Paul Weller- The Paul Weller Creation and Continuum Discussion

you all need this...

http://www.amazon.com/Fly-Wall-B-Sides-Rarities-1991-2000/dp/B0000A0C4M

used copies from $15, not bad for 3 discs of b-sides...

Disc: 1
1. Here's a New Thing
2. That Spiritual Feeling
3. Into Tomorrow [Demo Version]
4. Arrival Time
5. Fly on the Wall
6. Always There to Fool You
7. All Year Round
8. Ends of the Earth
9. This Is No Time
10. Another New Day
11. Foot of the Mountain [Live]
12. Wild Wood ['Portishead' Remix]
13. Kosmos ['Lynch Mob Bonus Beats' Remix]

Disc: 2
1. Loved
2. Steam
3. It's a New Day, Baby
4. Year Late
5. Eye of the Storm
6. Shoot the Dove
7. As You Lean into the Light
8. So You Want to Be a Dancer
9. Everything Has a Price to Pay
10. Right Underneath It
11. Helioscentric
12. There's No Drinking After You're Dead ['Noonday Underground' Remix]
13. Riverbank
14. Science ['Lynch Mob' Remix]

Disc: 3
1. Feelin' Alright (Mason)
2. Ohio (Young)
3. Black Sheep Boy (Hardin)
4. Sexy Sadie (Lennon/McCartney)
5. I Shall Be Released (Dylan)
6. I'd Rather Go Blind (Foster/Jordan)
7. My Whole World Is Falling Down (Crutcher/Jones)
8. Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City (Walsh/Price)
9. Waiting on an Angel (Harper)
10. Bang-Bang (Bono)
11. Instant Karma (Lennon)
12. Don't Let Me Down (Lennon/McCartney)

 

I've been waiting for this thread to start, nice work Butch. 20 years worth of music, it's gonna be some thread.

 

I owned every single track on this when it came out but bought it anyway just to get it all in one spot. Great pricing, essential stuff.

But... we get ahead of ourselves here!

 

Talk about jumping the bloody gun,good call mate! Before we get to that collection , HUT and I can rummage through our respective voluminous collections and start right there! Seriously, though I've found an expedient way to cover all that stuff BEFORE we get to that collection. That collection that shall remain nameless will be utterly redundant by the time we get to it! And that is no rueful boast all y'all!

 

Thanks,mate. The interview with Paul Francis was fun. The way he phrased his answers was very witty and amusing in places. Things like that make all this hard effort worthwhile in the end for me.

 

I keep the recordings of these two shows (frankly speaking, the only two I could find from that period), and I can tell, judging only by them, the 1990 Movement tour was awesome. I really like the acid jazz flavor of these performances, but it's kinda "good" acid jazz for me - a bit rockish and played live (compared to numerous midi-based contemporaries).
Work To Do - a new addition to the playlist - is a killer; I was never a fan of the original recordings, but the Movement version is something - it just shines with life and soul and energy.

 

LF, that's spot on. Wellie had one foot in acid jazz, one foot in TSC and his head was intimating a rock direction. Not Britpop or Dadrock but rock. Needless to say the musicians involved with The Paul Weller Movement did an excellent job for that initial effort. However the subsequent live versions of Weller's solo band would be on yet another echelon...at least chemistry wise that is.

 

Anyway it was a good reason to dig my shelves and bring these recordings back to spotlight...

 

i only mentioned that bsides box set now because you wrote

people might want to be prepared to discuss some of these tracks...a rough room already....

 

And off we go! To me the most important aspect of the start of his solo career is the return to prominence of......the guitar (electric and acoustic) and songwriting. Yes, he played guitar in TSC, but it was often less than 20% of the overall sound, if that.

Nice title for his first single as well.

 

No harm no foul. It's all good. Just having fun. In some of those B-side cases the tunes will be provided when need be!

 

That's what it's all about in the end. Shining a light on something that most people might have taken for granted. Bring Back The Funk, that's what I'm talkin' about. That 1990 period is one that most Wellerites don't even know exist. Fortunately we have things circulating(code for you know what) and the BBC sessions as proof of some intriguing things being done.

LF, I'm surprised that you didn't mention that comment that Paul Francis made about Paul Weller and his genius....a more provocative answer than what Bert Bevans gave me BTW!

 

If you go back and listen to Modernism, he actually plays some guitar on it. Very ,very little BUT it's there!Thing with the early Paul Weller Movement stuff is that he started to play guitar more frequently and his chops came back through constant and consistent woodshedding. Unfortunately and quite frankly, his guitar chops atrophied demonstrably during the time of the Style Council. He was just starting to get his footing again technique wise in 1990 and that shows.

 

And it evolved into a whole new style too! His guitar work on the solo albums doesn't resember the work on the Jam catalog much at all.

 

Being as one who came to the party late, when it comes to Weller, I found that three cd set to be a great mop up (although I imagine not comprehensive). Even though I have the deluxe's now too, it is still great to have.

I wish I had kept up with PW and not let things slip, but feel I have made good ground in the last few years and especially since these PW threads started. Since whenever it was that the first Jam thread it SH.TV until the PW deluxe dropped on my carpet, I bought 22 (dreams) Jam/TSC and solo albums, some of them were proper albums to augment the Jam/TSC boxes and some of the live albums of theirs that I didn't own, and I mopped up the missing Weller cds from my colllection and got the 5 deluxe versions to augment the single discs. That is a lot of Weller, luckily I got a lot of it pretty cheap on ebay or Amazon Marketplace, so I would say I have a good percentage of his output now, but with a lot of his later B sides missing.

The new album was in my mailbox yesterday, but as it is a birthday present, I can't listen to it for three weeks.
Ah well, all good things etc, it will give me time to dive into the solo stuff again in preparation.

 

i know i know...still dog pile on the good idea for the sake of the thread...that box is very helpful for the singles due to be discussed, but Coly makes a good point much of the deluxe editions will have what you need as well. i'm missing so many cd singles, it was a great way to fill in the gaps back in the day...

 

Is that a composite word for remember and resemble? That's a brilliant word, sort of a portmanteau of sorts ...or maybe not?!!! You can tell even on the early stuff, specifically the live stuff in 19990 that Paul was more interested in developing his craft in terms of his playing AND his song craft. I was surprised that Paul Francis liked KOsmos as that wasn't challenging to play for him in particular yet he liked the song craft on it. and whether or not you like that tune, it signaled a different directions of sorts for wellie.

 

You know the deal mate. Keep it kinda/sorta on topic! Whatever,by the time we get to that compilation it will probably be coupled with something else because when I mentioned being exhaustive I meant exhaustive. I'll be covering the deluxe editions of course, how can I not? I wanted to mention some of these things with the next post on Thursday BUT things will come into a far greater cogent focus by then!

 

I'll keep this brief BUT the deluxe versions were both a blessing and a curse,Colo. It kind of took the novelty out of the B-sides rarities comp because you basically had the tunes in their proper venue/album and their proper context on the whole as well. It's good to have the rarities collection just the same BUT go out and buy all those damn singles! That's what I did the first time around. My suggestion in the end....... is to buy everything! As I addressed Stylistmaniacs, I am now addressing Wellermaniacs.. Buy anything you can buy your hands on by Wellie...right quick! May Wellermania reign supreme, phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust,indeed. I'm quite sorry that you are not cheating and listening to Wake Up The Nation, you are depriving yourself quite simply put!

 

oh, go on then...we won't tell...

 

Good suggestion, I third that motion! Musical Infidelity is this what this is?! The fact that Colo might listen to WUTN shall never leave the cult of Weller's lips.

 

You know, Mr.Francis doesn't give a damn about PW - as I can see from the interview. Seems that it was just one of the numerous gigs for him, quite insignificant one in his career. By looking at the photo I'd expect him to come from a different background and moving into different direction... but that remark about Free and All Right Now... and all this prog stuff... and Keith Emerson story... you understand immediately his spot at the Movement was accidental. But he was good on those gigs and fitted excellently.

 

I wonder if starting to play the guitar again helped PW reconnect with his music.
I appreciate the comments Butch and Lesha made about the early gigs and as important as I they are you can really tell it's am artist in search of a direction. I do love the "all too beautiful" refrain on Speak Like A Child.

The early gigs were strange affairs.I remember a gig in '91 in Liverpool, which obviously hadn't sold out and people where walking in with bags of shopping.

 

I would disagree in this respect, that Paul worked with Mick Talbot, Whitey and others in the Acid Jazz scene. He got the Weller gig through Whitey. The impression I got from speaking to him that he wasn't dismissive of Weller at all. He liked playing with him and it was a good gig. In print some things that were absent his witty inflection might seem more brutal than they actually were. And his words seem far more damning in print,but he seemed to like Wellie. I think that if Wellie called him up to jam tomorrow, he'd be there in no time!

Also remember that Francis talked about Chris Farlowe,who he had seen when he was much younger as well as ELP. To be fair, he's a great lover of jazz so he did see some merit in Paul's music. It wasn't a gig like the Paul Gilbert gig where he had little or no aptitude for the gig yet did it because he was a consummate professional.

 

Helio, I think that it was a confluence of different factors that had a demonstrable effect on Paul. He started to get into the Acid Jazz scene and became attached to that form of music. In essence, it was a return to form for him because I firmly believe that despite what Eddie Piller claimed in his interview with me, that Acid Jazz and Talkin' Loud had acts that were influenced by TSC. I think that PW's interest in the Acid Jazz scene revivified his interest in revisiting certain types of music.


Without jumping ahead too much, he went back to music that influenced him deeply as a youth AND music that he never really gave a chance to appreciate with to begin with.

As to your guitar comment, it's well taken. Wellie had talked about how during Modernism they were working in the control room of Solid Bond almost exclusively! What he began to do was embrace feel rather than technology again and that fact would become extremely apparent in the near future.