Paul Weller

John William Weller (everyone called him Paul from a young age, even his parents) is proof that teenage pop stars are not entirely a modern phenomenon. You can talk about your Lorde’s and your Rihanna’s (who both made their debut on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same age, 17), but in The Jam, Weller was touring with The Clash by the time he was 19 and was nothing short of a youth cult leader by the time he was 24. Even at the time, few people had seen anything like the level of devotion that fans of The Jam displayed since the heyday of The Beatles. That kind of love can only really come from people seeing one of their own on stage, singing songs inspired and fuelled by the same experiences the audience were going through at the time.

Looking back on it, it seems quite strange for a man as famously contrary as Weller is to be related to as strongly as he was. However, apart from the whole successful rock band thing, Weller’s life had been pretty par for the course up until then. Growing up with a musical diet of The Beatles, The Who and The Small Faces, music was the one thing that Weller cared about from the age of eleven, the age that he took up playing the guitar. By 1972 he’d formed the first incarnation of The Jam with his mates Steve Brooks and Dave Waller on lead and rhythm guitar respectively, with Weller playing bass.

Weller’s father was a taxi driver by trade, but he became the bands manager and booked them a series of shows in working men’s clubs, which they played with Rick Buckler on the drums. The classic Jam line-up was beginning to take shape, and when Waller left the band, Bruce Foxton took his place playing guitar and the stage was finally set. The band gigged all over London and Surrey until 1976, when Brookes left as well, so Weller and Foxton swapped instruments and The Jam that would become familiar to millions over the next seven years was finally ready. While not quite a punk rock band, The Jam came to prominence at around the same time as bands like the Sex Pistols and The Damned, and by 1977, just before the Summer of Punk reared its head, they were signed to Polydor Records.

As far as The Jam goes, the rest is history. They became something of a youth movement, far and away one of the biggest bands in the country. However, come 1982 Weller became frustrated with how creatively constricting it was to be in The Jam and pulled the plug on the whole thing when he was a mere 24 years old. Not wasting a moment, The Jam played their final concert in December 1982 and Weller’s follow up band, The Style Council, were formed in early 1983 alongside keyboard player Mick Talbot. The band were moderately succesful in their way, having a series of top ten hits with the likes of “Shout To The Top” and “Speak Like A Child”, and the band even gave Weller some small success in the states, something which had eluded him in The Jam, but it didn’t even rival Weller’s previous success, and by 1989, The Council’s record company refused to release their fifth album “Modernism: A New Decade”.

Disillusioned, Weller split The Council and found himself without a band or label for the first time since he was 17 years old. Many others would have retired but Weller is nothing if not tenacious, and after taking most of 1990 off, he began touring again in 1991 with his band The Paul Weller Movement. These concerts, mostly taking place in the clubs that he’d long since outgrown previously, were highly acclaimed, leading to a newfound surge in interest and some serious hype around his debut solo album. “Paul Weller” was released in 1992 on Freedom High, his own record label, and was such a success that it got him a new deal with Go! Disks, who re-released the album and saw it hit the top ten of the U.K album charts. Weller had his commercial and creative mojo back, and ever since then he’s been a true national treasure, releasing acclaimed album after acclaimed album and still commanding respect from multiple generations of music fans. He’s earned the respect of any music fan multiple times over, and still comes highly recommended.