Lighting the Fuse - Everything But The Girl return

An enjoyable catch-up with an old schoolfriend recently reminded me of the soundtrack to our teenage years and, in particular, the records we listened to at each other’s houses while under the premise of doing homework. One that stood out was Everything But The Girl’s Eden, their 1984 debut, which arrived amid the cod-jazz revival of the early ’80s (Sade’s Diamond Life, The Style Council’s Café Bleu, Matt Bianco, et al). 

However, rather than get stuck in a bossa nova groove, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn - who’d formed the duo while at Hull University in 1982 - eagerly moved into new territories, with six more albums that took the duo out of the ’80s with explorations of indie guitar, electronica and thoughtful pop as they went. 

By the mid-’90s they reached their creative stride with the albums Amplified Heart and Walking Wounded (the former being boosted by DJ Todd Terry’s clubland hit remix of Missing). The creative dynamic shifted yet again with the album Temperamental, made immediately after Thorn had given birth to the couple’s twins (in her own words - stated in her excellent autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen - being reduced to “a guest vocalist on someone else’s album”). And then, nothing - until the release last Friday of Fuse, EBTG’s first album of original music since that 1999 release.

In the intervening years, Watt busied himself with DJing and random music projects, while Thorn released solo albums and collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack, as well as commenced her side career as a highly entertaining author - all while the couple raised their three children. “We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” Watt explained to the New York Times last month. “I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”

Their absence as a duo loaded the dice for when they started creating together three years ago, writing and laying down basic tracks at their Hampstead home. At first, they wanted to keep quiet their return to making music together: “We deliberately didn’t tell anyone that we were dong something, because we were both thinking that it might come to nothing - and that’s fine,” Thorn told the NME in January. “We’ve both been busy over the years with our own solo stuff, and it felt a bit perverse after so long to not even try.”

Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop

Initially, they considered calling themselves ‘TREN’ (conflating Tracey and Ben), instead of restoring their band name: “It’s not going to be a small deal to come back [as Everything But The Girl] after this length of time,” Thorn explained earlier this year. While that worry is understandable, not pigeon-holing themselves with the jazz of Eden gave them a free pass to take their music wherever they wanted it to go. “We’ve never been a particularly nostalgic band,” Watt said in their NME interview. “We’ve always been known for making a different record every time. Sometimes that’s meant going against the mainstream, but we just try to keep ourselves interested and keep things contemporary.”

Fuse won’t be the first album conceived during lockdown, but like so many home projects started during that surreal period in all our lives, when sourdough loaves and LEGO Technical kist sprouted on kitchen tables, Covid-19 came with the Watt/Thorn household noticeably emptier. With all three of their children having fled the nest as adults, and Watt having to self-isolate due to being diagnosed, in 1992, with Churg–Strauss syndrome, an autoimmune condition, there was a void to fill. The couple started exchanging snippets of ideas with each other, without having any particular plan as to what they’d become. 

“I started to put things on my phone,” Watt told the New York Times. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”

But, still, there wasn’t any immediate intention to release it. They didn’t even tell their children they’d made it. “We wanted to come back with something modern-sounding,” Watt told the NME. “We’re not out there on the heritage trail doing ‘best of’ tours or playing arenas. We just wanted to make a piece of work that would sound great now in 2023. That was the driver.”

Fuse isn’t, though, a lockdown album per se. “It just struck us that the time was right after 23 years of waiting,” Watt said. “It’s hard to put a finger on why. We didn’t go into the studio with any plans. We knew there was a bit of pressure because it was the first thing we’d done in ages, but we just wanted to be a bit playful and experimental to see what happens. There wasn’t a masterplan.”

Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop

Watt and Thorn have flirted with genres throughout their career. Fuse draws together many of those strands, but in a delightfully, contemporary way. Atmospheric, even downbeat songs are interwoven with more upbeat numbers - some even danceable - with Thorn’s voice a slightly deeper, more sonorous register than I remember of old. This adds to the album’s reflective, grown-up lyrics, such as When You Mess Up’s admission of imperfection, the life-assuring healing of Karaoke, and Nothing Less To Lose making a statement of repeated vulnerability. 

While the couple say that Covid didn’t influence their writing, even with the context of Watt’s underlying health, it’s easy to see - if not lockdown’s impact - its influence. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said in one interview, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency...about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”

What does come across from their publicity round is that Fuse is not album they needed to do, or felt compelled to make, but found themselves doing. “It kind of astonished us,” Thorn has said. “I remember the end of [their final day of recording], we looked at each other and basically went, ‘Oh my God. It sounds like Everything But The Girl. It sounds like an album!’ Afterwards I said to Ben, ‘That’s the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.’”

The hope is that, even if Fuse came about by circumstance, Thorn and Watt enjoyed themselves so much that it marks the return to regular record making by them as a duo, who remain one of music’s most enduring and likeable partnerings. Thorn, too, is one of the ‘good ones’ on Twitter - if there can be such a thing as the platform descends into into a festering bin fire of extremism - engaging friends, peers and followers alike with the kind of conversation that made it a fun place to find yourself in the first place. As 60-year-olds, parents of grown-up children, and artists who’ve proven themselves to be comfortable out of the limelight as much as in it, you can’t help but finding Everything But The Girl likeable. Fuse marks an equally likeable return.

Fountain of youth: Gary Crowley's lost ’80s continue

An unwritten convention in music appreciation circles is that the 1980s are to be maligned. Probably something to do with Thatcherism, yuppies, conspicuous consumption and hair. I generalise horrendously, of course, but somewhere in the mix, in music terms at least, the ’80s remain perceived as weak by comparison with the foundational ’60s, or the inspirational early ’70s and that decade’s raucous end, and the #madforit ’90s (during which any band with a guitar dipped its toes into those previous decades for reference ) that came after the party balloons in between had been swept up. 

It’s an issue that mildly sticks in the craw of Gary Crowley, an undoubted ‘face’ of the 1980s, who’d gone from fronting the reception desk at the NME to fronting his own show on London’s Capital Radio and the early Channel 4 music magazine Ear Say while barely out of his teens. 

“It was an exciting time,” Gary says now. For all of its reputation for confected frivolity, the early ’80s had a surprising edge to it: “I mean, half of those artists were all punks anyway,” he adds. “One of the positive things about punk was this kind of have-a-go, DIY attitude that continued into the ’80s.” Many bands had progressed from art colleges and the punk scene, but rather than simply continue with the Angry Young Man schtick, they put on designer suits, scooped up handfuls of hair gel, and brought the punk philosophy to soul music. “Just look at old episodes of Top Of The Pops from the time,” says Gary. “You’d have Dexys [Midnight Runners], and Adam And The Ants and The Jam. Of course, you’d still get novelties like your Joe Dolces and There’s No One Quite Like Grandma popping up every now and then, but it was mostly an exciting time.” 

The dancefloor, in particular, was where some of that punk energy migrated to. “From Orange Juice to The Pale Fountains to Animal Nightlife - everybody started talking about the soul music they grew up with,” recalls Gary.  “Along with the excitement in soul you had the beginnings of what became rap, as well. I mean, The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels of Steel in 1981 and Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa. It was just like, ‘Wow! Where is this going?’”. 

Crowley’s excitement was galvanised by the much-respected Tony Hale, then head of music at Capital. “He was the guy who gave me this chance. He said, ‘Listen, I want you to play what you want to play. I can promise that there won’t be any sort of restrictions’. And thankfully he really was a man to his word as well.” 

“I was never a musical snob,” Crowley reflects. “I mean, obviously I love punk and I loved new wave as a kid. But I was never an expert on soul or dance music. That was more of my sister’s kind of thing, really. But I would hear that stuff when she was playing it with her mates in the bedroom, so there was an awareness. Fast-forward to ’81, ’82, and I’d be buying Philadelphia or Motown compilation albums, just discovering that stuff for the first time.” Hip-hop was still an unknown. At a Camden Palace DJ gig on his 19th birthday, Crowley introduced ‘PAs’ from The Higsons (fronted by, no less, Charlie Higson of The Fast Show fame), Culture Club, Bananarama, Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet. When he played Planet Rock the crowd didn’t get it. “I played it on the radio show a couple of times but for most people it seemed to go over their heads. I thought it sounded great in the club, absolutely fantastic.”

It’s an approach to playing music on the radio that Crowley has never shied away from. His Wednesday night ‘People’s Choice’ slot on Capital would tie-up household phone lines as teenagers like me camped on (as one did in those days) to the only phone in the house, trying to get on a panel of listeners judging the week’s best new releases. I never did get through, but once I’d decided that music journalism would be my career, the 17-year-old me managed to secure an interview with Gary that I’d use to show potential employers what I was capable of. That led to him introducing me to the NME’s Mat Snow, who commissioned me to write some live reviews. 

My original approach was the same sort of chutzpah that Crowley himself had employed at a similar age, when he ran into Joe Strummer on the street and got himself invited to a Clash tour rehearsal (along with a gaggle of Lisson Grove schoolmates). That same MO landed him an interview with Paul Weller in 1977 for his fanzine, breathlessly contacting the Weller residence in Woking from a West London phone box, to be put through to the Modfather by his mother Ann. On leaving school Gary landed a job at Decca Records before moving to Carnaby Street and the NME, where he was put on reception duties after the previous receptionist - one Danny Baker - got promoted to a writing position. 

This was the time of punk, and that spirit was still in the air when the still-teenage Crowley broke into radio, embarking on a 40-year broadcasting career that continues today with his Saturday evening pleasurefest on BBC Radio London. There he enjoys much the same freedom afforded him at Capital and GLR [London’s BBC local radio station which took a proudly independent approach to music], unrestrained by playlists and algorithm-dictated scheduling.

Now an infuriatingly youthful 59, Crowley remains the effervescent music enthusiast he’s been throughout his adult life, and highly knowledgeable, too. His mental record library is as deep as his anecdotal archive of stories from myriad encounters with musical heroes like Paul McCartney (a supposed 20-minute TV interview was once extended to 40 - “He likes you,” explained a Macca aid).

Having been in the front row of the music scene in the early ’80,  Gary is perfectly placed to launch a second volume of Gary Crowley’s Lost ’80s, a sumptuous, 65-track, four-CD box set featuring a 32-page book with Crowley’s own notes detailing the frankly incredible track listing he compiled. A 21-track, clear vinyl, 180g double-LP is also available. Most ’80s compilations will be a predictable parade of the usual suspects but Crowley discovered a formula, with 2019’s Volume 1, to tread the path less followed. Relative obscurities from Wham!, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Bananarama sat alongside truly lost acts like The Suede Crocodiles and Strawberry Switchblade. Volume 2 is equally stuffed with the familiar and the unfamiliar, such as the opening track of Disc 1, The Style Council’s instrumental Mick’s Up from their Introducing... EP. “Expect a selection of not only the bigger names, with some of their ‘lost’ gems, but also a raft of lesser-known artists,” says Gary. “Many of the latter came nowhere near the mainstream but most certainly - in my honest opinion - deserve another chance to shine under the spotlight.” 

So, along with staples of the 1980s’ first half, like Altered Images, Madness, Swing Out Sister, The Blow Monkeys, Elvis Costello, The Undertones and Nick Heyward (albeit with delightfully lesser-known examples of their work) - there are, again, ‘lost’ entries that made their impact on Gary at the time, like Pressure Point, Polecats, Stephen ’Tin Tin’ Duffy and Funkapolitan. There’s also a healthy nod to the early ’80s cod jazz-soul movement (which seemed to provide a Soho soundtrack that culminated in the flawed, but still cherished film adaption of Colin MacInnes’ coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners) with Working Week, Marine Girls, Dee C. Lee, Sade and the very mighty Animal Nightlife.

“When I was compiling Volume 1, one of the things that really stood out for me was the influence of the ’60s and ’70s,” Gary recalls. “Whether it was George Michael or Paul Weller, or Mick Head from The Pale Fountains, they were aspiring to be Burt Bacharach or [the Small Faces’] Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane.” Volume 1, he adds, somewhat suggested its follow-up: “I must be honest and say as soon as I delivered the track listing for the first compilation I already had a selection in mind for a sequel.” That first package came out of a similar compilation of punk and New Wave music he put together with his Soho Radio pal Jim Lahat. “I said to Demon Records - almost before the finished copies of GC’s Punk & New Wave were delivered - I’ve got a great idea for another box set: the music that I was playing on the radio show or a lot of the bands that were appearing on Ear Say.”  

“In a way,” he adds, “it’s trying to reclaim the ’80s, and take the decade away from that easy, lazy, naff version with the poodle hair. I hate slagging off bands, and you know what? If it works for somebody, fine. Not everything was my cup of tea back then - Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones were never my ’80s. The ’80s that I was into was this eclectic group of bands, like The Style Council, Everything But The Girl, The Pale Fountains and Grandmaster Flash. That period,” he stresses, “was my ’80s”.

Gary recognises that the decade can be compartmentalised into the period before and after Live Aid: “It did get a little naff in that middle part. I’ve said before, in a reverent way, that Live Aid had a little to do with that. Because with a lot of those sort of bands, those artists, the hair got bigger, the shoulder pads got wider, and they all started looking like Princess Diana - and started hanging out with her as well!” he quips. 

Even now, in the mind’s eye, the second half of the ’80s seems dominated by the rock chumocracy’s Prince’s Trust gigs and their Armani suits, and a somewhat slicker brand of music and pop star image. Again, a horrendous generalisation, but Gary says the period still had much going for it. “I think the mid-’80s did start to sound a little bit homogenised, but thankfully in ’87 and ’88 an edge started to come back.”

“It got good again towards the end of the ’80s, with Guns N’ Roses, The Happy Mondays and so on. A very important band for me at that time was The Wonder Staff. I always remember going to see them just after they’d signed to Polydor but hadn’t yet released anything. I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is amazing!’. They had this energy in the club that night. It was like a punk gig. Miles Hunt was a great front man. That was an exciting time, especially to be on air at GLR. It’s certainly an idea for another compilation...” he adds. Knowing Gary, he’s probably already put together the track listing. Someone at Demon Records should be getting a phone call any time soon.

Gary Crowley’s Lost ’80s Volume 2 is released on Friday 23 July.

The rebirth of cool: the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

In my actual timeline, I am a child of the 1960s. In my self-mythology, I’m a child of the rock-pop era. There is some legitimacy to this claim: I was, after all, born in November 1967, three months after the Summer Of Love and two weeks after Hendrix recorded Little Wing. My childhood was spent in the 1970s, which meant attending the Thursday night ritual of Top Of The Pops, and bopping along to Mud, The Rubettes, Smokie, and being ever-so slightly freaked out by Alvin Stardust clad in full leather, pointing at the camera with a gloved hand bearing a large jewelled ring on the index finger.

It was only later on in the 1970s that I discovered what is now referred to as “classic rock”. This meant that my musical upbringing - until I ‘accidentally’ discovered Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album (well, taped it off my brother’s copy) - was shaped by the Top 40 tunes of the decade as a whole, which meant putting up with Peters & Lee’s Welcome Home and ABBA, and becoming mildly interested in the punky chops of Blondie, The Jam and The Police around the time I started secondary school.

By no fault other than the year I was born in, I turned 13 in 1980, which meant that the 80s were my coming of age, music-wise. This was the decade that began with the Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall at No.1 and ended with a Top 10 that included Jason Donovan, Soul II Soul, Jive Bunny, Madonna, De La Soul and New Kids On The Block. Make of that what you will. My read is that you probably can’t generalise any one era: the 50s might have given us rock and roll, the 60s the golden age of pop (or pop-rock if you prefer), the 70s rock, punk and disco, and so on, but really we’re in broad sweeping statements here.

Recent trundles about the South Coast, listening to the type of "classic hit" radio stations Peter Kay captures so brilliantly with 'Forever FM' in Car Share, reminded me that the 80s were no different. Sure, there was plenty of cheese, but no different then than now or, indeed, any era you pick. The difference, though, between the 80s and now is that - and I’m going to go full card-carrying, cardigan-wearing old fart here - there was some musical integrity, then, about Top 40 pop. You know, real instruments and no Autotune, unlike the software-infested durge coming out of the station we had on the car last week on the Isle of Wight.

So, then, a statement of the bleeding obvious: there’s something for everyone in every decade, and no one has the right to call snobbery over anyone else’s. Rant over, the reason this comes to mind is the reissue this week (and rediscovery in my vinyl collection) of an album that, in one particular way, captured a specific aspect of the 80s. Last week I blogged about the demise of Q magazine and my involvement in the launch of a near-rival in 1986, looking to break into the ‘men’s lifestyle’ market, which was being fuelled by Soho, The Face and i-D magazines, and the convergence of style, fashion and music of the early 1980s. So the reappearance of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack album has randomly evoked a phase of my musical education when the 1980s tapped into the 1950s, and jazz made an unexpected appearance. We had, of course, Sade, whose Diamond Life became a period cliché due to its association with ‘yuppie’ wine bars (though it’s true - you couldn’t avoid the record if you visited such establishments). Plus there were pseudo jazz acts like Carmel, Matt Bianco and Swing Out Sister, along with Everything But The Girl’s Eden album and even The Style Council, with their cod-jazz leanings on their debut, Café Bleu. All of it was, though, eminently cool.

Julien Temple’s 1986 screen musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’s 1950s-set, coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners just seemed ripe for the time. It was brash, it was bold, it was colourful, it was invariably overblown - and many critics just didn’t like it - but it was, for all its many faults, relentlessly cool. Not quite the commercial and critical dud it has since been painted to be, Absolute Beginners had a certain charm - in particular, its soundtrack. Temple drafted in jazz great Gil Evans to oversee it, and in between pieces of Evans-arranged incidental music, it captured a eclectic, but jazz-themed mix from the likes of Sade, Ray Davies (in a particularly amusing skit as a put-down dad pleading for a “Quiet Life”), Patsy Kensit (on-the-money 80s casting as the film’s love interest) with her band at the time, Eighth Wonder, and even a stormy instrumental by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to accompany the film’s riot scene (a statement on the 1950s Notting Hill race riots). Paul Weller - who’d already written his own paean to the McInnes book with The Jam’s song of the same name - got on the soundtrack with The Style Council’s bouncy Have You Ever Had It Blue.

The standout contribution (inevitably, given my pronounced leanings), however, came from David Bowie. The Dame was at something of a career plateau when Temple invited him to ham it up as vampiric advertising executive Vendice Partners - himself a skit on Soho’s then-status as 80s London’s adland epicentre, replete with an intentionally fake American accent. When the film was released, Bowie was several months on from his barnstorming appearance at Live Aid, a performance in which he’d appeared with a brand new backing band (including Thomas Dolby), having discarded - as he often did - the group he’d worked with on the Let’s Dance album and its subsequent Serious Moonlight tour. Temple’s Absolute Beginners was already in production when Live Aid came around, and Bowie’s theme song for it was recorded at Abbey Road just a month before the self-style “global jukebox” was staged.

Like Queen and other acts who were given a career lift by the charity concert, Bowie’s appearance in Absolute Beginners, and his musical contribution to it, went further in cementing his legend status, but not in any obvious leap or bound. You could argue that he'd left behind artistically interesting, complex music, and that Let’s Dance had sent him fully commercial (with the mid-80s Tonight and Never Let Me Down albums widely considered creative lows). But with Temple’s film, Bowie looked like he was just having fun. As Partners, he camped it up for England, but it was the title song - all eight minutes of it, in its full version - that stood out as, arguably, one of the great entries in the entire Bowie catalogue, and certainly of that period of his career. When I saw him at Wembley a year after the film ca out, on the much-derided Glass Spider Tour (regrettably, my only experience of Bowie live), it was Absolute Beginners’ energy that made the biggest mark of the night. I could wax on further about Bowie here, but as much as we (well, I) still mourn his loss, it’s memories of his involvement in this film - both the comic acting and the impassioned theme song (not to mention another gem on the soundtrack, his cover of the old Dean Martin standard, Volare), that added another chapter - no, paragraph - to the already expansive Bowie story, and to the magic of why few bend a knee to The Dame as much as I still do.

The Absolute Beginners soundtrack, then, snapshots two eras: the 50s the film portrays, and the mid-80s in pop. Just as Live Aid, it’s near-contemporary, captured the crossover between the generations (those of the classic rock era like Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who, Queen, etc, and those from the more immediate present - Madonna, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, George Michael), Absolute Beginners sliced into a momentary phase of the 1980s, when Soho cappuccinos, Bass Weejun loafers and wearing pastel V-necks over the shoulders - essentially the entire Paul Weller vibe at the time - provided a jazz-infused, politically-minded (anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge et al) interlude to the decade that brought us puffball skirts and red braces-wearing, Bret Easton Ellis-inspired bankers with far too much gel in their hair. But above all, in just the first eight minutes of side one, it brought out a recording by David Bowie that combined so much of his undoubted talent - drama, excitement, luscious chord changes and an impassioned vocal, plus a Bowie trademark that often goes unrecognised: a honking saxophone.

Sunset boulevard - Paul Weller’s West Coast album

You know, it's actually become boring to talk about Paul Weller’s rich vein of form. Because, for a purple patch, it's been going on a mighty long time. His 15th solo studio album, On Sunset, continues an output that has averaged an album every two or three years since his self-titled solo debut, incredibly, 28 years ago. It's a rate that puts most of his contemporaries - even an Elvis Costello - to shame. Much, I suspect, has to do with the restless spirit that has always charged Weller’s creativity, not just in having something to say, but also a yearning to try something new each time, dipping a quill into the different shades of ink from which the now 62-year-old has drawn his influences.

On Sunset marks another change of course, veering from the reflective, folky vibe of 2018's pastoral True Meanings, to a decidedly sunny, open-topped outing. As the title might allude, it’s an excursion into the blue skies and free'n'easy living of 1970s Los Angeles: effortlessly cool, intriguing by turns, melodically pleasing and incongruously soulful for an album crafted in deepest Surrey (Weller’s work-from-home location, Black Barn Studios in the village of Ripley - Eric Clapton's birthplace).

“Everybody likes a good tune, regardless how it’s dressed up,” Weller told GQ’s Dylan Jones recently. “Luckily, melody comes relatively easy to me – it’s a very natural part of the writing process. You’re often trying to find new ways of saying the same thing, but I can always rely on melody to see me through.” And thus it proves, with 10 tracks (15 if you buy the ‘deluxe edition’) of joyous songcraft, most making authentic nods to the '70s soul and R&B influences that, like the more orthodox mod traces of The Who and Small Faces, have fed Weller’s musical subconscious.

Perhaps, most surprising, is the unabashed West Coast association. The likes of Down In A Tube Station At Midnight and Stanley Road may have given the wrong impression of a narrow, Anglo-centric scope, but a visit last year to his son in Los Angeles brought about a reawakening to the City of Angels. “I stayed at this funny little hotel just off the Strip [Sunset Boulevard],” Weller told Jones, “and while I’ve been to LA a lot, I hadn’t spent any time on the Strip for years and so it all came rushing back – the Sunset Marquis, the Rainbow... I couldn’t believe how quickly everything had gone. I love the West Coast: not the psychedelic Grateful Dead but The Beach Boys, especially the later period. Be warned, though, this isn’t my West Coast record.” That’s as maybe, but from the cover art to the title, and from the title track’s strings, lusciously arranged by Game Of Thrones composer Hannah Peel (and with an ebbing seashore sound effect in the outro), to it’s references to palm trees, the warm breeze and drinks “in the Whiskey” [A-Go-Go] (with an unashamed touch of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord in the intro), it’s as West Coast as Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen. And that’s no bad thing.

It might be corny to suggest, but the warmth I know, love and, frankly, miss about California - the endless days of sultry sunshine and freshening winds blowing off the Pacific - is present throughout this record. Written and recorded before the lockdown, it nevertheless exudes freedom. The kind of freedom you get from cruising through the Santa Monica Mountains in a vintage '70s Pontiac convertible, as Weller appears to be doing in the album’s artwork. It’s there in the woozy funk of the album’s seven-minute opener Mirror Ball, with its nods to the Isleys' Summer Breeze. It’s there in the wistful thoughts of Old Father Tyme, which presciently - pre-COVID - makes the statement: “In this time of confusion, hang on to what is real. Hail the love around us, see how deep it feels.”

The contemplative frame of mind that Weller has attached to his work of late is patently age related. Though not obvious, the death of his father John - who’d managed his son’s career from the beginning (instilling in him the relentless work ethic) - might still bear presence. Certainly he is not afraid of his past, both in re-signing to Polydor, the label Weller Sr. helped sign The Jam to in 1977, but also in drawing on the organ talents of former fellow Style Councillor Mick Talbot, who appears on Baptiste and Village. Earth Beat, while we’re at it, swings like the Council’s Speak Like A Child, with the giddiness of pristine ’80s pop wrapped in modern sonics. Nor is he afraid of casting out widely into his vast pool of historic reference, calling on Slade’s Jim Lea to provide a rakish violin to Equanimity, one of several Beatley tracks which include the acoustic guitar-driven melancholic beauty, Rockets (featuring some pristine bass work by Andy Crofts).

Picture: Lee Cogswell

Looking back over the last fourteen Weller solo albums, it’s hard to truly find any which waste your time. In fact, looking at the bigger picture, most conform to an unbelievably high standard. He’ll probably hate this, but I don’t think Paul Weller ever gets enough credit. Some, lazily, still think of him as the angry young man, of Red Wedge, of Town Called Malice or ‘A’ Bomb In Wardour Street. Others go to the Paris Match posing of The Style Council. All of which were a long Weller time ago. “You’ve got to keep your tools sharp,” he told GQ. “The world is full of people who made great records and then tailed off, but maybe I care more now because I wasn’t as good as they were when I started. With me it’s probably worked in reverse, but there are still some great performers who are doing great work. The things Robert Plant has been doing have been really, really good; I’ve seen Macca and The Stones play live recently and both were absolutely brilliant.”

Frankly, he should be held in the same reverence. It might be tempting to think that On Sunset points to a career winding down, but with Album 16 already on the sketch pad, Paul Weller is showing no signs of his 28-year purple patch ending any time soon. Even if, for me, On Sunset is an absolute career high. Maybe, even his best to date.

Modz rool: Paul Weller at Greenwich Music Time

Picture: Simon Poulter © 2019

When your career has produced a current total of 26 original albums (14 as a solo artist, six each with The Jam and The Style Council), and you are Paul Weller, you’ve got a certain licence to do whatever the hell you want to. You could, for example, turn your gigs into a two-hour jukebox of hits and send your exclusively middle-aged punters home satisfied, blissfully karaoked-out with sore throats from reliving their youth club days singing along to The Eton Rifles, Going Underground or Beat Surrender. Or you could play to the political climate and revive the prescient Walls Come Tumbling Down, a song as relevant and needed today as it was during the era in which it was conceived.

But, if you are Paul Weller, you’re 61, you’ve been in bands since you were 14, recording since you were 19, and you have produced 26 studio albums, there’s nothing stopping you opening your set at an outdoor summer's evening show with I’m Where I Should Be, a low-key, somewhat obscure track off 2015’s Saturn’s Pattern. Because you can. And he did.

It's hard to truly tell whether the choice of opening song was Weller's little joke, simply as it's hard to tell if Weller ever does joke. I think he does, and the stony face cracked a number of times during Sunday night's closing show of the six-night Greenwich Music Time festival, delightfully staged in the stunning grounds of the Old Naval College next to the Thames (one of London's busiest filming locations, with episodes of The Queen shot there amid the pristine period surroundings). If the opening number caught the audience off guard, My Ever Changing Moods up next restored the crowd to the familiar.

Now, about the crowd. Unsurprisingly, for an act in the public eye for over 40 years, the crowd is default middle-aged. Dadwear is in copious evidence, along with a high propensity of close-cropped balding pates which, when queuing behind, makes you wonder whether you're standing behind a London cab driver you've ridden in and had to put up with his views on, well, everything. Then there are the Weller uberfans, replete in Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts, some sporting feather cuts (one even going the full distance with a magnificent mane of grey hair and a camelhair jacket that the Modfather himself would surely approve of. Or laugh at. Again, I'm not really sure).

Over the course of 27 songs, Weller and his band - which included trusted lieutenants Steve Craddock on guitar and Andy Crofts on bass, augmented on occasion by the brass section of Weller protégés The Stone Foundation (who'd opened for their mentor) - covered a wider gamut of the canon that perhaps many in the audience, especially those who'd come in costume, were expecting. There were the brusque, R'n'B rockers like Woo Sé Mama from 2017's A Kind Revolution and Peacock Suit from Heavy Soul, the fourth in Weller's extraordinary - and continuing - purple patch of solo outings, as well as the reminders of his soulfulness: the sublime Broken Stones appearing in the encore, along with an old live favourite, Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up. Earlier in the set, Weller brought out Leah, his daughter with Dee C Lee, to duet on You Do Something To Me, another perennial of the tender side to his songwriting (which also includes A Kind Revolution's standout, The Cranes Are Back - which I would have loved to have heard reproduced live). There was another surprise appearance with former Style Council compadre Mick Talbot coming out to tickle the ivories on Shout To The Top! A pity Merton's finest couldn't have stayed for more.

When The Style Council split, somewhat ignominiously, in 1989 when their record company blocked the release of their fifth and final album, Weller found himself at a crossroads. It was to be the making of him as a national music treasure. Despite having fronted two of the most successful and intrinsically British bands of the 1980s, his first solo album, Paul Weller set him on a path that would result in the 13 albums of rich variety that have followed, and which were heavily drawn from in Greenwich. Above The Clouds drifted dreamily under the partially leaden sky next to the Thames, while Into Tomorrow reminded of the Britpop template that Weller laid the foundation of. Wild Wood provided an early would-be cigarette-lighters-aloft moment, casting grey-haired memories back to the second solo album that really underlined the creativity that had pent up during Weller's brief sabbatical. Later in the set, that album's Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) provided an energetic example  of an album that contained such stompers as Sunflower, Foot Of The Mountain and Shadow Of The Sun, all of which would have been welcome in Greenwich.

Picture: Simon Poulter © 2019

Weller is nothing if not a prolific songwriter, and the number of albums recorded masks the shere scale of songs he's committed to tape: Mermaids and Brushed from Heavy Soul are performed as a brace, and even Strange Museum - co-written with Talbot - is resurrected from the debut solo album. There was even the rare moment of Weller fluffery, with Have You Ever Had It Blue throwing back to the Bass Weejun-wearing, carefree side of The Style Council and that period of mod revivalism that coincided with all things Soho and The Face magazine that occurred when Julien Temple decided to make a film out of Colin MacInnes' nod to 1950s teenage life in London, Absolute Beginners. Looking back, it was all rather naff, but I loved it at the time.

Weller is, and always has been intrinsically cool, and that's why the association with an era of supposed jazz-cool, revived in the mid-80s with the The Style Council's Cafe Bleu album (with sleevenotes from the legendary 'Cappuccino Kid', itself a nod to Bar Italia and that Soho scene), along with Sade and even Everything But The Girl's Eden album, was something of an affectation. After all, that's what mod culture has always been about, as opposed to rock's somewhat obsessive adherence to its earnest blues roots. Whatever culture Weller was hoping to channel in his younger self, manifests itself now, in his early 60s, as simply extraordinarily good songs. Earnestly performed, perhaps, but an encore that includes the soul classic Broken Stones, The Jam's Start!, the Mayfield cover and Town Called Malice, there is an unlikely communion with the 5,000-strong congregation, sitting in this quintessentially British environment. Apart from the more nailed-on devotees, who'd been able to recall the words to Jam songs like Precious and Man In The Corner Shop, the crowd on this Sunday evening in South-East London had been somewhat subdued, perhaps by a somewhat chillier climate than expected, forcing Weller at one point to enquire of his crowd if it was enjoying itself. Of course it was. This was a master at work. Why wouldn't they?