Riding high on the back of critical acclaim for his last two albums, Paul Weller's ‘Fat Pop’ is his most accessible collection in years. It’s a homage and a thank you to the art of pop singles - a form he grew up with and left his own indelible stamp on, with his sharp, socially charged hits with The Jam, and catchy soul songs with The Style Council.
The aim is clear from the title track:
Who raised the game, when the game was poor and sent our heads in search or more, made you question all you’d learnt before. Fat pop! Fat pop! This is pop.
“Who’s been a light when the world’s been so dark” Weller asks. Indeed, had the world not gone so dark, the Wizard of Woking would be out treading the boards, promoting his last fine creation, ‘On Sunset’.
Instead, we all know what happened. Instead of becoming fluent in French, or learning to paint, which is what a lot of us allegedly did in lockdown, he chose to knuckle down and commit pen to paper and voice to tape, and produce this high-quality opus which includes future classics in ‘Shades Of Blue’, ‘Cobweb Connections’, and ‘Glad Times’.
‘Shades of Blue’, is Weller at his soulful best assisted by his daughter Leah, who herself has an album due out soon. With a further nod to classic pop of old, he trades vocals on ‘Testify’ with the hugely underrated Andy Fairweather Low, whose tenure with Amen Corner produced the 3-minute classic ‘If Paradise Is Half As Nice’.
Weller has written amazingly tender love songs over the years from ‘You Do Something To Me’ to ‘Broken Stones’, and ‘Have You Made Up Your Mind’. To that exalted canon, we can now add ‘In Better Times’.
The best songs of the heart are songs of plain sentiment simply and beautifully expressed, with a beautiful melody. Weller has never been found wanting when it comes to melody making, and this is the heart laid bare, condensing the message of ‘Glad Times’ to it’s essence:
Oh cold in your eyes, don’t you know that you break my heart in two? Try to see behind these walls you own. Slipping over the oceans like a storm, looking for a place that you call home. Well I don’t know, I thought home was in your heart. I didn’t know your heart was so apart.
When he sings “it makes me so sad to think of you alone”, you can’t help but wish for those ‘Better Times’ for his love and, with this, his 16th solo album, Weller continues his recent purple patch. He has produced an album that rests easily in the company of his finest works like ‘Wild Wood’ and ‘Stanley Road’.
This is “Pop in Old Money” states the man himself. Roll on Volume 2!