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Paul Weller
"Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict
myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
Walt Whitman
I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there are
lots of layers to what I do.
Paul Weller
Dancing Through the Fire is the authorised oral history of
one of the world’s most important musical figures: Paul Weller has almost
Dylanesque managed to reinvent himself from the stunning rise of The Jam to the
stylish reinvention of The Style Council. Since disbanding the Council, he has
had a spectacular decades-long solo career. Weller, alongside Lennon and
McCartney, remains among only a handful of artists who have topped the UK album
charts in five consecutive decades. This excellent oral history by award-winning
broadcaster and journalist Dan Jennings features over 200 hours of interviews
with Weller’s family, bandmates, collaborators, and industry figures.
A study of Paul Weller’s career (from the Jam and Style
Council to his solo work) and Dan Jennings’ use of the oral history genre will provide
the reader with a rich entry point of how popular music reflects class
formations, political currents and the shifting role of intellectuals and
artists under capitalism.
The Modfather and Working-Class icon Paul Weller’s post‑punk
and Britpop-era work reinforces a British working‑class identity, nostalgia, and
dissent. Weller’s politics and music were grounded in the post‑war
British political economy of deindustrialisation, youth unemployment,
Thatcherism, and the music industry’s
structural shifts toward commodification, consolidation, and global markets.
One of the most important songs from Weller’s punk days was A
Town Called Malice. Released in 1982 by the Jam (written by Paul Weller,
recorded with Style Council musicians), the song emerges in the wake of
late-1970s deindustrialisation, rising unemployment and the political
consolidation of Thatcherism. These processes transformed the British working
class—through mass redundancies, the decline of long-term industrial
employment, and the expansion of precarious, service-sector labour—altering
both objective class positions and political subjectivity.
The pun names the locality (town) as a social relation: not
merely a site of decline but a product of hostile economic restructuring.
“Malice” anthropomorphises the systemic violence of capital’s
restructuring—plant closures, wage cuts, rising rents—making structural
brutality feel like an intentional social agent. The title functions
ideologically: it mobilises resentment but frames it as a local pathology
rather than an expression of class conflict.
The song captures the accelerated proletarianisation of entire
layers: young people forced into wage dependency or precarious work, losing
access to transitional education and apprenticeship pathways. The affective
register—disorientation, fatalism, yearning—reflects a class composition with
fractured organisation and weakened industrial solidarity. The lyrics’ focus on
private emotional response rather than collective remedy points to the present
limits of working-class political organisation under Thatcherism.
The song’s upbeat Motown-derived groove and horn lines give
it a buoyant, danceable surface while the lyrics narrate decline. This
contradiction of form and content is dialectically significant: an uplifting
groove can broaden appeal (embedding class grievances in popular culture) but
can also aestheticise suffering, sedating political urgency. The adoption of
black popular forms—soul and Motown references—connects British working-class
musical practice to international proletarian cultural traditions. Yet, here it
is largely cosmetic rather than explicitly solidaristic.
Jenning’s book runs to well over 700 pages, but it is well
worth the read. As you can see from the picture, I bumped into Weller recently.
Had a brief but memorable conversation. He was kind and polite. I look forward
to his next piece of work. Jennings's book is a masterpiece and reflects
Weller's genius.
