How The Clash inspired Paul Weller
Growing up, Paul Weller was an anomaly in his circle. He prided himself on being an outsider who belonged to a different generation, and it never bothered him as a youngster not to be associated with a popular subculture.
Although he was too young to fully experience the phenomenon of The Beatles, Weller was raised on their material and acts such as Chuck Berry, who inspired the Fab Four. Thanks to his parents, who were still teenagers when he was born, Weller has been blessed with a love of music for almost as long as he’s been sentient.
However, rather than chase the trends during the 1970s as bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd asserted their dominance, Weller stayed attached to the artists he’s always admired. While he stuck out like a sore thumb dressed in his parka and riding a scooter, Weller had crafted his image, which he wasn’t prepared to change with the seasons.
If he had been born ten years earlier, Weller would have felt far more at home, but he was at ease with existing on the outside. When the punk movement began, the frontman of The Jam did manage to relate to it, on some level, despite never fully conforming to the demands of the scene.
During an interview with Paul Du Noyer in 1995, Weller explained: “The Pistols and The Clash were the two groups for me, the first contemporary groups that I’d ever liked. There are groups I’ve gone back to from the early ’70s and checked out, like Free, and I really like them now but not at the time. When punk came, at last there were some groups more or less the same age.”
Despite connecting with the music of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, there was a lot of baggage associated with punk, which exasperated Weller. “I liked the attitude of punk, but I also thought a lot of it was fake. We all saved up about 20 quid to go to McLaren’s shop – it was called Sex at that time? – and we went in to buy some mohair jumpers and found we couldn’t afford anything,” he recalled.
“We thought, This is bullshit. At the same time, what I got from those bands as a punter was good because it inspired me,” Weller added.
Although Weller refrained from conforming to the punk uniform, The Clash significantly impacted him as an artist and helped him find his true voice. The Jam singer continued: “Especially The Clash’s lyrics – some of those early Jam songs were awful, my attempts at being socially aware, but that was me just aping The Clash, after reading interviews with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, saying people should be writing about what’s happening today. I’d never even thought of it before. I was busy re-writing ‘My Generation’.”
While Weller had many issues with punk and questioned the authenticity of many involved, the words of Joe Strummer spoke to him on a visceral level. If not for his impact, Weller perhaps wouldn’t have penned anthems such as ‘Eton Rifles’, which addressed wider societal issues that continue to plague Britain today.
