16-07-2025
Paul Weller: Find El Dorado — a baffling but charming set of 1970s covers
Just when you think you know Paul Weller, he does something so unexpected that you have to reassess him entirely. Having built up the Jam as the ultimate playground band, hard and impassioned, he swanned about in upper class homoerotic abandon for the video to the Style Council's Long Hot Summer. After decades as the ultimate mod, psychopathically sharp in his crewneck jumper and scarf, he grew his hair long enough to not look out of place on a hippy commune. Now he has made an album of country, folk and Seventies singalong pop cover versions, and you can imagine hordes of loyal Wellerites scratching their feather cut-clad heads in confusion.
Perhaps Weller is simply doing what he's always done: tapping into a wistful, rather melancholic strain of Englishness. He's doing it even when he's tackling American tunes like Bobby Charles's resigned country rocker Small Town Talk, a masterpiece of understatement from 1972 with a message about gossiping neighbours that could be applied to Weller's Woking, Surrey, just as effectively as Charles's Abbeville, Louisiana. And how about Merle Haggard's White Line Fever? Weller is a touring musician and the words refer not to the effects of cocaine but the loneliness and addictiveness of life on the road. 'I'll die with this fever in my soul,' he sings. There is no reason not to believe him.
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Elsewhere he is mining the nicotine-stained, real ale-sodden atmosphere of the provincial pubs and working men's clubs he played in during his early teen years. Pinball is a litany of complaints set to an acoustic strum, a sole 1974 hit for the actor Brian Protheroe, which captures the mood of Britain under the privations of the three-day week. 'Got fleas in the bedroom, I got flies in the bathroom and the cat just finished off the bread,' Weller sings gloomily, while Nobody's Fool is a song Ray Davies wrote for the theme to Budgie, Adam Faith's early Seventies TV show about a down-on-his-luck petty criminal. You can almost feel the faux leather in the Ford Cortina.
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There are certainly some eccentric choices here. White Plains were an early Seventies studio band, concocted for the sole purpose of scoring hits, who got little respect from the cognoscenti. Yet Weller revives their When You Are a King, a strange slice of baroque pop from 1971 about a naughty boy who nobody likes. Then there is the Bee Gees' I Started a Joke, a sentimental masterpiece of tragicomedy about, well, it's impossible to know exactly, but the narrator tells a joke, the joke is on him, he dies, the world is better for it. Bleak bubblegum surrealism at its best.
Elsewhere comes Lal Waterson's folky lament Never the Same and Clive Palmer of the Incredible String Band's rough blues Clive's Song, songs from rural Britain that are several B roads away from Weller's dressed-up urban world. There are guests too: Robert Plant's harmonica on Clive's Song, Noel Gallagher's guitar on the Derry songwriter Eamon Friel's wise El Dorado, the kora player Seckou Keita on Duncan Browne's cheery Journey. Is Weller fulfilling contractual obligations, testing the limits of his fanbase or indulging in childhood nostalgia? Maybe all three, but the result is an unusual covers album with a mood of lived-in charm. (Parlophone)★★★★☆
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