The documentary will air on Sky Arts as the channel becomes free for everyone, moving to Freeview channel 11. The release is paired with a brilliant Sky Arts documentary under the same name out in late October, featuring interviews with all key members, fans and collaborators. Named after the band’s biggest hit, "Long Hot Summer", it's endorsed and co-compiled by Paul Weller himself, and as well as "Long Hot Summer", the album includes the sterling debut top 5 single “Speak Like A Child” plus other masterpieces such as the languid “You’re The Best Thing”, “Ever Changing Moods”, and dance floor filler “Shout To The Top”. The long-awaited and eagerly anticipated definitive career anthology Long Hot Summers: The Story of The Style Council, packed with the greatest hits and more, is landing on 30th October 2020. The Style Council was emblematic of its creator, Paul Weller. Smart, fearless, audacious, with a social conscience totally unafraid to push the possibilities of pop. With their generous slew of chart hits, The Style Council were one of the defining pop bands of the 80s. Who am I kidding? Yes, and to my adulthood as well.” “The Style Council gave so much to my youth. But for a moment or two at least, The Style Council caught a rare balance.“We set out to have fun, document the times and at the same time we wanted to elevate pop to an art form – I think we did that.” The attempt to chart a third way between agit-prop and sleek New Pop was ultimately doomed to wind up in Red Wedge, the laboured attempt to deliver the youth vote to Kinnock in ‘87. And on “Walls Come Tumbling Down”, Weller wrote a supreme piece of protest pop, finally making good on his Curtis Mayfield ambitions. The Rigbyish strings of “A Stone’s Throw”, meanwhile, draw a pretty astute line between the anti-union police in South Yorkshire and the monetarist laboratory of Pinochet’s Chile. The slow-burning opener, “Homebreakers”, subtly inverts mod mythology, describing a family torn apart by the on-your-bike imperatives of the time, while “A Man of Great Promise” and “With Everything to Lose” are elegant, eloquent testaments to doomed youth. The extra disc, incidentally, includes among sundry b-sides, the Miners’ benefit single, “Soul Deep”, credited to the Council Collective, which inadvertently makes “Wham! Rap” seem convincing.īut when Our Favourite Shop dramatises rather than simply delivers slogans, it can be a powerful and even moving record. Or the sledgehammer sarcasm of “All Gone Away”, a bitterly breezy bossa nova answer to “Club Tropicana”. And frankly it doesn’t get much worse than “The Comedian’s Instructions”, a piece of spoken word Britfunk performed by Lenny Henry, skewering the profound political menace of Bernard Manning. Our Favourite Shop is so riven by the contradictions of its times – between the shop floor and the shopping centre – that it’s fascinating even when it’s terrible. After all, the audience with which Weller had such a love-hate affair – southern, suburban blokes with aspirations – was also the constituency courted most assiduously by the Tories. ![]() Having deserted the green parka ranks of the Jam Army, by 1985 you could find him alongside Mick Talbot on the cover of Our Favourite Shop, the second Style Council record proper, spiffed up in a suit and scally wedge, languidly browsing in a vintage gentlemen’s outfitters.īut even here, at his most posed and pretentious, seemingly trying to instigate a revolt into style through French menswear, Italian coffee and the Isley Brothers’ Greatest Hits, he was calling, on the most politically forceful record of his career, for class solidarity in the face of Thatcherism. Through the 1980s Paul Weller lived out the paradox at the heart of Mod, between being one of the lads and being a dandy.
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