David Cameron reunites The Smiths!

[Cozmo]

When I heard of Cameron's interest in The Smiths I was mortally wounded Like many folks (with amazing taste) I grew up on The Smiths and still rate them as one of the finest bands out of the UK in the last 30 years, Johnny Marr, one of the last original guitar legends, cool, humble and criminally underated. So when I hear David Cameron is a 'fan' I fell like throwing up, Cameron is the opposite of everything the Smiths stood for.

 

"Frankly Mr Cameron, this position I've held, it pays my way and it corrodes my soul!"

[wednesday1]

When I heard of Cameron's interest in The Smiths I was mortally wounded Like many folks (with amazing taste) I grew up on The Smiths and still rate them as one of the finest bands out of the UK in the last 30 years, Johnny Marr, one of the last original guitar legends, cool, humble and criminally underated. So when I hear David Cameron is a 'fan' I fell like throwing up, Cameron is the opposite of everything the Smiths stood for.

 

"Frankly Mr Cameron, this position I've held, it pays my way and it corrodes my soul!"

 

 

I'm not a Smiths, but he also tried to latch on to The Jam. Weller gave him even shorter shrift:THE TIMES THE SUNDAY TIMES TIMES+ The TimesThe Sunday TimesArchive Article Please enjoy this article from The Times & The Sunday Times archives. For full access to our content, please subscribe here MY PROFILE From The Sunday Times May 18, 2008

 

The Modfather sniping at David Cameron and his Eton Rifles

PROFILE: Paul Weller

Paul Weller of the Jam was the angry, impassioned voice of a generation opposed to Thatcherism. Little wonder, then, at the cackles of disbelief when David Cameron declared that his favourite song was Weller’s The Eton Rifles, a satire railing against social division and inequality in Britain.

 

Weller, one of the most respected and inventive figures in pop music, was a 21-year-old living in a rented caravan when he wrote the song after seeing a television report about right-to-work marchers being jeered by Eton schoolboys as they passed the college. By contrast, the Tory leader was a 12-year-old newcomer to Eton, where he joined the cadet corps - the object of Weller’s ridicule: “All that rugby puts hairs on your chest/ What chance have you got against a tie and a crest.”

 

Hence the incredulity at Cameron’s insistence that he had embraced this enraged riposte to his own school chums. “It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to,” he told the Radio 4 programme The Jam Generation. “I don’t see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs.”

 

Weller, the stylish “Modfather”, may have mellowed a bit since The Eton Rifles helped to confirm the Jam as one of the biggest and most influential bands in the UK, but his rejection of the Tory leader’s claim showed he had lost none of his spiky invective: “Which part of it didn’t he get? It wasn’t intended as a f****** jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.”

 

The fuss casts the spotlight on a resurgent Weller just before 22 Dreams, the most interesting album he has made in a while, is released on June 2. “It’s a sprawling mess that could be awful, but it turns out to be excellent,” said Mark Edwards, our rock critic. It is also a reminder that this reticent icon, dubbed “a rock star’s rock star”, is revered by the pop aristos he grew up worshipping, notably Sir Paul McCartney. Noel Gallagher is one of his best friends.

 

With his trademark vocals in a gruff sarf London accent, vivid melodies and lyrics that catch the nuances of working-class life, Weller triumphed with the Jam and then with the Style Council, before starting a successful solo career. His songs about England have become the equivalent of Penny Lane and Waterloo Sunset for those born too late for the Beatles or the Kinks. One interviewer wrote: “He’s one of those people who makes you feel good about being English.”

 

Like Prince and Madonna, Weller is enjoying an Indian summer as he approaches his 50th birthday next weekend, although his face is ravaged by late nights and cigarettes, and his voice has a whiskery, oak-aged timbre. He lives in Maida Vale, west London, with his girlfriend Sami, who was working at the recording studio where they met, and their two children. He also has two children from his previous marriage and one from another relationship.

 

The list of politicians eager to sign up to the “Jam generation” of protest has provided much sport for commentators, but to Weller it’s a sign that the lines are blurring: “The stark contrasts of Thatcherism and socialism have gone: you can’t really tell who’s Brown or Cameron.” To his shock, he found himself agreeing with “a Tory t***”, Boris Johnson, about bringing back Routemaster buses in London.

 

For most of the 1980s, Weller was a staunch supporter of Red Wedge, a loose coalition of Labour-minded rock musicians who toured the country by bus. Now he bitterly regrets it. The Labour politicians he met “really put me off. They were all in it for themselves. It was all firm handshakes and distant eyes”.

 

He liked Glenys Kinnock, but had no time for her husband Neil, Labour’s leader. Even Ken Livingstone, photographed embracing Weller in 1985, was corrupted by power as mayor of London, he claimed in last week’s New Statesman.

 

By the time Labour came to power in 1997, Weller was so disillusioned he refused to let the party use his song The Changingman as a theme alongside its electoral anthem Things Can Only Get Better: “I put the blockers on.”

 

He tried to dissuade his friend Gallagher from accepting Tony Blair’s invitation to No 10 and claims to be disgusted with the former prime minister’s latest appointment: “Peace ambassador to the Middle East. F****** joke, mate. How he sleeps at night, I don’t know.” Weller turned down a CBE in the 2006 birthday honours.

 

These days he draws inspiration from his children and from God, admitting that he “sort of” prays: “I have a quiet word now and then.” Yet his Christian charity has its limits. Baroness Thatcher “should be shot as a traitor to the people”, he told The Guardian last week. And he is frosty on the subject of his former bandmates, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler, who have started touring together for the first time in 25 years under the name From the Jam. Old bands, he said, should “just move on”.

 

Weller was born into a working-class family on May 25, 1958, in Woking, Surrey. His father John was a scaffolder and bricklayer who occasionally joined the taxi rank at the station. He became Paul’s manager for 30 years until ill health forced him to retire in 2006. Weller’s mother Anne was a cleaner at the local mosque.

 

He was brought up with his sister Nicky on Stanley Road, which he evoked in his No 1 album of the same name in 1995. On the title track, he sang: “The ghosts of night, the dreams of day/Make me swirl and fall and hold me in their sway.”

 

While he was detached and uninterested at school, his parents nursed his obsession with pop music. “It’s all I ever wanted to do,” he recalled. “I wouldn’t concentrate in English classes, but I’d study the lyrics on the back of an album cover.”

 

His father bought him his first electric guitar at 12 and two years later he got together with some schoolmates to form a band that became the Jam. Inspired by the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Who, they played their first gig round the corner at Walton Road working men’s club and for the next five years played clubs and pubs.

 

Weller, who had left school at 16, saw the Sex Pistols in 1976, on the night he first took speed, and realised where the Jam’s future lay. Punk was in full swing, but Weller was keen to distance the Jam from punk, telling the NME that he was a Tory voter and monarchist. “I was just being controversial,” he later claimed, but the music press largely treated the band like pariahs until The Eton Rifles hit No 3 in the charts in November 1979.

 

Smart mod attire set him apart from the punks. “It’s a way of looking at the world,” he explained. “It’s saying, ‘We’ve got f*** all, but we can make ourselves look proper’.”

 

The Jam became the first band since the Beatles to perform two songs (Town Called Malice and Precious) in one edition of Top of the Pops. Weller, however, wanted to explore other musical avenues and in 1982 announced that the band would split.

 

His new band, the Style Council, played white soul music that alienated many Jam fans and were never as successful as its forerunner, but it helped to spark a jazz/pop revival and increased Weller’s stature. His song Have You Ever Had It Blue? is now a jazz classic. He appeared on the Band Aid record Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984. Five years later, the band’s death knell sounded when their record company refused to release their fifth album.

 

Weller went to ground for a couple of years as his life fell apart. His marriage to the Style Council’s backing vocalist, Dee C Lee, collapsed and he went through a bout of heavy cocaine use. Then he was suddenly the darling of the music world again when his album Wild Wood was released to acclaim in 1993.

 

Writer’s block struck him five years ago. “I just waited for the muse to find me.” He carried on working, recording cover versions by artists ranging from Gordon Lightfoot to Sister Sledge. In 2005 the songs came flooding back. Now he has written 22 Dreams, representing nearly every musical influence he has absorbed.

 

Although coy of media interest, fame doesn’t bother him at all. Chase it and you end up nowhere, he maintains: “It’s like, do you wanna put something of value into the world, or do you wanna be a pop star?”

[taxman]

He'll come out as an NWA fan next.

 

 

"I remember hanging with the Bullingdon boys, cruising down the strip in my 'mobile listening to Dr. Dre. We was seriously Compton man, I mean heavy doo. Our posse were bad-bottomed Mummy lovers. Make no mistake. Innit"

[wednesday1]

He'll come out as an NWA fan next.

 

 

"I remember hanging with the Bullingdon boys, cruising down the strip in my 'mobile listening to Dr. Dre. We was seriously Compton man, I mean heavy doo. Our posse were bad-bottomed Mummy lovers. Make no mistake. Innit"

 

 

 

I don't know why he just can't accept that this is more his sort of thing:

 

[Cozmo]

Excellent post Wednesday1!!!

Weller, another hero and one of staunch working class roots who, to his credit, has remained one of the few 'stars' who has managed to retain his integrity, both musically and on a personal level.

 

I'd even go as far as to say Weller in The Eton Rifles delivered the notion of class awareness to a wider audience than many, many other artists and even social commentators......"What chance have you got against a tie and a crest" still gives me goose bumps now!!

 

Plus, Weller isnt one to suffer fools gladly as his response to doing a duet with James Blunt evidenced

 

I have been lucky enough to see Weller live on many occasions but sadly never managed to see The Jam live.

[Guest sibon]

I can never understand why people want to kill animals, and even worse get enjoyment out of it.

 

 

You don't get the urge to strangle Morrisey every time you see him then?

[wednesday1]

Excellent post Wednesday1!!!

Weller, another hero and one of staunch working class roots who, to his credit, has remained one of the few 'stars' who has managed to retain his integrity, both musically and on a personal level.

 

I'd even go as far as to say Weller in The Eton Rifles delivered the notion of class awareness to a wider audience than many, many other artists and even social commentators......"What chance have you got against a tie and a crest" still gives me goose bumps now!!

 

Plus, Weller isnt one to suffer fools gladly as his response to doing a duet with James Blunt evidenced

 

I have been lucky enough to see Weller live on many occasions but sadly never managed to see The Jam live.

 

 

Yep, he and people like Jerry Dammers of The Specials helped to politicise and give leadership to a whole generation back in those troubled days.

I was lucky enough to see The Jam twice, saw Weller last week at Arena.

Enjoyed The Jam and Council songs best, not really fussed by his solo stuff.

Wasn't v impressed though when he referred to Sheffield as a 'provincial city'!

 

I expect Cameron will be claiming Ghost Town is his favourite song next!

[Guest sibon]

 

I expect Cameron will be claiming Ghost Town is his favourite song next!

 

More of a policy, I suspect:)

[wednesday1]

More of a policy, I suspect:)

 

 

Could be like '81 revisited.........royal wedding mass unemployment.....riots......TORIES!!!

[Keith Rich]

You don't get the urge to strangle Morrisey every time you see him then?

 

Not really because whether you like him or not he is a true artist who writes his own songs and has something to say...in other words he has musical credibilty.

 

If you want someone to strangle I suggest those who appear on Xfactor...and those who watch it.

 

A more painful death can be saved for Cowell who knows as much about music as I do the Dark Side of the Moon. The place not the record.