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As the brass bounces off the synth bass giving a lesson in how do late 80s production with elegance, the bitter Falklands winter of “But now I watch smoke leave my lips/And fill an empty room” is something Paul Weller may have considered to be a show of agency in the final hurrahs of The Jam, but with the cutting of that neurotic spectre he exorcised in a short burst of glory on The Style Council’s descent into schlock, he managed to set himself free from both the personal neuroticisms that plagued his laboured love ballads, and press in-jokes that presented him as the as the Ivan Lendl of pop/rock. If one thing can be salvaged, preventing the album from being a complete narcissistic implosion, it’s How She Threw It All Away, an act of liberty unbound as Weller finally reconnects the missing segments between the drab doldrums of 1982 to an avalanche of words ballasted by the colours of atonement “She threw it all away/I played both parts/In the fool and I”įorgive the cliché, but time is a healer does have the right to feature here, if very briefly. Not looking too good for the defence is it, M’lud? Keith Emerson and his cohorts of whom Weller played the J’accuse card against in his Woking bedroom back in the fury of his adolescence. Even more alarming for The Cappuccino Kid’s defence team was the inflated pomp of 1988’s Confessions Of A Pop Group, a nauseous spurt of Weller’s egomania leaving him in the creaky old dock with Mr. Granted, their early material did carry with it a generous brew of mid 70s blue eyed soul weaving around tales of downtrodden coalminers, but Weller and Talbot’s Matthew Arnold fused crusades never really shook off an icky surface where Jeff Banks was on hand to blindfold the youthful British psyche.

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In late 1982 as The Jam’s closing chapter saw them feted as real deal pop stars for the only time, an acrid sarcastic dirge was license for Woking ‘s incredible sulk to confess how shortsighted he had been in matters of the heart ”The love I gave/Hangs in sad coloured/Mocking shadows”Īs for The Style Council, well frankly, they’ve never really competed with any vigor against the mythological might of the modtastic trio. What really grabs attention in this belated companion piece to The Jam’s penultimate single The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow), is just how little they have in common.

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