The British cannot be blamed for a lack of stylistic breadth throughout his decades of career. Weller knows punk, rock, avant-garde, folk, pop, left a lot of traces with The Jam, Style Council and above all as a solo artist and is still considered the “Godfather Of Britpop” today.
Enough reason to take a look back at a wealth of oeuvre. The now 63-year-old Weller doesn’t do that with a classic best-of album (he has had one for a long time anyway), but with a retrospective in an unfamiliar environment. Because in mid-May, the straightforward man, who is considered an eternal mod, agreed to put 18 songs from his career on stage together with the BBC Symphonic Orchestra and arranger Jules Buckley.
The special concert took place in mid-May of this year and is now available as a recording for eternity. Title: “An Orchestrated Songbook” (Polydor). Now you can stand whatever you want to the music of Paul Weller, like the rocker more than the romantic. But one thing is interesting. In the orchestral sound, you suddenly encounter familiar and popular things with a much more alert ear. In the somewhat different approach, the core of the compositions is emphasized even more, you listen much more intensely to the arrangement and text and suddenly discover new facets of the music.
But to be honest, you have to admit that it is your favorites that you succumb to the most again. “Broken Stones” (from the 1995 album “Stanley Road”) is just as much an event in the version with James Morrison as “Wild Wood” (title song of his second solo album 1993), which is still great in its calm and radiance, which Weller revived beautifully and dignified together with Celeste.
Source: Nachrichten
