What do you do when the nickname that has stuck is the Modfather? What happens next when you’re viewed as an elder statesman of contemporary cultural affairs? Or when, as a musician and songwriter in your mid 50s, you are plugging your 12th solo album in just under 25 years?
If you’re Paul Weller you take it all in your stride. You dismiss the nickname as a joke, you discard the “elder statesman” tag as a byproduct of not having died yet, and you agree that, prolificacy aside, there isn’t much more you can do than write songs, record them, put them out and hope for the best. “What else would I do?” he says.
Although Weller has something of a reputation for being brusque with journalists, he asks his rhetorical question politely. “Of course I’m going to write more songs and make an album, because that’s what I do in life. The alternative would be not to do it, and that never enters my head.
“Writing songs is what I’m alive for – that and looking after my wife, my family and so on; paying the bills. But my sole purpose is to make music, and it was that way from when I was a kid. It was always my vision of what I should and could do.”
Weller is looking leather tanned and slightly weather beaten, but he’s as trim and slim as when he was a 19-year-old in The Jam, and he remains as nifty a dresser as he has always been.
His 12th solo album, Saturns Pattern, is out this month, and although it might not attract many new members to the Weller brotherhood – and it is very much a brotherhood – it keeps his common-touch pop and rock ticking over. If anything it continues his unending love for the 1960s, despite his age meaning that he lived through them only as a child.
"I regretted missing out being a teenager in the 60s," he says, "but I was massively influenced by the decade from as long as I can remember. In the 70s, after the initial thing of Bowie and some of the glam-rock stuff, like Marc Bolan, it was such a wasteland. It was punk rock that kicked me off – and the protopunk of Dr Feelgood's debut album, Down By the Jetty, which came out at the start of '75, was a game changer for me. They were totally anti-fashion – odd haircuts, grimy suits from Oxfam shops – and were the first band to make an impact. The next thing after that was seeing The Sex Pistols in 1976. They played at an all-nighter at the Lyceum in London. I'd come up from Woking to see the gig. I was about 17, speeding off my head, and seeing them was an epiphany. I just thought, This is it: now is my time."
We know what happened next: The Jam, which Weller had formed with friends at school, and now consisted of Weller and Bruce Foxton on guitar and Rick Buckler on drums, signed a record deal and, in early 1977, released their first single. But Weller split up the trio at the height of their commercial success, in 1982. A year later came The Style Council; at the end of that decade Weller once again called time on a successful band.
He began a tentative solo career in 1990, and since his self-titled debut, in 1992, he has released an album every two years or so.
Melody maker
Underpinning his output are what Weller views as two motifs: melody and a preoccupation with the passing of time. “You could have slightly more experimental or backing music,” he say, “but as long as the melody is still there, that’s all that matters. The lyrics? Well, I feel that I have to avoid repeating myself, but some things you just can’t avoid. I really can’t believe that I’m 57 very soon” – his birthday is May 25th – “and I really can’t believe that my kids are growing up so quickly. I’m not overly sentimental or nostalgic, and so the passing of time thing isn’t either of those; it’s more genuine surprise at where the time has actually gone.”
And the elder-statesman tag? “I don’t take any offence from it, but if you don’t die in your 30s of a drug overdose then you’re always going to end up being an elder statesman or -woman. It’s better to keep sight of more important things than any kind of status, such as what you’re like as a person and how you treat your neighbour. I’ve seen loads of people over the years fall by the wayside through booze and drugs – but mostly by their ego, which can be just as destructive.”
Fractured relationship
Weller’s relationship with alcohol and drugs, he says guardedly, has fractured in the past 10 years. The implication is that if it hadn’t he might not be here to talk about it. “Oh, I just got bored with it.” He shakes his head. “You know the cliche of feeling sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? Of waking up every day in a heap and feeling awful for a few days? It got to the point where I just wanted to stop doing that, and so I did. But mainly because it was so predictable. That’s drugs for you. And the drinking – which I loved – became too much for me as well. It helped that another influence was my missus: she said I had to make a decision. It was either her or the bottle.”
Unusually for someone who tends to stay out of the limelight, Weller’s private life has come under scrutiny in the past decade. The tabloids and gossip mags started to take notice in 2008 when the singer, who has seven children from four relationships, left Samantha Stock, his partner of 13 years, for Hannah Andrews, a backing singer, who was almost 30 years younger than him. They married in 2010 and are now the parents of three-year-old twins, John Paul and Bowie. It seems impolite to ask, but did getting a vasectomy never enter his head?
“Nah. You mad?” he says. “I love being an old dad. Sometimes people ask if I’m the twins’ grandad, but that’s fine: it doesn’t offend me. To be honest I feel lucky, blessed. The only thing that worries me – and here we’re getting back to the passing-of-time thing again – is how long left I have with them. That’s scary for me, but you can only think of what’s in front of you today, can’t you?”
We’re on such a roll that we dig out an answer that Weller once gave when asked which trait he liked least in himself. “Emotional cowardice”, he said at the time. Does that still hold? Weller eyeballs me for a few seconds, then says, “Men can be cowardly, we know that.”
Another dose of eyeballing is followed by a pause. “It’s hard to be honest sometimes, but I can see the wrongness in being like that. So, yes, I could have handled certain things better. But such is life.”
- Saturns Pattern is released on May 15th. Paul Weller is at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on November 16th and the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on November 17th
THE 1970S AND 1980S: ‘EVERY GIG I WENT TO WAS VIOLENT’
“I don’t think the 70s and the 80s were great days,” Paul Weller says. “There were loads of things I hated about them, frankly, and I much prefer my life now. If you gave me a time machine to go back to those decades I wouldn’t be bothered. What did I hate about the 70s? Black-and-white television. The way people were overtly racist and Neanderthal. Every gig I went to was violent, with crowds exploding in blood, fists, kicks. I’m pleased to say that we’ve improved, and I’m really glad we’re far more cross-cultural now.”
