26/02/2024
Paul Weller: Fulsome Blues issue intro...
In the spring of 2020, as COVID coursed through the populace, the UK government - presided over by an inner-Churchill-channelling PM more akin to the nodding dog of a well-known car insurance commercial - introduced a stay-at-home order and issued emergency powers not seen since World War Two. The subsequent ‘blitz spirit’ invoked by the tabloids would equate to little more than bunkers built from bog-roll. As Nature nursed her man-inflicted wounds and a nation paused for breath, shoals of Smithers-Jones’, no longer swallowed up by the whale of commerce, pondered alternatives to being down in the tube station or stuck in London traffic.
For many furloughed workers and their families, lockdown brought meltdown. In private hells of illegally-clad tower blocks and sink estates there was no release valve from the pressure cooker steam of kitchen sink drama; no playground kids or five-a-sides in the fields beyond the foundries; no post-work pints in the local, or lovers’ trysts on the wasteland.
On the fringes of a picturesque town, three-and-a-half miles from the M25, beyond the priory and the myrtle hedges, something was stirring. Weller, unable to tour the brilliant On Sunset, sought sanctuary from enforced domesticity in his recording studio. As the creative cogs turned, so a new collection of songs began to take shape.
‘I had about four or five songs left over from On Sunset,’ he told GQ, ‘and they were just lying around unused. So, I started working away, chipping away; trying to put together a new batch of songs.’
The resultant LP, although a product of the pandemic, is not specifically about it. However, two tracks do touch on the impact of lockdown on creativity and relationships. On LP-opener ‘Cosmic Fringes’, Weller inhabits the mind-set of a housebound egotist unable to wrench himself from artistic torpor (‘A lazy c**k that never crows’), and on ‘Glad Times’, yearns the romantic longing that time apart creates: ‘We go for days without a word/Without a kiss/Both looking for something that we missed’.
If On Sunset portrayed Weller as a 21st Century musical Lone Ranger riding his trusty steed towards an end-credit horizon (‘Yes, I’m ready rider’ he proclaims on ‘Old Father Tyme’), Fat Pop reveals that the moral crusade is all but over: racism is addressed in response to the murder of George Floyd on the highly emotive ‘That Pleasure’, social deprivation on the ‘Dead End Street’ pathos of ‘Shades Of Blue’, and mental health issues on LP standout ‘In Better Times’.
Whereas On Sunset continued the mellow tone of True Meanings (even anti-Establishment epic ‘Rockets’ trades ‘Money-Go-Round rage for resignation), Fat Pop harks back to the tensions of Wake Up The Nation and the immediacy of Sound Affects with its moving musical canvas of pop art exclamation marks. Furthermore, the title reiterates the central theme of Sound Affects: music as a conduit for cultural and political thought and its ability to educate and inspire: ‘Sent our heads in search of more/Made you question all you’d learnt before’.
Like the finale of On Sunset, Fat Pop ends forlornly with ‘Still Glides The Stream’; a hymnal, not only to the forgotten 5 O’clock heroes on the front line of the pandemic, but also to the politician who had their best interests at heart: ‘the man [Jeremy Corbyn] who never was [Prime Minister]’, who ‘still knows what his public needed’ (the lyric, penned by Steve Cradock, is a nod to Weller’s barbed line from ‘Going Underground’ which berates voters for electing Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979: ‘the public gets what the public wants’).
When asked by Uncut what it would have been like without recourse to a studio during lockdown, Weller replied, ‘I’d probably be in a padded cell’.
Following the confinement of innumerable lockdowns, and less than a year after the release of On Sunset, Weller released his fulsome prison blues, which urged us to ‘stand tall’ and ‘walk the line'.
© Drew Hipson.
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