John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Monday

It's Monday, you know. 

That is, the song by The Jam. 

 

A Gorillaz update on some rock icon T-shirts

Paul Weller? Been a fan for more than 30 years. Pete Townshend? Even longer. Phil Lynott? Um... well, I guess I like hearing The Boys Are Back In Town as much as anyone when the sounder goes off at an IceCaps game at Mile One. 

But I really like the designs of these three Brit Rock icons that Jamie Hewlett, the animating genius of Gorillaz, came up with a fundraiser for a cancer charity in the U.K. 

Find out more here. 

Mick's Up

Earlier in the week, I had a Paul Weller tune; here is, effectively, a solo song from his Style Council collaborator, Mick Talbot. Talbot wrote several of these jazzy instrumentals over the fairly short history of the band, largely showcasing his love for Hammond B-3 organ. This is from a 1984 concert (featuring drummer Steve White, then still a teenager). 

 

Wild Wood

One of Paul Weller's sweetest songs, about love and support for someone who's come out of a very dark place indeed. 

That's Entertainment

Paul Weller has aged considerably since he wrote this Jam single in the late Seventies, but he's always played it. Here's a rendition from Jimmy Fallon earlier this month. 

You Do Something To Me

I think Paul Weller's song may stick around for the ages. This is a version done for the BBC in 2008, with the then-emerging Adele on vocals.

Eton Rifles/ Transmission

What a broadcast this must have been. In 1979, the BBC aired Something Else, featuring The Jam as they were establishing their reputation, and Joy Division as they were still creating theirs. Remarkable.

That Dangerous Age

Brand-new from Paul Weller. Just posted today, in fact, to his YouTube channel, this video is for an advance single from the album Sonik Kicks, which is out (grammar be damned) on March 26, at least in the U.K. 

A Man of Great Promise

In 1982, Paul Weller broke up The Jam, started the Style Council, and lost one of his oldest friends to a heroin overdose. Dave Waller had played in an early, schoolboy version of the band. His death led Weller to write A Man of Great Promise, a surprisingly upbeat song about self-destruction and a moth drawn to a flame, as the song puts it. [You can read more about the song, and much else, here.] 

This version of the song was recorded for British TV in the fall of 1984, several months before it showed up on Our Favourite Shop. 

Shout to the Top

Paul Weller's Thatcher-era pep talk to the downtrodden was given a new life on the Billy Elliot soundtrack, which put Weller (rightfully, in my view) among Marc Bolan and Strummer-Jones as key English songwriters for the Seventies and Eighties. The Jam's A Town Called Malice is the emotional centrepiece of the film, but the Style Council's Shout to the Top fits, too, particularly as it was written during the miners-strike era that the film depicts.

The video, of course, gets that other side of Weller at the time: posh clothes, sleek lines... and an inability, it seems, to clap on the beat.

Click on the tag below for other songs of the day. There've been dozens!

Paul Weller has ever-changing moods, but, mainly, it's just rage

Paul Weller has been a figure in my life for more than three decades, which isn't bad, given that I haven't clocked out five yet. He's an incredible songwriter, a durable performer and a music-business survivor. And he must have one hell of a liver.

He also has a notorious temper, which is no secret at all, but now there's a book out from Paolo Hewitt, who used to interview Weller for NME back at the start, and went on to become one of Weller's best friends. No more.

In the way that only the Daily Mail can, here's the headline on the book that Hewitt has produced on what Weller can be like, all too often:

Why, after 30 years of endless tantrums, I’ve had enough of Paul Weller’s ever changing moods, says a former close friend

Check it out here.

Empty milk bottles (and Billy Elliot, too)

"Rows and rows of disused milk, stand dying in the dairy yard / And a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts."
- Paul Weller

The lines are of course from Town Called Malice by the Jam. Motown beat meets U.K. economic malaise of the early Eighties. The original tune:

The song became known all over again in 2000 in the film Billy Elliot. Town Called Malice didn't just appear in the movie; it formed the emotion centre of it. Here's the sequence, in which Billy (Jamie Bell) is at the centre of a heated argument between his brother and father and his dance teacher (Julie Walters). The song plays as he bottles up and then unleashes all of his anger and frustration and humiliation; I remember the exuberance I felt as Billy kicked out the door. I love the sequence of Billy's head coming up over the horizon, as if his spirit is actually lifting up and out of the city... only to see him run into a dead end.

A warning to those who haven't seen it: the clip here has some salty language.

The Changingman

Just don't call it Britpop! It's Paul Weller from Jools Holland, from way back whenever...

Winehouse and Weller whoop it up

Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller ripped through I Heard It Through the Grapevine on Jools Holland's latest new year's fiesta.