Paul Weller

The Jam and the Style Council had already provided contrasting musical lives before Weller’s self-titled solo album in 1992. The new work gave him another environment in which rhythmic playing, a grainy lead voice and carefully shaped melodies could meet. Wild Wood in 1993 brought a particularly strong relationship between acoustic texture and the movement of a band.

Stanley Road followed in 1995, including The Changingman and You Do Something to Me. A forceful guitar-led statement and a more suspended ballad can belong to the same record because the singing keeps its conversational weight. The arrangements allow individual instrumental colours to register rather than reducing the music to a single broad reference to older rock or soul.

Later work makes that restlessness explicit. For Wake Up the Nation in 2010, Weller and collaborator Simon Dine moved towards a harder, more urban sound, deliberately setting aside some of the acoustic and pastoral associations of earlier records. Sessions at Black Barn brought in musicians including Kevin Shields, while former Jam bassist Bruce Foxton contributed to particular songs. That meeting has historical resonance, but the musical interest lies in what the players do within new material. Weller’s career is not sustained by refusing to grow older, or by returning endlessly to one triumphant period. Its strongest records treat experience as a larger store of possibilities. A familiar voice can find an unfamiliar rhythm, and a record that first seems rooted in the past can make an abrupt, productive turn.