Q: In your estimation, did The Jam or The Style Council or any Paul Weller enterprise produce a great album?
A: Near-great, perhaps, if one is especially disposed toward the decidedly Brit-centric, Who/Kinks/Small Faces-derived pleasures of the Jam albums IN THE CITY (1977), ALL MOD CONS (1979), or SETTING SONS (1980), although the narrow, immediately-anachronistic MUSIC of those fabled (in Brit-centric circles) Punk/Postpunk-era LPs will always bring forth queries as to their utility, insofar as The Late-Seventies was a time characterized by ANTI-nostalgia and innovation, particularly among its Pop Musical vanguard(s).
Once Paul Weller chose to walk away from the pals with whom he’d risen to (UK) fame, to my ears he became a youngish man in search of the “Tamla-Motown” and/or Singer-Songwriter pleasures/gestalt of his (actual, Sixties-bounded) youth, so that even those few Style Council “hits” that one could actually recall once they’d left the airwaves (“My Ever Changing Moods”, say) seemed more like the ephemeral, Soul-lite work of his High MTV-superiors (Boy George, ABC’s Martin Fry, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, et al.), but also—crucially—NOT AS GOOD!
After that, years seemed to pass without word from our once-young Punk gun, ’til MOJO Magazine and their glossy ilk emerged to anoint its Elder Statesmen of Brit Pop, once Oasis, Blur, Pulp, et al. made it safe (and, for a time, very commercial) to be a proudly Anglophilic ancestor of Lennon, Townshend, and Steve Marriott!
And thus Our Paul now had a semi-viable “solo” career in Old Blighty, and a stubborn cult in the former American Colonies as well.
Not terribly prolific, of course, and nothing new musically, EVER, except in the sense that HE had never made such records up ’til then.
I think the great disappointment of Paul Weller—if one can continue to feel “disappointment” in a decidedly MINOR artiste who once roused a little rabble during our long-ago American youths, focused as we were on an (apparently) Anarchic UK—is simply that he abandoned the forceful-if-not-especially-powerful music his modest gifts afforded him for an attempt to resuscitate glories that were well beyond those eternally-modest gifts.
At this point (meaning the past twenty-five years), I’m cheered to read the very occasional interview with Mr. Weller, who seems not to hold himself in anywhere near the regard that his loyal, almost exclusively male fans insist upon, and whose solidly Leftist politics don’t seem to have mellowed with age, mercifully.
But in comparison to the musical accomplishments of his initial Punk/Postpunk comrades—John Lydon, Joe Strummer/Mick Jones, Mark E. Smith, Ian Curtis, Andy Gill/Jon King, Jon Langford/Tom Greenhalgh, et many al.—Paul Weller’s seem pretty paltry and decidedly long ago/far away.
Good bloke though, from all accounts.
Hope that tart li’l summation doesn’t fly too much in the face of the inevitable ENCOMIA likely to emerge from the Weller-centric confines of the East Portland Blog brain trust!
Thanks fer querying, my dear friend…. 
