PAUL WELLER – you can’t say he’s not full of surprises. Here he is, nearing 66, letting co-writers into his hermetic world – from Suggs to Noel Gallagher. And here again, embarking on a fledgling movie career. Meanwhile, he’s getting giddy about unlikely new enthusiasms. Whatever next – leather trousers? “I’ve got to say, man, Billie Eilish is fucking great,” he tells a startled WILL HODGKINSON.
BLACK BARN STUDIO IN SURREY IS, AS A DISPLACED ROAD SIGN perched on a beam above the doorway tells us, Wellers Town. Pass the toilet to the left, with its faded photograph of the Faces in their early-’70s prime, and the kitchen to the right, with its boxes of prawn cocktail crisps and Cadburys Mini Eggs, and you’ll come to the control room, where a vast mixing desk stands a few feet apart from a Wurlitzer jukebox. Big Youth’s Hit The Road Jack, Donovan’s Barabajagal, Bob Lind’s Elusive Butterfly and, naturally, The Beatles’ Taxman are a few of the 45s in there, waiting to be fired up between rehearsals. A small office holds the gold discs: 500,000 sales for The Jam’s Going Underground, 1.2 million for Stanley Road. In the studio itself, where a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh stands on a grand piano, Epiphone, Fender and Rickenbacker guitars line up alongside a bare brick wall, and the drum kit sits under a ceiling painted in strips of red, white and blue, Paul Weller is taking his band through their paces.
“That tempo’s good, innit?” says Weller, sitting by a Fender Rhodes piano, pub ashtray and packet of cigarettes within reach, a Mod in relaxed mode in his red crew neck jumper and Levi’s 501s.
The band are playing Nothing, a co-write with Madness singer Graham ‘Suggs’ McPherson from Weller’s forthcoming album, 66; it is a plaintive reflection on the loss of innocence adulthood inevitably brings and it feels suited to the phase Weller finds himself in. He’s still working hard, feeling out new directions, still thinking about the details, from the length of a trouser hem to the dampening of a guitar string. As he approaches the age signposted in the album title, however, he’s a mellower figure than he once was, only too aware that life is finite and it moves faster than you think. Is the drive that will make 66 his 17th solo album since 1992’s Paul Weller in as high a gear as ever?
“I don’t know, man,” he says. “A year ago, a few months even, I would have told you that drive would always be there no matter what. Something has happened, though. Not that I would ever retire but I’ve been thinking lately, and I know this sounds morbid, that I’ll be four years off 70 this year. You get caught up: with making records, going out on the road, and I’ve realised how precious t
