The Style Council: The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council
Terry Staunton, Uncut, November 1998
FIVE-CD overview of Paul Weller's "Cappuccino" years.
THEY PISSED a lot of people off, The Style Council. It could have been the allusions to all things French, or the contrived white-macced, Breton-shirted video and photo shoots. It could have been the way they referred to live shows as "council meetings", the endless bloody Mick Talbot instrumental, or the ludicrous Cappuccino Kid sleevenotes.
But The Style Council pissed most people off because they weren't The Jam. How dare Paul Weller disband the best group in Britain to take up with a mod revival nonentity! Didn't he care about the kids?
Weller's decision to knock The Jam on the head was, in all honesty, a bold move. At the time, he said he wanted to avoid the band turning into something as worthless as The Rolling Stones and anyone who's ever heard Bridges To Babylon should fall to their knees and give thanks for that alone.
Had the outraged diehards got a grip for a few seconds, they might have actually enjoyed taking a ride with Weller on his new adventure. Hearing these songs again with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that The Style Council made some of the most intriguing and enduring records of the Eighties. 'Paris Match' is a beautifully atmospheric ballad, 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' is political pop at its most uplifting, and 'Come To Milton Keynes' an imagery-laden indictment of the hopelessness and narrow-minded values of England's newtowns "We used to chase dreams, now we chase the dragon / Mine is the semi with the Union Jack on."
Complete Adventures... is 90 tracks long (curiously omitting the original single version of their second hit, 'Money-Go-Round'), and it's the last eight which are of most interest to Weller fans, namely the Council's "lost" house album, Modernism: A New Decade. On first hearing the tapes in 1989, Polydor refused to release the record and the Council split up soon afterwards, with Weller leaving the label that had been his home for 12 years. Obviously, its historical and curiosity value is high, but there's little in the way of aural pleasure to be had a succession of uninspired sub-Marshall Jefferson grooves and it's almost as if Weller was willfully tapping his fingers on the self-destruct button.
That aberration aside, Weller and Talbot may not have broken much in the way of new ground but their dabbling's in jazz, folk, Sixties beat group pop and blue-eyed soul, and their floating collective of occasional band members (Tracy Thorn, Omar, erm, Lenny Henry) kept it interesting for themselves and Jam fans who hadn't already jumped ship and it helped spice up the usually bland daytime radio playlists.
You'll be surprised by just how much of this box you get a kick out of.
© Terry Staunton, 1998