Paul Weller's "Wake Up The Nation" - Review From The Boston Globe!

Paul Weller, 'Wake Up the Nation'
May 10, 2010
MARC HIRSH

Paul Weller sounds fired up all over “Wake Up the Nation,’’ his upcoming album that’s already available as an import. Apparently years away from exhaustion, the former Jam/Style Council kingpin proves himself energetic and vital well into his fourth decade of making music. If only he wasn’t doing his best impression of an overstimulated rookie scrambling to get as many ideas down as urgently as possible because he might never get another chance. His voice crosses David Bowie and John Lydon on the title track (which fits a song pitched halfway between “Suffragette City’’ and “Holidays in the Sun’’), while “Trees’’ is a rollicking New Orleans-style piano romp. Weller’s so all over the map that even the best tracks — like “7&3 Is the Strikers Name,’’ whose drum part is a lone snare placed right up front where a lead guitar would normally be — sound like ideas instead of songs. The closing “Two Fat Ladies’’ is a swinging blast, but it doesn’t build to anything and slams the album shut instead of ending it. “Wake Up the Nation’’ rocks with abandon, to be sure. What it needs is cohesion. (Out June 1)

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John Weller Obituary From The Independent...

For thirty years, John Weller managed the career of his son Paul, through the salad days and success of The Jam in the Seventies and early Eighties, the ups and downs of The Style Council and Paul’s re-emergence as a solo artist in the Nineties. Theirs was a unique father-son relationship in the music industry, built on John’s unwavering belief in Paul’s talent and shared values like hard work and pragmatism.

John could be blunt, and once refused to have lunch in a record company’s executive dining room, remarking to the managing director: “I didn’t come here to eat, I came to do business.” But his bark was worse than his bite.

John’s success was all the more remarkable since he started in his forties after years working in factories, on building sites and driving a taxi. When The Jam signed to Polydor in February 1977, for a £6,000 advance and a six per cent royalty rate, John admitted he didn’t have a bank account and asked for cash instead of a cheque. A&R man Chris Parry duly we…

Paul Weller's Son, Natt Gives A Candid Taxi Interview

Where else to meet the musician son of the agelessly groovy Modfather but at London’s trendy Met Bar? And there’s more than a hint of moody Mod style about the Japanese parka that Paul Weller’s eldest child Natt has slung over his Vivienne Westwood top.

Yet there all similarity ends, for singer-guitarist Natt has inherited the exotic beauty of his mother – former Wham! and Style Council backing singer Dee C Lee – rather than the famously angular features of his father.

‘Everybody always goes, “Luckily he took after his mum…”’ laughs Natt, whose mother is from France and St Lucia and whose great-great grandma was Japanese. Hence Natt’s fascination for Japan, where he moved in 2006 for a year to learn the language.

To pay for his studies, he modelled and deejayed, ‘I felt like an outsized monster,’ confides Natt, 21, a 6ft 1in beanpole. He returned a fan of Japan’s popular culture – from manga cartoons to punk-goth music – and with a different spelling to his name, which now features two ‘…

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Paul Weller joined Ronnie Wood and Friends at the Royal Albert Hall for Blues Fest! Along with Mick Taylor, Paul and Ronnie paid tribute to Mississippi's Jimmy Reed with a performance of the Blues classic, "Shame, Shame, Shame."

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