Paul Weller cites The Beatles’ Revolver, and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall as inspirations and, while the track Start (“what you give is what you get”) may have nicked the bassline from The Beatles’ Taxman, to my ear this album sounds more like XTC than either of those two influences.
This is particularly the case in the slightly discordant and awkward guitar riffs on tracks like Scrape Away and Boy About Time. The psychedelic feel (with backwards guitar) on Monday is like XTC as they veer into their Dukes Of Stratosphear phase, but than one could also consider that XTC were heavily influenced by psychedelia-era Beatles as well, so it’s more a case of shared DNA.
One track, The Man In The Cornershop, sounds more like a Kirsty MacColl track, with its floaty chorus of “la-la-lalala"s and, like a lot of MacColl’s tracks, may sound nice but deals with socio-economic disparity; in this case the man in the cornershop being envious of the life of the factory owner who frequents his shop. I checked the dates, and both MacColl and XTC were releasing material around this time, and before, so the cross-fertilisation of ideas is probably not just my imagination.
As for social commentary, this album is chock full of Weller’s characteristic acerbic lyrics. From Set The House Ablaze that warns of indoctrination from populist rhetoric leading to extremist views - “You was so open minded, but by someone blinded, And now your sign says closed”. How times have changed.
Little references to the banality of modern living are scattered throughout, like “My love comes in frozen packs bought in a supermarket” in Dream Time, but the culmination is surely in the polemic That’s Entertainment, sarcastically listing the “exciting opportunities” of the British working class - “Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday” and “ A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls”. I checked out the Office of National Statistics for the unemployment rate in the Eighties – the worst it has ever been in terms of percentage. At the time it was rising from the baseline of around 3-4% and was already around 6%, heading towards its peak of 11.4% in 1983. No wonder Weller is angry.
The album is excellent, much more varied than the previous Jam album and, although no less polemic, the lyrics are just that bit tighter, driving like a good old Sixties protest song rather than some generic moaning, and I really liked it.
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