The Paul Weller album Polydor refused to release: “I have a right to be an artist”
The Style Council‘s fifth and final album, Modernism: A New Decade, did exactly what it said on the tin.
Gone were the pop-soul hooks and polite jazz flourishes, and in came a future-facing sound with deep house, Chicago grooves, and the pulsing heartbeat of the late-1980s club scene, as Paul Weller was going underground to chase the future, but one Polydor wasn’t ready for. One listen, and the label shelved the album, slashing The Style Council’s commercial shelf life and casting them to the street like out-of-date meal deals.
Inspired by Weller’s fascination with the emerging rave and club scenes, the album stretched 51 minutes across eight sprawling tracks for a full stake-your-flag-into-the-ground attempt to stay ahead of the curve and claim a place in the burgeoning electronic dance movement. The eight-minute opener, ‘Love of the World’, set a hypnotic pace, while the instrumental ‘That Spiritual Feeling’ later found a second life in the acid jazz scene when Weller revisited it on his 1991 solo debut.
The shift in sound was philosophical as well as musical. By the late ’80s, The Style Council’s intricate arrangements were beginning to feel self-conscious and stale, while the club scene, by contrast, offered Weller a kind of punk rock for the next decade: immediate, communal, anarchic, a way to challenge mainstream pop without dragging himself back into the thrashing bitterness of ‘Town Called Malice‘.
Polydor, however, weren’t having any of it, for without a six-string guitar in earshot, they worried the record would fall on deaf ears among the band’s established fanbase, so they ultimately pulled it. The rejection triggered the immediate dissolution of The Style Council, leaving Weller in a professional limbo, his double-breasted blazers, silk scarves, and wide lapels tossed to the back of the wardrobe, left to lie alongside a dust-covered, thrashed-up Rickenbacker, a beret, and a collection of skinny ties.
During this post-Style Council haze, Weller’s ego took a battering as he headed back to square one, and back to playing the small venues he thought he’d long surpassed, but slowly, over the 1990s, he steadily rebuilt, experimenting with new sounds, collaborators, and images, creating a plethora of hits and earning himself a Brit award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’ along the way.
Yet fast-forward to 2007, and he found himself in familiar unwelcome territory: restless, dissatisfied, and questioning his output in the first decade of the new century. Touring his 2005 album As Is Now, which he liked but which hadn’t found the wide audience he hoped for, he decided to do what he did best and channelled his inner Orange Juice, ripping it up, and starting again. This time, instead of guitar-led compositions, he improvised around producer Simon Dine’s looped grooves, ditching nearly all his regular musicians for fresh collaborators, including ELO’s Bev Bevan and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields.
Of his relentless shapeshifting, he told The Guardian in 2010, “What are you supposed to do? Go through the motions? Or be seen as ruthless and try to expand and do something different? People are happy doing their greatest hits fuckin’ pantomime tour, and people lap it up as well. But that’s not enough for me. I have a right to be an artist.”
And so it continues. Weller’s staying power is knowing when to quit and when to keep going, so while Polydor may have forced him into signing The Style Council’s divorce papers, in hindsight, we really ought to thank them, as it kept him marching forward.
