The Style Council: The Cost Of Loving
Dave Rimmer, Q, March 1987
IT'S FOUR YEARS now since Paul Weller knocked The Jam on the head and launched his new group with "Merton" Mick Talbot. Ever since the break, his old die-hard following has been dwindling slowly but inexorably. In its place he seems to have found a new audience. I know only two big Style Council fans. One of them (a man) simply fancies Paul Weller. The other is a Thatcherite estate agent who finds their moods and melodies the perfect accompaniment when cruising the Mediterranean on his yacht.
The point is that however much the politics count in the concept of the group (and in songs like 'Right To Go' and 'Fairy Tales' on this LP), in the wider scheme of pop people buy Style Council records for a mixed bag of more or less non-political reasons – chief among them that Weller knows how to turn out a good tune. Or knew. The biggest problem with this new LP is that, bizarre though it may seem, the decidedly droney single 'It Didn't Matter' is about the most melodic song of the lot.
The Style Council would probably sound a ridiculously corny name if somebody coined it now. In 1983 they just about got away with it, getting in with the word "style" marginally before it became near-meaningless Sunday supplement shorthand and the word "council" before it began to conjure up Fleet Street caricatures of the "loony left". There in any case were the two sides of the group: politics and, well..."style".
In musical terms "style" translated into a moodiness and whimsicality that was the opposite of The Jam's urgency and aggressiveness. Socialists have feelings too! Weller played with all sorts of black music, but most memorably a lazy, hazy sort of sound that recalled Getz and Gilberto and girls from Ipanema. Though the odd track here is harder (like the appallingly untidy rap, 'Right To Go', recorded with The Dynamic Three), that sound still dominates. But without the solid structure of a song like 'My Ever Changing Moods' or 'You're The Best Thing', it just drifts like a raft in the middle of the ocean.
On track after track after track, the group sounds little better than a pub band of balding musos who can play slickly enough but haven't got an interesting idea between them. Even after listening through this a half a dozen times I still find myself incapable of singing along with a single song.
© Dave Rimmer, 1987