Jam fans were embittered when Paul Weller decided they had had their day pretty much at their commercial height, and shut them down. This was nothing mind by comparison with the vitriol Weller was on the receiving end from NME, Melody Maker and Sounds writers when he had the nerve to reinvent himself as a foppish playboy with Mick Talbot in The Style Council. You could see playground class rules operating at their basest and most crude in the music press on a weekly basis throughout 1984 and '85. It still operates in much the same way in the UK and it's naive to think it doesn't. Weller had ideas above his station. The bitterness and class contempt of other's reaction was pretty unpleasant to say the least.
How dare he wear his hair in that floppy fringe. How dare he don moccasins and loose sweaters and be so gauche.So damned confident. Who did he think he was. Understudy for Anthony Andrews or Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited which was playing on British television at the time and made an enormous cultural impression. I wasn't a huge fan of The Style Council at the time and didn't buy any of the records, (I'm still not keen on Cafe Bleu, it's ridiculously mannered), but some of the things that were written told you all you needed to know about class hatred and how it worked. In the words of George Bernard Shaw. ' It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.'
To be fair to Weller he could generally give as good as he got. There was certainly not much wrong with many of the singles the Style Council put out. Ever Changing Mood is a superb 45, Perhaps the video was a bit much. Cue the preening cycle race.
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