Note album by Herbie Hancock), whose three minutes brimmed with a gleaming sense of freedom and optimism. At this point, Weller was also busy with his freshly-launched Respond label, and a collective of musicians — most notably, the plucked-from-obscurity singer Tracie Young, and the Scots band The Questions — with whom The Style Council occasionally appeared. With his tongue very close to his cheek, Weller talked about his ideas for this new career phase in terms of a “musical Kama Sutra”, and purposely rejected the kind of schedule that had so ground him down with The Jam: for their first year, The Style Council did not tour, or release an album.
“There was a lot of pressure from Polydor, wanting to make the numbers up,” says Weller. “I can even remember the MD coming down, saying, ‘Could you reconsider? Maybe you could make an album.’ I was like, ‘No — we want to put some singles out, and take our time’. Which is what we did.”
Their first run of records rose to a brilliant peak with the À Paris EP, recorded in the French capital, and led by Long Hot Summer — arguably one of the most perfect songs Paul Weller has ever written, and The Style Council’s biggest hit: in August 1983, it reached number 3 (just behind Spandau Ballet’s Gold and KC and The Sunshine Band’s Give It Up).
“Being the pretentious twat I am,” says Weller, “I was really into the Modern Jazz Quartet. I really loved the sophistication thing they had going. They’d done a record called Place Vendôme [recorded in Paris in 1966, with The Swingle Singers]. And thought, ‘What a great idea — to take us off and go and record in Paris.’ At the time, I was thinking about doing a run of these EPs: doing an Alpine record in Switzerland… and going to different European cities. It never came about: it was a shame, really.”
“The other thing with me and Mick was that we were committed shoppers. We were like two old ladies at a jumble sale most of the time. We just loved shopping. In between recording, we’d be buying clothes. It was a beautiful time: getting up in the morning and having our croissants and coffee. It was like a little holiday.”
That EP also showcased the mischief that was a Style Council hallmark, not least in its comically homo-erotic video (“me and Talbot touching each other’s earholes”, as Weller later put it). On The Paris Match, he sang a verse and the refrain in French: what with the regular sleevenotes written by someone called The Cappuccino Kid (Weller’s music-writer friend Paolo Hewitt) and such advert tag-lines as “a new record by new Europeans”, it was perhaps inevitable that plenty of people took umbrage, and reached for the ‘p’ word. “Sometimes you’ve got to be pretentious to go forward, you know?” says Weller. “To try and show people something. You’ve got to have those unobtainable dreams to do anything different.”
Both Weller and Talbot say that as well as picking up some people’s bafflement, they also could see Weller’s public changing in front of their eyes. “A lot of people misread what we did,” says Talbot. “But at the same time, there were a lot of people who weren’t Jam fans who came into the fold. I can remember that when we first played proper live dates, Paul was quite surprised at how many girls and women there were in the audience.”
“Anyone who came to see us liked it — but obviously, it confused a lot of people as well,” says Weller. “But it’s not like I didn’t expect that to happen.”
By the spring of ’84, The Style Council had released the deeply impressive full-band version of My Ever Changing Moods — which reached 29 in the US charts, still Weller’s highest-ever placing — and their almost surreally expectations-defying first album Café Bleu. The latter included five instrumentals and a rap, and another two of Weller’s best-ever songs, You’re The Best Thing and a fully-realised Headstart For Happiness, first premiered on the B-side of Money Go Round.
“It felt like a weight had lifted,” says Weller. “The first three years, I have only happy memories of. We had so much fun. The first proper tour was like being on the road with a youth club. We had a lot of young people playing with us, who came from total obscurity. Anthony Harty, our bass player, was, like, 16 — he’d never played in a band before. Steve White was 17 when he first joined us. It was just all these kids on the road. It was brilliant.”
At thirty years’ distance, The Council’s early fondness for using an ever-changing cast of musicians looks positively trailblazing (by way of a latter-day reference point, Mick Talbot mentions Massive Attack). Moreover, in the oeuvre of any comparable British musician of Weller’s generation, you will not find the creative light years that separated most of what he did between 1977 and 1982, and what followed it: to go from, say, Funeral Pyre to Long Hot Summer in not much more than two years is a leap almost Bowie-esque in its audacity. “I was trying to challenge people,” Weller says now. “Any conceptions people had of me, of what I do, and what I was about — I was trying to break all that down. It was a very liberating time.”