{"id":8324,"date":"2026-01-26T19:20:49","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T19:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/the-style-councils-cafe-bleu-reviewed-the-modfathers-messy-but-rewarding-rebirth-152989\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T19:20:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T19:20:49","slug":"the-style-councils-cafe-bleu-reviewed-the-modfathers-messy-but-rewarding-rebirth-152989","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/the-style-councils-cafe-bleu-reviewed-the-modfathers-messy-but-rewarding-rebirth-152989\/","title":{"rendered":"The Style Council\u2019s Caf\u00e9 Bleu reviewed: the Modfather\u2019s messy but rewarding rebirth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There\u2019s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI need absolute quiet for this number,\u201d Weller insists, before a bossa nova called \u201cThe Whole Point Of No Return\u201d. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing \u201cParis Match\u201d and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Michel Legrand and Erik Satie, you can hear sections of the audience lustily chanting a line from the film Quadrophenia: \u201cWe are the Mods, we are the Mods\/We are, we are, we are the Mods!\u201d<\/p>\n

As Flaubert once wrote: inside every revolutionary is a policeman. Only a few years earlier, Weller had been the rabble-rousing king of the Mods, now here he was telling his lairy disciples in Fred Perrys and Bass Weejuns to pipe down as he introduced them to French chansons and jazz waltzes. One recalls Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl getting a phone call from Weller in January 1983, asking them to come and guest with him at the ICA. \u201cAt the time, it was a bit like getting a phone call from, I dunno, David Lee Roth,\u201d said Thorn. \u201cI loved The Jam and worshipped Paul but I was amazed that he wanted us to come onstage and sing \u2018The Girl From Ipanema\u2019 with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the early 1980s, Weller was about as big as any British pop star had been since The Beatles. The Jam regularly entered the singles and albums charts at number one. Record shops opened at midnight to sell their albums. A million people applied for tickets for their final tour. Long before the arena circuit had become established, tour promoters were having to temporarily reinvent sports halls and swimming pools to host Jam gigs.<\/p>\n

But Weller had clearly moved beyond the confines of a rock trio. British pop fans became very familiar with punk and post-punk legends forming new projects \u2013 PiL, Fun Boy Three, Big Audio Dynamite, General Public, Fine Young Cannibals, That Petrol Emotion, The Creatures and so on \u2013 but few had an agenda that was quite as contrary as The Style Council.<\/p>\n

Weller wanted to pursue an authentic \u201cmodernism\u201d that was defiantly anti-rockist. Teaming up with piano player Mick Talbot \u2013 a likeminded Mod from suburban south London \u2013 he wanted to explore R&B, funk, jazz, new pop, Eurocentric exotica and the new strains of electro emerging in London clubland.<\/p>\n

The Style Council would be a loose, modular collective, with a free-floating line-up of guest musicians (in the seven or so years that the band operated, they featured more than 100 \u201cHonorary Councillors\u201d, nearly twice the number of members that Mark E Smith went through in 42 years).<\/p>\n

Talbot remembers how Weller initially didn\u2019t want to release albums, preferring snack-sized singles and EPs, but so fertile were The Style Council in their first few months that Polydor assembled a mini-LP of their early singles and B-sides in June 1983 \u2013 Introducing The Style Council \u2013 but only released it in North America, Australasia and Japan (inevitably, Dutch imports made it onto the UK market).<\/p>\n

An expanded, 16-track version of Introducing\u2026 is the first of the six discs in this impressive boxset. It features the deluge of early singles \u2013 the cheery, Mod-friendly \u201cSpeak Like A Child\u201d, the Motown-ish \u201cA Solid Bond In Your Heart\u201d, the sun-dappled electro ballad \u201cLong Hot Summer\u201d, the funk workout \u201cMoney Go Round\u201d and the spritely \u201cMy Ever Changing Moods\u201d (Weller\u2019s biggest US hit). It still seems astonishing that some of the other tracks of this era, like the folksy ballad \u201cSpring Summer Autumn\u201d and the gospel-infused \u201cIt Just Came To Pieces In My Hands\u201d, were tossed away as mere B-sides. Lesser artists might have based entire careers around songs that good.<\/p>\n

By March 1984 The Style Council had enough material for a sprawling, multi-themed double album \u2013 Weller envisaged four compartmentalised sides \u2013 but Polydor insisted on a single LP. It\u2019s why Cafe Bleu comes across as a scrapbook of disparate ideas; a meal made up of hors d\u2019oeuvres. Weller is a reluctant frontman: of the seven tracks on the first side, he sings just two, alongside a gospel piano workout, a Booker T-style R&B instrumental, an Art Blakey pastiche, a romantic brooding 6\/8 ballad sung by Tracey Thorn and another instrumental where Weller plays a guitar solo over a bed of Mantovani strings. Fair play to the old Jam loyalists who got into all of that.<\/p>\n

As it happened, Cafe Bleu reached far beyond Jam loyalists, staying on the chart for 38 weeks and gaining a very different demographic: teenage girls, sophisticated soul fans, the kind of urban hipsters who bought StreetSounds compilations. Cafe Bleu also contains some of Weller\u2019s finest songs. \u201cHere\u2019s One That Got Away\u201d is a cheery slice of swinging gypsy jazz, with Bobby Valentino providing the same kind of killer violin riff he later wrote for the Bluebells\u2019 \u201cYoung At Heart\u201d. \u201cYou\u2019re The Best Thing\u201d is a piece of state-of-the-art R&B which confirmed Weller\u2019s status as the crown prince of blue-eyed soul. \u201cHeadstart For Happiness\u201d is the kind of uplifting slice of gospel-infused soul that the Isley Brothers would have been proud of.<\/p>\n

This mammoth package also features demos and lots of unfinished but promising song ideas: \u201cUp For Grabs\u201d, \u201cTake It To The Top\u201d, \u201cCome Away With Me\u201d and \u201cMick\u2019s Demo\u201d all feature Weller wordlessly singing over intriguing chord changes. There are two discs of live recordings and radio sessions: on many \u201cexpanded\u201d releases these can often sound very similar to the album versions, but that\u2019s certainly not the case here. All the versions of singles, LP tracks and contemporaneous B-sides sound unique \u2013 completely different arrangements, tempos, harmony vocals, even different time signatures \u2013 which display how adaptable Weller\u2019s compositions are.<\/p>\n

There are numerous versions of \u201cLong Hot Summer\u201d, for instance, including one very early demo that sounds absolutely nothing like any of the others. For a song seemingly reliant on distinctive synth voicings, it comes as a surprise that the most striking version features just Mick Talbot\u2019s piano and the heavenly harmonies of Weller and Dee C Lee.<\/p>\n

There are also soul covers that the band only performed live \u2013 an audience-friendly version of a 1970 single called \u201cHanging On To A Memory\u201d by Detroit\u2019s Chairman Of The Board; a happy-clappy take on Curtis Mayfield\u2019s 1965 single with the Impressions, \u201cMeeting Over Yonder\u201d; and Jimmy Young\u2019s militant soul anthem from 1983, \u201cTimes Are Tight\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly true that, with such scattershot ambition, lots of The Style Council\u2019s output around this time fell flat. \u201cA Gospel\u201d, a well-meaning effort to connect with an embryonic UK hip-hop scene, is pretty awful. The cod-bebop of \u201cDropping Bombs On The White House\u201d now sounds rather remedial, like a middle-school rehearsal band. Weller\u2019s jazz chops aren\u2019t bad \u2013 his solo on \u201cBlue Cafe\u201d is quite serviceable \u2013 but his rather grating guitar tone is more Grant Mitchell than Grant Green. But this sense of overreach is part of the appeal of The Style Council\u2019s chaotic first year. Even at their worst, it\u2019s a glorious mess.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post The Style Council\u2019s Caf\u00e9 Bleu reviewed: the Modfather\u2019s messy but rewarding rebirth<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,88,3760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album","category-reviews","category-the-style-council"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}