"Weller's avowed aim with the group was to merge his twin interests of soul music and social comment." - Colin Larkin, The Virgin Encyclopedia of Indie & New Wave (Virgin Books, 1998)

"It soon transpired that The Council weren't really a 'group' at all, more a conceptual pop vehicle based around Paul's love of clothes, films, books, records and '60s French fashions. With friend and confidante Mick Talbot in town, Weller declared that he wasn't going to tour for a while. Instead, he and Mick projected an image of themselves as coffee-bar sophisti-cats, listening to jazz and soul records, sipping endless cups of cappuccino and generally living out their Absolute Beginners fantasies." - Pat Gilbert, from the foreword to the book accompanying the Complete Adventures of The Style Council box set (Polygram)

The Style Council, unlike The Jam, was something I was going to have to go out and find, something that wasn't going to be handed to me or exist in my brother's record collection. (He later came to understand what I saw and heard, but at that point, it wasn't where he was at.)

The Style Council was exactly what my young mind yearned for.

I didn't get a lot of what was going on. It would be a couple years before I would be able to discover what it was Paul was talking about in a lot of the songs. I got the ones about love, and I sort of understood there was anger and tragedy in the others -- but that was also part of the appeal. The Style Council was a puzzle to put together, a tangled knot to unravel.

And it wasn't just the lyrics. As the Gilbert quote suggests, Weller was creating a whole world, a whole experience. It was my challenge to discover what each piece meant, to divine the clues. It was great detective work, and there were some fantastic mysteries along the way.

For instance, the cover to Our Favourite Shop, the Council's second album. Over here, it was issued as Internationalists and the cover very much worked a pretty-boy angle. I stumbled across the import vinyl in Moby Disc in Canoga Park, and discovered there was much more to this edition of the record besides a different tracklist. My God, so much more -- namely, that cover. On it, Weller and Talbot were in their favorite shop, indeed -- and my eagle eye was going to make out every book, every poster, every detail until I deciphered the code. (Oasis would later adopt a similar principle for their debut, Definitely Maybe, decorating apartments with all sorts of knick-knacks of their influences; Paul would do it in a much more overt, collage-style for his Stanley Road solo LP, as well.)

Similarly, each album came with sleevenotes by The Cappuccino Kid (later revealed to be Weller-biographer Paolo Hewitt). These were baffling missives from somewhere beyond me, but I loved them. They added weight to the mystery. A sample from the The Cost of Loving album: "And sometimes, when dark clouds move inexplorably across the blue sky dome, I take, in the gathering twilight, my constitution down by the water and, as I watch the liquid forever rushing by, my thoughts always turn to those bitter sweet times and for minutes I am lost in a trance of regret until the sound of a siren somewhere in the distance shakes me out of my moods and restores me back to the world, and all its strange yet comic ways."

Yes, it's the purplest of purple prose, but still, there was something in these mindbenders that spoke of the mood of the album, like the music went in one ear and spilled out the other. (Again, Oasis would crib from Paul, as the Kid both contributed notes to their What's the Story...Morning Glory? Album and wrote two books on the band.)

And let's not forget the Absolute Beginners thread -- the title was first used for a Jam song, but it was followed by a movie by Julian Temple. To me, this film is a lost classic of the '80s. It crackles with a rhythmic energy that was intoxicating, and the look of the film was shockingly good. Appealed through and through to the aesthetic I had at the time. It featured one of the Council's best songs, "Have You Ever Had It Blue?" And, yes, of course, I eventually discovered the book by Colin MacInnes that really started it all.

As silly as it sounds, as I grew, so did the band and my love for it. Their final album, Confessions of a Pop Group, came in 1988, when I was 14, and I was ill prepared for the grand design of it. They moved out of the soulful jazz and into a larger sound, employing orchestras and long pieces that were more about mood than anything else. (And yes, it has a song called "Confessions 1, 2, & 3.") Sadly, it was to prove their doom, a little too weird and completely savaged by critics and fans alike. Paul spoke of it in 1998 in an interview for the book for the Style Council box set, and I think he sums it up appropriately: "It was a conceptual thing that incorporated some classical things in it, I don't care how pretentious it is. I was listening to Debussy, there's even a quote. You know, 'Clair De Lunes' there's a quote from that on the flute. 'The Story of Someone's Shoe' was supposed to be like that MJQ album with the Swingles Singers, Place De Vendome, so that was an influence, It's a good album. Again, it's always easy to say it was bad timing because sometimes you put things out and they click and sometimes they don't...sometimes you want something fresh and challenging."

 

And things were to become a different kind of fresh, a different kind of challenging, and a step in a different direction...as we once more clumsily transition to Part 3...

Or back to the Jam.