Fantastic review, Richard!

My friend is seeing him in Liverpool tomorrow.
I still have to wait for 6 months for his postponed gigs from last year, but it’s worth to wait!

“Because he’s never gone away. It’s easy to forget the influence and
significance of this 63-year-old man. Two-and-a-half hours of music may perhaps test the audience, but if anyone deserves a bit of self-indulgence, it’s him.

Nights like this are a welcome reminder for us all to cherish Paul Weller.”

Thanks for the review. I'm seeing him in a couple of weeks. 35 songs!

He announced to play Singleton Park next year which is like a 10 minute drive from me

Dunno if I'm going to go as I'm not really a fan, but I don't usually say no to gigs on my doorstep as they are a rarity

One of the greatest things for being at Weller's gigs is, that you can put your bag and coat on the stage next to his foot. Weller self said about it once in the interview that it's a nice thing to playing in a small venue.

Also he's alwayd having loads of plectrums on his mic stand and throw each of them during the gig.
I was nearly "attacked" by his plectrums several times.

My friends who went to see him in Liverpool 2 weeks ago ended up with meeting him in the hotel after his gig and spent with his band until midnight.

I always see regular faces at the front of every Weller gig over here. We don't even know our names, but it always feel like "here we go again" when we stand in a queue.

Oh no! I'm sorry to hear that, birchy and Weller and his band!

Get well soon!

Nice Weller interview in The Sunday Times.  No Gallagher-related content but he talks politics, Get Back, state of the music biz.  

Paul Weller is angry — take cover, Spotify and Boris Johnson
The singer-songwriter has made an album with an orchestra but he hasn’t mellowed

Dan Cairns
Thursday December 02 2021, 5.00pm, The Sunday Times


Paul Weller is speaking on a rare day off during his tour of Britain. Even over the phone that famous restless energy is tangible. It isn’t hard to picture him pacing the hotel room. I once walked down a West End street with him one early summer evening as the offices emptied and the pub pavements filled up, and he set a gruelling pace. No flies on the Modfather.

At 63, the songwriter who soundtracked the late Seventies as leader of the Jam, before moving on to immaculately attired blue-eyed soul and jazz with the Style Council and, later, a solo career that continues to bear glorious fruit, seems to be running to keep still. Eight children with four partners, including the splendidly named twins Bowie and John Paul, a punishing touring schedule, the gaps between his albums getting smaller by the year: quitting booze in 2010 helped Weller to refocus, after years when drinking had blunted his once razor-like edge.

He may have broken fans’ hearts by calling time on the Jam in 1982 — and, to them, abandoning agit-pop for easy listening — but Weller can still snap and crackle with the old fire and brimstone. Mention of Boris Johnson’s recent blunderings calls forth some corkers.

“I’d sooner have Peppa Pig as prime minister,” he spits. “It’s the same mob, it’s Eton Rifles all over again, isn’t it? The same old cronies, all looking out for themselves. The only difference is, they’re not even bothering to cover their tracks. They’re so arrogant, it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re corrupt, f*** ya.’ We’re in a shocking state, mate.”

Weller is no less savage about the stand-off between artists, streaming platforms and the major labels over the distribution of income from music streaming — from which, he says, he earns a pittance. “It’s just greed at the end of the day; profit and greed. Everything’s supposed to be more transparent now, but we all know this stuff is still going on. It’s like the government — no one even tries to hide it. If you look at the situation with streaming, it’s just a f***ing joke, an insult.

“There’s people making billions off of streaming. But it’s no different to all the skullduggery that was going on in the Sixties and Seventies: Tin Pan Alley ripping off artists, the Beatles getting paid a penny per album sale between them — all that nonsense. There’s this veneer of being more modern and open, but it’s still just the same.”

Weller isn’t one to sentimentalise the past, but he admits to a degree of despair about what income inequity and the further financial privations caused by the pandemic and post-Brexit visa and touring rules could do to music and musicians in the future. “I really feel for younger artists. It’s a bit easier for someone like me, I’ve got my catalogue. But for young artists, they’re f***ed. They’re not getting any royalties, they’ve got to have hundreds of thousands of streams before the labels will even look at them, and if they do get signed, they ain’t going to get paid anyway. People say to me, ‘Well, you can always make money live, can’t you?’ Well, yes, but only if you’re playing to a certain number of people. If you’re playing pubs and clubs, you’re probably making the same money I was 40, 50 years ago: a couple of hundred quid a night between the three of us. It’s a joke.”

A musician who has sprung surprises throughout his 43-year career, Weller is about to throw another curveball. An Orchestrated Songbook is an album of songs drawn from his back catalogue, recorded live in London last spring with the conductor and composer Jules Buckley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The setlist stretches from English Rose, from the Jam’s 1979 masterpiece, All Mod Cons, to tracks from Weller’s most recent album, this year’s Fat Pop (Volume 1). Buckley’s sensitive and lushly beautiful arrangements knit the music together, for all the many decades it spans.

Sweetly, Weller is self-effacement itself — with a brief burst of unapologetic pride — as he discusses the project. “I was really thankful for the opportunity to do this; it’s not something I’d have ever done myself. I gave it over entirely to Jules, because I’m really out of my depth with that sort of thing.

“It was interesting to hear some of the older songs in particular, in these different arrangements. Old Jam songs such as English Rose and Carnation, it was almost like hearing someone else’s music. And it gave me — I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant — a better appreciation of some of those older ones. I saw them in a different light.”

As a live artist, Weller has long veered between a cussed refusal to litter his sets with hits and sudden outbreaks of crowd-pleasing selections. On this tour, which winds up on Sunday night in Cambridge, he’s done a bit of both. But that’s not him being perverse, he insists. Rather, it comes from a desire to keep himself engaged.

“Sometimes I get fed up playing certain songs, because of the repetition of it. But when I was putting the setlist together for this tour, I was going back through old sets and I thought, ‘You know what, I really miss playing Shout to the Top, or My Ever Changing Moods, or whatever.’ So we’re back at that, even if there can still be nights where I don’t feel like doing it. It depends. When we’ve played Town Called Malice, the whole room has exploded. How could I not get off on that? It’s so moving and energising. After all that’s happened, I’m happy to play anything and anywhere now. I’d consider bar mitzvahs and weddings.”

He still gets asked if he’ll reform the Jam but remains adamant it’ll never happen. He and his present band are watching Get Back, Peter Jackson’s film about Weller’s beloved Beatles, and he doesn’t mind that, for chunks of it, very little occurs. “That’s often the reality, you sit around, getting nowhere, and then you find the ‘somewhere’.”

He’s pleased the Beatles broke up. “Can you imagine if they’d carried on? The Beatles in the Eighties? With f***ing drum machines and sequencers? Their legacy is there for ever, secure. If we’d carried on, people wouldn’t talk about the Jam in the way they do. Not that I’m comparing us to the Fabs, obviously.”

Weller’s late-career solo work has few rivals for shape-shifting. Beginning with 22 Dreams in 2008, he has released eight albums in a purple patch few of his peers have come close to matching. “I don’t ever want to make substandard records, especially at my age. It’s just a frame of mind. People shut down, they get to a certain age and close themselves off from new things, happy to stay stuck in whatever period it was when they were 15.”

Weller says he could never join the corporate heritage circuit — churning out the hits for money, shilling for riches but empty inside. “Nah, mate, that wouldn’t do for me. I’d sooner go and play covers in a pub.” And off he paces, searching for the next (musical) high. Long may he run.

"I’m happy to play anything and anywhere now. I’d consider bar mitzvahs and weddings.”
and we know he really mean it.

Speaking about the government and all that, Weller is one of the angry (young) men after all.

Am considering having a bar mitzvah just to test him 

Just got my copy of "an Orchestrated Songbook" which is out today.
My weekend can't be better.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0b3k4cr

Weller talking about his new album on phone (from 3 hours 13 min).