“All these greedy fuckers”: Paul Weller’s 2020 political anthem keeps becoming more relevant
Paul Weller is punk, pass it on. He may well be known as ‘The Modfather’, but in terms of his artistic ethos and socio-political leanings, he couldn’t be more aligned with the rebellious nature of punk.
Now, not all of his songs sound punkish, with him having ventured in multiple directions that have felt far removed from what his early contemporaries, such as the Buzzcocks and The Clash, made at the height of the movement. However, his attitudes have never steered away from being motivated by his left-wing perspective, even when it isn’t immediately obvious that he’s making a staunchly socialist point through his lyricism.
Even some of his modern material, which has edged more towards soft balladry over angular guitars, still contains some of his most scathing assessments of the state of politics in Britain, and on his 2020 song ‘Rockets’, he was perhaps at his most acerbic in his brutal takedown of the establishment. While the track starts out as a fanciful song about space travel, as the title suggests, the longer it goes on, the more evident it becomes that he’s singing about the ills of capitalism and the virulent nature of elitist greed.
“Nothing in the chambers / Worth nothing at all,” Weller exclaims at the top of the final verse, before continuing into a diatribe about how damaging extreme wealth is to the most powerful people in our country: “All the wealth is hidden / Diamonds a-glistening and solid gold / Well, have it all / It’s worthless”.
Weller has always worn his heart on his sleeve when it comes to his political ideology, with him continuing to be a voice for the working class and a supporter of marginalised, but even by his own standards, ‘Rockets’ is the sound of a man with a burning and primal rage directed towards the ruling classes, whom he has witnessed dragging the nation down into complete turmoil.
In a 2022 interview with Uncut, Weller chose to elaborate on his motivations for the song, making it explicitly clear who he was having a pop at in this damning closing stanza. “That’s what that verse is about,” he said, “All these greedy fuckers, like Boris and his cronies, the royal family. When you go out, you go out with nothing. We’re not the pharaohs. You don’t get buried with your gold, and even if you did, what good did it do to them? The most important things you hand down aren’t material things.”
The song may well have been directed at contemporary forces of evil, but large amounts of his vitriol stemmed from things that he witnessed in his early life when he and his peers were trying to forge paths for themselves in life. He further elaborated on this stance in an interview with Mojo, where he claimed that he witnessed people get swallowed up by society and ushered into lines of work that were deeply unsatisfying.
“I would see a lot of my mates, the ones who were lucky enough to leave school before me,” he revealed, “They’d wave at me through the factory windows as I was going to school, taking the piss. I was lucky because music helped me see beyond that, that there’s a possibility of another world out there that I’m not part of yet.”
A punk, a socialist and an important voice for change within music, Weller absolutely hits the nail on the head with the observations he delivers in ‘Rockets’. It may well be Weller’s most explicitly political song, especially in his solo career, and it’s the sort of song that unfortunately still rings true half a decade later despite the fact that the faces of evil have all changed.
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