Paul Weller, ‘Sunflower’: An old name pushes Britpop in a new direction

Paul Weller
‘Sunflower’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
#16 on July 11, 1993

1. We have no future, we have no past

We’ve seen Britpop go through its first incarnation recently: the bittersweet nostalgia of Denim, the retro-futuristic London of Saint Etienne, the grimy, sexy glam of Suede, and Blur trying to reinvent The Kinks for a post-Pavement audience.

Britpop 1.0 isn’t really a sound so much as a mood. It’s literate, socialist, salacious, ironic and provocative. While Britpop 1.0 doesn’t always engage with other genres (such as dance and hip-hop), it’s not antagonistic to them either—except for the dour, earnest, machoness of grunge.

But Britpop will soon evolve into something very different. By the time Oasis played Knebworth, Britpop had moved away from Suede or Back In Denim and become steeped in the beer-and-football cliches of Lad Culture. Bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Cast and Kula Shaker (not to mention the Brothers Gallagher) played no-nonsense, straight-ahead rock’n’roll that fans celebrated as “proper fahkin music”.

Britpop 2.0 was partly defined by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t as decadent as rave, as queer as house, as girly as pop, or as ethnic as hip-hop. This was normal music for normal blokes.

In other words, Britpop 2.0 was a reactionary movement, based on the same worldview that ultimately led to Brexit. Where Britpop 1.0 had been ironically retro, treating the past as something slightly toxic, Britpop 2.0 used nostalgia as a defence against the onrushing future.

And this musical movement had an intellectual figurehead to give it some gravitas. They had The Modfather himself, Paul Weller.

2. I don’t care how long this lasts

The first important thing about Paul Weller is that he doesn’t care about anything besides music. The Guardian interviewed him a few years ago and asked which mattered more to him, his music or his personal relationships:

He ponders this for an eternity – aware that an honest answer involves “hurting other people. But if I’m really honest, outside of my kids, it would be music.”

The second thing to know about Paul Weller is that he’s almost impossible to analyse. He hates interviews, hates explaining himself, and often does the most unpredictable things. He is a man of ever-changing moods, as it were.

Weller first became a pop star in 1977, when The Jam’s debut single, ‘In The City’, appeared just a few weeks before The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’. Several things suggested that The Jam might be anti-punk reactionaries: their neat Mod-inspired suits and haircuts; the union jack imagery; their ability to play their instruments (very much against punk’s DIY ethos); the fact they had a song bemoaning the end of the British Empire.

But ‘In The City’ explodes with spiky, furious energy that most punk bands would die for, and songs like ‘Down The Tube Station At Midnight’ and ‘The Eton Rifles’ were more politically coherent than anything The Sex Pistols ever wrote.

Punk collapsed pretty quickly, but The Jam went from strength to strength. When ‘Going Underground’ made Number One in 1981, they looked set to become the biggest band in Britain and emerge as the undisputed kings of post-punk.

Instead, Weller shocked everyone (including his bandmates, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler) by disbanding The Jam. He was bored, he said. He wanted to try something new.

That something new was The Style Council, a blue-eyed soul group that leaned into contemporary pop music trends. Fans of The Jam hated Weller’s new project, but Paul just carried on and kept making albums until people were forced to accept that, actually, The Style Council were pretty great.

They made four albums together and achieved something that had eluded even The Jam: a hit single in America.

3. I long for that sharp wind to take my breath away

In 1989, something that changed the course of music history. An event involving five words you never expect to find in the same sentence:

Paul Weller’s acid house album.

The Style Council had gotten on board with house music in 1988 when they released a pretty excellent cover of ‘Promised Land’ by American DJ Joe Smooth:

After this success, they started work on an entire album of acid house-inspired songs called Modernism: A New Decade. If this record had been a success, it could have sent Weller off in an entirely new direction. Perhaps he would have followed in Norman Cook’s footsteps and become an iconic superstar DJ?

We’ll never know, because Modernism: A New Decade was an utter catastrophe. The label hated the finished project so much that they not only shelved the album, but terminated their contract with The Style Council. Shortly after, the band split up.

Weller entered the 90s at the lowest point of his career. Without a record deal, without a band, the future looked bleak.

4. And I miss you so

Probably not a surprise that Weller, now in his mid-30s, decided to go back to his roots.

He started working on solo music with a greater focus on folk and 60s pop, moving away from acid house and all other traces of modernity. This back-to-basics approach feels even more pronounced on his second solo album, Wild Wood, which sounds like it was recorded in 1973.

Now, all of this is fairly typical in any rock star’s evolution. People like Eric Clapton and Sting were going down the same road at the same time. The big difference is that Clapton and Sting’s retro music didn’t make a dent on youth culture.

However, the opposite happened to Weller. Wild Wood and its follow-up, Stanley Road, became essential texts of the Britpop movement. Paul Weller himself became The Modfather, the elder statesman giving his blessing to a new generation who were making guitar-based “proper music”—meaning old-fashioned music with minimal experimentation and zero genre crossover. He became unequivocally reactionary, an anti-punk.

How did he end up here?

A couple of coincidences dragged Weller into the centre of Britpop. First of all, Blur essentially stole his Mod revival schtick during their Modern Life Is Rubbish era. This prompted a renewed interest in Mod, which caused younger people to rediscover things like The Who, Quadrophenia—and The Jam.

Second, Weller befriended a struggling young band called Ocean Colour Scene who had failed out of the Baggie era. Steve Craddock from OCS played guitar on Wild Wood, while Simon Fowler sang backing vocals. Ocean Colour Scene then went on find success in latter-day Britpop with aggressively retro anthems like ‘The Day We Caught The Train’. As well as the OCS guys, Weller also became a friend and collaborator to people like Noel Gallagher and John Power from Cast.

So, Weller didn’t jump the Britpop bandwagon. If anything, Britpop jumped the Paul Weller bandwagon and assimilated him into its plans.

And Weller doesn’t seem like he particularly cared, in much the same way that he didn’t care all that much about punk in the 70s. The difference is that The Jam found themselves in a thrusting, forward-looking youth movement.

As The Modfather of late-90s Britpop, Weller took the opposite role, becoming a general in a fight against the future.

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