When Style Council came out with its first record, Bruce, the biggest Jam fan I knew, shook his head sadly. He may never have uttered the word, but hanging over his head was an acid green thought bubble containing the word, “sellout.” Bruce had a Mosaic sense of pop ethics, and when he came down from the mountaintop with a judgment, he was not inclined to revision. So he had a hard time with the fact that the creator of the razor sharp songs he esteemed above most others could suddenly be producing airy, neosoul bagatelles. For another stripe of music fan, it would have been like Joe Strummer breaking up the Clash to start a Serge Gainsbourg tribute band.
I never got the Jam—not really and despite some effort. Oh, sure, I liked about half of Sound Affects and happily spun “Town Called Malice” when the dance floor needed filling, but I am mostly grateful to the band for having had the taste to cover, and thus introduce me to, the ChiLites “Stoned Out of My Mind.” (Was this, in effect, the first Style Council single?) I recognize the craft and the passion of Weller’s songs for the Jam, but frankly his concerns were often so parochial that he made the Anglocentric songs of the brothers Davies seem positively universal. I’ll allow that it is a wonderful and important thing to define and document a subculture, but I lacked the will to project myself and my adolescent concerns into mod London.
Many others, like Bruce, had no such trouble. They heard something I didn’t in the music, and I can understand the dismay of those who watched helplessly as the tense urban experience of going underground turned into what looked like a Haircut 100 knockoff. Me, I didn’t mind. Style is style, and Weller’s sense of it seemed no less keen as a continental romantic in Style Council than it had as a mod in the Jam.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Style Council songs are better than Jam songs, but something in Weller was freed in the new group: there is a welcome color and tunefulness that took Weller’s writing to new places. “My Ever Changing Moods” was the big hit here; it’s interesting to consider whether Weller of the Jam would have even admitted in song that moods mattered let alone changed. For my money, “Long Hot Summer” was the best of the bunch (though the video was—is—disconcerting). Weller sings with real passion, and a nice tension develops as the mood of the title phrase is aptly evoked. I also liked the Philly-soul inspired “Shout to the Top.”
I can see Bruce shaking his head again. But they were just pop songs to me. The whole fashion-spread thing was kind of silly, but Weller had earned his fun. And were his newfound affectations any more or less false than those of the kids in Chicago or Cleveland who were swept up in the Jam’s mod cons? Were they any less romantic than the British accents adopted by the countless American would-be punks inspired by the Jam and others?
Weller is still a demigod in Britain, where his semiannual record release provokes yet another panegyric from MOJO magazine. His status as an active artist has pretty much dried up on these shores, but as YouTube commenters prove, the affection for his work with Style Council is unchanging.
– Tom Fredrickson is the proprietor of the unparalleled music blog, Lost Wax Method.
