The Changing Man

Interview feature with Paolo Hewitt on his Paul Weller biography...

In February 2006, London-based author and broadcaster, Paolo Hewitt, realised that an intense, close and volatile friendship had withered and died. There has been no phone-calls, no emails and no postcards suggesting some kind of reconciliation. Hewitt, though, isn’t expecting one. For that once close-friend was Paul Weller, the English songwriting legend who famously split The Jam up in 1982 at 24-years-of-age and never looked back; the man who abandoned The Style Council in 1990 after record company politics and critical derision took their toll; the man who went from ‘anti-rockist’ soul boy in the 1980s to archetypal ‘Dad rocker’ with his current, and largely lamentable, solo career. Weller is clearly an individual who believes you can only explore fresh territory by burning bridges to the past. And that, it seems, applies to close-friends and committed lovers as it does music directions and haircuts.

All this is carefully mapped out in Hewitt’s biography Paul Weller: The Changing Man, which takes a successfully distinct approach to the well-worn rock-biog format. Rather than laboriously chart Weller’s 49 years with acres of interviews, anecdotes and press clippings, Hewitt surveys Weller’s life and times through judiciously selecting key songs from Weller’s vast repertoire and using that to shed insight on Weller's outlook and internal demons. Think of Ian McDonald’s sainted Beatles book, Revolution in the Head, crossed with personal diary entries from a life up close with Paul Weller. It’s neither a dirt-spilling hatchet job, nor a fawning white-wash, but an absorbing and illuminating study on what motivates and moves this celebrated songsmith.

“A publisher came to me suggesting I do a Revolution in the Head style book on Paul Weller,” says Paolo Hewitt, “but I didn’t fancy doing a technical, he used a D-minor chord type of book. I was more interested in taking a psychological look at Paul as I knew him so well. I started thinking about some of his songs, ‘A Town Called Malice, ‘Wild Wood’, ‘Wings of Speed’, and how I could use that to show how art and other ideas inspired him. I quickly realised that I had a really good way of writing a biography here”.

To Hewitt’s credit, there is no bitterness, no shrill carping and back-biting, just a tinge of nostalgic sadness coupled with an objective assessment on Weller’s strength’s and weaknesses as both musician and friend. “Any kind of emotional turbulence I had about the fall-out had gone,” says Hewitt, “and so I could look at Paul in the same way I would John Lennon or other musicians I hadn’t met. It was a very dispassionate process”.

The other approach Hewitt developed was to use Antony Sorr’s The Dynamics of Creation to assess whether Sorr’s thesis, that artists have a different psychological make-up to the rest of us, applies to Paul Weller. Hewitt believes it does. While his once good friend was loyal and generous, warm and witty, he could also be thoughtless and mean, vicious and vindictive – and usually in the same evening. By the end of The Changing Man, you wonder why Hewitt tolerated the latter’s outbursts so often, especially when Weller’s increased alcohol in-take hot wired his already short-fuse temper.

Hewitt blames the adoration he received during the Britpop years for ‘derailing Weller’ and turning him into a decadent rock star. He started ingesting stronger substances than simply lager. He hung around other musicians like Noel Gallagher, Tim Burgess and Primal Scream. And he even hung around star-studded parties and clubs, something that the once anti-music industry Weller studiously ignored.

“A night out with Paul can go either way, as he’s governed by moods”, says Hewitt, “especially when alcohol is involved, though he’ll say that himself in interviews. Most artists are incredibly self-centred, the world revolves around them, and everything else comes second. Nevertheless, I only write this if it reveals something about his music. It’s never done in a News of the World, sensationalist way – it is all about what sparks the music”.

The hallmark of any good biography is how freshly informative it is and The Changing Man has that in spades. We learn that Weller’s suspicion towards America and American popular culture is so deeply ingrained, he can’t even bring himself to watch Martin Scorsese’s films or genius US comedy such as Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. After the experience of Red Wedge, the Labour Party’s ‘yoof recruitment campaign’ in 1986, he distanced himself from party politics because he was stunned that Labour politicians went socialising with Conservative MPs. And while it disillusioned him with parliamentary socialism, Weller's sense of class and injustice, that so often barked out on The Jam’s tightly incendiary singles, remains a constant compass in his life.

“I think the Style Council articulated that clear cut battle between the Tory Party and the working-class better than anyone then,” says Hewitt of Weller's most musically and politically radical vehcile after The Jam. “He was writing deeply political songs, but was never crass slogans like the Redskins. It was more that he wrote vignettes on how Thatcher’s policies affected working-people’s day to day lives. But the really great revolutionary thing about the Style Council, which in the end wound up more critics than supported, was how they were always aspiring for more – and that came out in their broader influences, emphasises on different music and better aesthetic styles – even if this wound up the donkey jacketed left”.

Indeed, through out Hewitt’s book, it’s clear that Weller’s cherished Mod ideals have been another grounding compass and guiding light. Arguably, though, today that’s somewhat tainted with 1970s rock-star trappings and week long guitar solos to match. For Hewitt, though, the measure of Weller is all down to his contradictory personality, his infamous ever changing moods. “This is a man who basically goes to bed not knowing quite what who he will be when he wakes the next day,” says Hewitt. “It is the journey between his various states of being that this book seeks to examine.”