A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#18: The Style Council – Walls Come Tumbling Down (1985)
Cor, that Paul Weller, he’s a right one, isn’t he? One minute he’s all lovey-dovey, punting up the River Cam in a cricket jumper, the next he’s in your face like a hard-nosed union rep trying to get the world out on strike. Oi, Weller! NO!! Sort yourself out!!!
Like several of their fellow graduates from the late-70s, such as Scritti Politti or Heaven 17, The Style Council were in the business of blending chart-friendly pop with social and political messages, getting under the skin of people who maybe didn’t think of themselves as radical lefties.
But where Scritti and Heaven 17 were pretty much ‘always on’ – every song was a subtle nudge away from the orthodoxy – Weller’s output was a bit more ‘on and off’, alternating dewey-eyed romance like You’re The Best Thing with between-the-eyes rage like A Gospel from first album Café Bleu.
Walls Come Tumbling Down is a song that packs more anger and agitation into its up-tempo 60s-r’n’b than any other Style Council release since second single Money Go Round. Weller’s gruff vocal as he sings “You don’t have to take this crap!” harks back to the young man on The Modern World, telling us he didn’t give two fucks about our review. The lyrics echo the very direct political line of Jam songs like Scrape Away or Trans-Global Express, ditching poetry for straightforward agit-prop.
It doesn’t seem as though this flip-flopping between love and hate bothered either the fans or the critics for the first few years of The Style Council’s term of office. Walls Come Tumbling Down became the sixth of their eight singles to date to go Top Ten, with the other two both falling just short at number 11. The reviews, about which fewer than two fucks were given, made generous allowance for Weller’s willingness to go where The Jam could never have gone, even if some inconsistency was noted.
Plainly, while much of The Style Council’s music felt increasingly distant from The Jam’s, Weller’s social and political side had, if anything, hardened. In 1984, what amounted to a ninth Style Council single credited to The Council Collective (Paul, Mick, Whitey and a veritable picket line of other artists), Soul Deep had been a fundraiser for the striking miners (charting at 24), and 1986 saw the Council devoting much of their time to the Red Wedge campaign, in support of the Labour Party’s attempts to unseat Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.
The final track on this EP, Blood Sports, was another fundraiser. The anti-hunting song’s share of royalties was donated to the Bristol Defence Fund in aid of two jailed hunt saboteurs. Given that the single reached number 6 in the charts one assumes a few bob went their way. Both this and the title track act as reminders that half-way through a decade already characterised by shallow celebratory materialism, superficial New Romantic glamour and self-indulgent hedonism, there was still a persistent streak of political radicalism running through pop culture.
The other two songs on the EP share something of a maritime theme with references to oceans, seas, ships and harbours. Both are a little more cryptic than the other two, perhaps unusually neither the one romantic thing nor the political other. Side one’s Spin’ Drifting is a whole-ensemble outing in the familiar jazz-pop idiom of Café Bleu, perhaps meditating on some emotional betrayal or disappointment. Mick Talbot is credited with ‘Himalayan flute’, but apart from sounding more like a synth keyboard than a real flute, I think they’ve got their mountains mixed up and we should be in the Andes instead.
Side two (labelled on the sleeve as ‘The Council Folk Club presents…’) opens with The Whole Point II, a revised version of The Whole Point Of No Return from Café Bleu with new lyrics. Since the soulful pop tune is the same, just having Weller accompany himself on acoustic guitar is scarcely enough to call it ‘folk’. Where the earlier song dreams the destruction of aristocratic privilege, the EP remake appears to be more a plea for personal integrity, to resist the self-destruction of acquiescence in the status quo. “But I’m not prepared to live the lie/To shut my mouth and just say yes/To make a vow and then confess/It’s so easy, much too easy.” Blood Sports is also a solo guitar arrangement where the style definitely comes closer to justifying the folk tag.
For a long time I owned only singles by The Style Council. This EP was my sixth purchase out of their eight up to that point, putting them third in the list of most singles by one artist in my collection, behind The Jam (9) and Elvis Costello (8). Tallied another way, I hold fifteen singles by bands led by Paul Weller. Either I had a serious obsession with the man, or else he had an uncanny knack for churning out corking pop 45s. Given that all those fifteen discs were Top 30 hits I think the second statement requires no debate.
Obsession, on the other hand, is putting it too strongly since Walls Come Tumbling Down proved to be the last Style Council record I bought, and I hardly noticed their slow decline and disappearance even though there were still three Top 20 and one Top 10 single to come. In retrospect, I could have irrigated my late 80s musical desert with what The Style Council still had to offer. I could have done a lot worse – and in fact I did. Much of what I bought then has either gone or languishes unplayed in my shelves.
It’s hard to remember clearly now, but I think I came to feel that the cocktail jazz pastiche on the Style Council’s B-side was just too frivolous. I still admired Weller’s worthy leftism and I remember a fellow fan and I contrasting his real-world social commitment with the apparently self-pitying whine of up-and-coming spokesperson-for-a-generation Morrissey when Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now was racing up the charts. I confess I didn’t get The Smiths at first and it took me two or three years to appreciate the perfect mirror to my own self-pitying adolescent whine that Morrissey was holding up. Morrissey was so much more Wilde than Weller, but the importance of being earnest was taken much too literally by me.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 