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Jason Maloney reviews
V o l u m e # 1 4 Week Commencing: 15th May 1995 Online Date: 20th May 2005
(Deluxe Edition)
After more than a dozen years of chart prominence with The Jam and then The Style Council, Weller had been without a label or a loyal audience for the first time in his career as the ’90s dawned. This once-unthinkable state of affairs did not last too long; following a brief self-financed excursion as The Paul Weller Movement in 1991 (from which the potent, bridge-repairing single Into Tomorrow resulted), Go Discs! came calling and the third phase of Paul Weller’s musical odyssey began in earnest courtesy of September 1992’s eponymous album. It was warmly received, but sold only modestly.
The real turning point arrived in the form of Wild Wood, released exactly 12 months later, which became a chart ever-present well into 1994 and put his name back in the spotlight. A succession of singles (Sunflower, Hung Up and the title song itself to name just three) created an enormous momentum, as well as a huge demand for whatever Thechangingman came up with next.
For the first time in exactly a decade, when The Style Council’s second long-player Our Favourite Shop debuted at #1 in early June 1985, a new Weller release was greeted as a big deal. Stanley Road, named after the street in Woking where the young Weller was raised, rode the wave of Britpop’s feelgood factor and the nostalgia boom precipitated by the VE Celebrations of the week before. Everything about the packaging (original packaging), designed by Peter Blake (he of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper sleeve), played up to the iconic, rose-tinted Englishness so fashionable at the time. The music itself continued his lucrative foray into psychedelic rock with folk and funk trimmings; first single Out Of The Sinking recalled early ’70s McCartney, while The Changingman picked up where Into Tomorrow had left off. While the spectre of “Dadrock” had yet to raise its head, it was still a harder sound than the often pastoral Wild Wood set, his Traffic/Hendrix influences remained and the songs themselves included some of Weller’s strongest to date.
Centrepiece ballad You Do Something To Me instantly became a classic (and the album’s second Top 10 hit in a row), while his reading of Broken Stones proved an ideal late-summer single. Stanley Road went on to become an even bigger hit than its predecessor and the pinnacle of Weller’s commercial achievements: debuting at #1, it stayed on the UK chart for more than 18 months and sold well over a million copies in Britain alone.
One of the more endearing (and enduring) acts to emerge from the Britpop melee were the powerpop force of Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffee, Mick Quinn and Rob Coombes, making the musical landscape a more enjoyable place as Supergrass. For a few months in 1995, roughly around the time of trademark smash anthem Alright hitting #2 on the Top 40 – they were the cheeky, bubbly antidote to Oasis’ lumbering laddishness and Blur’s contrived Mockneyisms. The cartoon representations that graced the cover of this debut album became synonymous with the band; Steven Spielberg even showed interest in making an animated series based on their characters at one point.
The difference between Supergrass and so many of their bandwagon-jumping contemporaries of the era lay in the genuinely joyful music, and the potential for even greater things in the future – which, despite declining sales, they largely fulfilled. For every Caught By The Fuzz or Mansize Rooster, there was the beyond-their-years scope of Time or Sofa (Of My Lethargy).
I Should Coco was stuffed full of singles, a virtual half-dozen of them in fact, as well as album tracks that sounded like singles (I’d Like To Know, Strange Ones); this strength in depth eventually took the album to the top of the UK charts, having originally entered at a very creditable #3.
Page Content copyright © Jason Maloney, 2005.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.