The Story Behind The Song: How Paul Weller created ‘Be Happy Children’
To anyone who hasn’t diligently been following ‘The Modfather’ and his creative output since his days fronting The Jam, it’s easy to forget how varied the musical back-catalogue of Paul Weller really is.
Jumping from The Jam’s pub rock attack to the smooth-jazz pop sheen of The Style Council, Weller would spend the rest of his career hopping between disparate musical fancies, his heralded 1990s ‘comeback’ amid Britpop’s backdrop witnessing a traverse around the folk stylings of the 1970s singer-songwriters to reaches into Mod garage attacks on Wildwood and Stanley Road respectively.
Electronic music holds a greater presence than is remembered, too. Coating The Style Council’s politically charged sophistipop wanders with muted synthesizers and drum machines—most prominently heard on 1983’s ‘Long Hot Summer’—their final album Modernism: A New Decade‘s immerse into deep house in 1989 alienated Polydor to such an extent they refused to release, accelerating band’s dissolution and not seeing the light of day until 1998.
Speaking candidly over the years of his love for David Bowie’s synth-soaked Low, the avant-garde psychedelia that leaps out of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘, and the pioneering musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Weller’s embrace of electronics shouldn’t come as a surprise. Flashing a little Krautrock on 2008’s 22 Dreams and playing guitar for the Neu! 50th anniversary at The Clapham Grand with band founder Michael Rother, at the centre of Weller’s immersion of fizzy electronics was 2012’s Sonik Kicks.
Blasting out the speakers with warbling affrontery and smattered with whooping static breaks and psych-noodles with album opener ‘Green’, Weller had never sounded so belligerently remote from his foundational love of 1960s rock and pop. Yet confoundingly, one of his most sentimental cuts closes the record, the sweet ‘Be Happy Children’ dedicated to his own children and born from the ruminative aftermath of lost loved ones that comes with the passage of time.
“It’s the first time my kids have sung on one of my records,” Weller revealed to NME. “When I was writing it, I was thinking about my dad, who passed away about three years ago, and I was thinking about my role as a parent. The track is about the whole cycle of life.” Coating the unabashed ode to parental love with swirling Mellotrons and Moogs, the invite of his children’s contributions brings a nostalgic edge to the album’s otherwise new wave character, his daughter Leah—whose mother is former Style Council singer Dee C Lee—and five-year-old Mac gifting their vocals.
“He did it with the headphones on and everything,” Weller revealed regarding Mac’s studio time. “Then kept saying he weren’t happy with the way his voice sounded and wanted to do it again. A little diva!”
It sounds cloying on paper, but ‘Be Happy Children’ avoids steering into too saccharine a direction, Weller dialling up the grandiosity to just the right amount and delivering an understated but sincere performance, Leah’s voice as good as her mother’s and Mac’s closing sentence a brief and silly one-line closer that serves the song’s charm. Leah would go on to front her own solo project and DJs regularly in London, as well as co-write Weller’s ‘Shades of Blue’ on 2021’s Fat Pop (Volume 1).
