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The new book by Paolo Hewitt about British songwriter Paul Weller is set for publication this September. Before its release Peter Wallace spoke to the author about the ‘Modfather’ and their lifelong friendship.
Paolo Hewitt’s latest book Paul Weller The Changingman, a biography of the British music icon, is the latest instalment in a long friendship between the two that stretches back to their birthplace in Woking. On several occasions throughout the years they have worked together, from Weller supplying the idea for The Soul Stylists, to Hewitt writing the screenplay for the Style Council film Jerusalem. This is the first time though that Hewitt has written a full length description of Weller since the official Jam biography in 1983. The moment to write about Weller has been a long time coming.
Looking at both subjects their lives have been remarkably similar. They were born in the same year in Woking, a large overspill to the south of London, with contrasting starts in life. While Paul grew up in the family home with his parents, Paolo was adopted and brought up in a children's home, deprived of affection and material possessions. They later came to write about their separate experiences, Weller naming his hit album Stanley Road as a paean to his youth and Hewitt turning his childhood into the subject of his harrowing autobiography The Looked After Kid.
In the twenty-six years they have been friends the two men, both 49, have led similar lives; they settled in London in pursuit of their careers, married their partners, became fathers and then divorced. As well as forming a personal bond, they have regularly crossed paths professionally, collaborating on books, films and records. From the closeness of their friendship Hewitt has gained an insight into Weller’s life that other writers do not have.
"Because I’ve known Paul for so long," Paolo explains, "I’ve probably got the best insight into his music. And because I’ve known him for so long I feel that I can point out lines in his songs and I can say I know what he’s talking about here. Whereas other biographies can’t because they’re not that close to him."
When he came to write the book this January he was writing at a pace of 20,000 words per month, a prolific rate. He began the book last November, studying in the British library, reading through interviews and compiling notes. He started writing in his North London home on New Year’s Day, and worked continuously for the next four months, finishing before the end of April in time to present the manuscript to his publishers. The finished article is an honest and full appraisal of Weller’s life and work.
Over the last thirty years Paul Weller’s career has scaled high and low. He signed a record deal with his band, The Jam, at a tender eighteen years old and rose to become the spokesman for his generation, before prematurely disbanding the group just five years later. During the eighties he led a pop group, The Style Council, with keyboardist Mick Talbot, his wife Dee C. Lee and a nineteen year old drummer Steve White. Weller spent the beginning of the nineties in the wilderness, unceremoniously dropped by his record label and unable to find another company willing to make a suitable offer. In order to finance his first solo record he sold his private recording studio and began touring again, slowly rebuilding his career on small venue tours of Britain. The nineties were both commercially and critically successful for Weller, reaching the top ten in the album and single charts and gaining unanimous recognition as an influence on contemporary music. In the last ten years he has built on his reputation as Britain’s biggest songwriter, and after thirty solid years as a musician, has been awarded a lifetime achievement award from the British Music Industry. Hewitt documents the long journey that has taken Weller to the pinnacle of his career and reveals how he has developed from an angry young man to the elder statesman of British music.
The unique approach he has taken for the biography is to separate Weller’s life into the three sections of his career, The Jam, Style Council and solo years, and to look at the songs he wrote within that period. The seventy songs he has selected are either personally significant to a moment in Weller’s life or are used to highlight a specific benchmark in his career. Hewitt has been privy to watching the songs emerge and even to have been the influence for some of them. I asked Hewitt how Weller composes his songs;
"He’s very secretive about his writing" Paolo divulged. "He would only come to me and say ‘I’ve written a new tune.’ He would never say when he was writing or how he wrote it. But he’s told me about how or why he would write his songs. The song Frightened has a line in there is about that feeling of not being able to really help someone although you would love to. So, on the song Frightened when he’s talking about a distant star, so near so far whilst the song itself is about Paul being scared of not being able to meet his responsibilities as a father”
Hewitt, as a close friend of Weller and as a gifted writer, is in an extremely good position to write the story of his life, but even though a biography has a sense of finality about it, The Changingman is only a milestone in their careers. This year both men are moving in new directions; Weller has collaborated on two singles with other artists, a situation he has never participated in before without having control. And Hewitt has plans to take his writing to a higher level. As a writer he has continued to improve with each book, and his ability to construct a narrative is unequalled in factual writing. He has moved from the subjects of his earlier books, examining the submergence of young people in Mod culture, to focusing upon the pressure and strain of life upon a person. In The Fashion of Football he and co-author Mark Baxter reached a new peak in the biography genre. As the book charted the progressive influence of money into the modern game and the effect it has had on fashion, expression and identity, it also cleverly describes the journey of the book itself within the pages, almost as a book within another book. The development from Getting High: Adventures with Oasis to The Mumper, his second collaboration with Mark Baxter, also published this month, has continued unabated. During our interview he took a rare inverted look at his feelings;
"You’re always looking to improve, well I am anyway. And to be honest with you I think I’d like to go up to another level now. It’s hard to explain but I feel like I’ve come to the end of a cycle in some ways, because now I’ve done this book fresh pastures beckon and I’d like to do it in a different way. I’d just like to get another style of writing or just a better style, I don’t know. It’s just something that’s been bothering me for a couple of months now. Where I just think I’m very good at doing just something, I’m a very good writer but I always want to get better all the time. I think I’ve got a certain style that I really like and I just think I’d like to, not move away from it but just get better. Instead of finishing fifth in the premiership I want to finish first."
The desire to take home silverware is an indication of his ambition to improve as a writer. When I spoke to Hewitt he was returning home from the British library and already working on his next book. When I asked him what he was writing he would only reveal that he was "thinking about a couple of ideas at the moment", but other than that he was tight-lipped. Paul Weller The Changingman is released on September 21st.
Words: Peter Wallace
