The Style Council: Cafe Bleu (Polydor)
Hector Cook, New Musical Express, 17 March 1984
ME AND my ever-changing moods. One minute I hear 'Strength Of Your Nature' and think Paul Weller's cracked it, next I'm hearing some snippet of Blue Note clone-work and I can't fathom what he wants or expects out of such faceless music...
Cafe Bleu is full of a man changing his mind, his shoes and his allegiances. It speaks out in the clutching, awkward way of someone who has slippery and protean concepts like 'style' and 'preaching' nagging in his head and a great skill at his fingertips: they never clearly match up, and if it makes The Style Council's LP an interesting and human record it disperses and wastes its opportunities too. It's not two different contrasting sides. The entire is a patchwork of moods, categories, tempos.
Weller might pretend otherwise but it inevitably comes brassily out as a manifesto, laid down in the barstool oratory of The Cappuccino Kid's 'notes' ("Children to your feet!"), declaimed in pop that puts its faith in people coming together, hooking up to some collective vision and sorting out their spirits and capacity for love. That sort of thing. Then why is Cafe Bleu so full of regret, self-doubt, music with a heavy heart?
The rub is that Weller's replaced his anger with sentimentality. If The Jam's velocity was romantic in impulse at least it moved. The Style Council – well, they're sitting around in a cafe. They're talking and talking, plinking at whatever instrument is to hand, yearning for some lost time when music came from the heart. But when was that time?
As crisply packaged as Mick Talbot's instrumental fillets are, they suggest an artificial nostalgia – the stain that spoilt all that 'new jazz' chicanery a couple of years back – which blights the enthusiasm. 'Mick's Blessings' is a single piano lick and 'Blue Cafe' is a bit of Barney Kessel meets Mantovani – mere makeweights. But when they go straight for the heartland of hard bop in 'Dropping Bombs On The White House' and 'Council Meetin'' the spectacle of horn players bumming clichés off their tutors' record collections and Talbot overreaching his competence is neither exciting nor purposeful. You cats want to cut it, you double your chops.
Perhaps this perplexingly empty cargo is something Weller feels he has to include when his confederates blab about "the sweetness of Miles' sad lonely trumpet" and the influence of Jimmy Smith – as if this were some obligation to go mature and tap a bit of class beyond mere pop. The blandness of the results, which spill over into the doleful 'The Paris Match' as voiced by Everything But The Girl, should make him reconsider. Yet elsewhere one looks equally in vain for the much vaunted strength of Weller's vision.
The truth may be that that vision either idles in the mysterious 'style' which the group is pinned to or sprays in many haphazard directions. 'The Whole Point Of No Return', the last minute addition to the LP, is a spruce piece of traditional protest sung to a lonely guitar, astute, unimpeachable, vanished in a moment. Then it's back to the goulash of manner and method which The Style Council have picked over since their inception. Weller's new songs have the hum of a deep-set pop integrity, which makes the beatific trio of 'You're The Best Thing', 'Here's One That Got Away' and 'Headstart For Happiness' an entertaining trot. But they bounce off the ear. They don't burrow in.
The less said about the glib rap rip of 'A Gospel' the better. Then, suddenly, in 'Strength Of Your Nature' Weller polishes the dance bullet he found in 'Money-Go-Round' and all the potential of The Style Council comes clear. A terse crackle of pop polemic where everything is at the service of a result instead of the ingredients: the players cut back to paragraphs (Talbot's organ romp works brilliantly), the hook furious. Only here, and in the subdued version of 'My Ever-Changing Moods', an insidious sketch of self-consciousness, does the record really connect.
All the dissatisfaction Weller's felt since the last days of The Jam may be no more than a gifted man realising that his talents only go so far. Like pop, Weller can change nobody's world fundamentally, just offer a few useful splashes of colour.
Cafe Bleu shows him reflecting on what he can't do, and that could account for its strangely drooping spirit. So much of it sounds so low. In their handful of great moments The Style Council have proved they can still be a vehicle for a profoundly important worker in pop. I will counsel that Paul forgets his pole position, ignores the clamour for weighty rhetoric and 'vision', and restores the real vigour of his craft.
© Hector Cook, 1984