Paul Weller Picks His Favourite Poets!

Bard Reputation: Pop stars pick their favourite poets.
To celebrate National Poetry Day, Dave Simpson talks to musicians about the joys – and occasional tribulations – of setting verse to music.

Paul Weller

I wasn't taught poetry at school, but after I left I got into Liverpool beat poets such as Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. I related to their use of grand images next to a rainy, shitty street in the suburbs or city. Songs such as God and Trees [on Wake Up the Nation] started out as poems. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight was originally a poem, until the Jam's producer said it would make a great song. People have said that the Jam turned working-class kids on to poetry. Around the time of All Mod Cons people started sending me stuff they'd written in their bedrooms, which normally they'd be too embarrassed to tell anyone about. Some of it was great, so we published it. One fan sent me the Shelley poem The Mask of Anarchy and we used it on the cover of Sound Affects. I'm not some pseudo intellectual – I just thought it was brilliant.

From The Guardian.

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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…

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