Summer Style
Old school trams, floppy hair, and a Rupert Everett cameo
We’re into the double-digits of August, and in my part of the world, that means we’re staring down fall in just a few weeks. Sure, September can be hot, and the actual autumnal equinox isn’t until September 23, this year, but there’s more summer behind us than ahead of us -- which means it’s time to get on this post on the Style Council.
The Style Council delivered on their name not only with the breezy, breathy music of “My Ever-Changing Moods” and “You’re the Best Thing” but also with their look. Sunglasses and trench coats in sidewalk cafés in blue-tinted photos for Café Bleu. Mick Talbot’s boating blazer. The whole gang in nautical, naval-themed outfits. And then there’s the turn as posh cast members from Brideshead Revisited a couple of years later for their second album, Our Favourite Shop. On the iconic British gatefold (!) cover, Paul Weller and Mick Talbot are posed in front of Rupert Everett sprawled out fetchingly on a bed in a poster from the Guy Burgess (one quarter Canadian!)-inspired classic film Another Country, itself a veritable festival of floppy-haired English boys like Colin Firth and Cary Elwes. There’s an explainer somewhere of all the items in the Our Favourite Shop photo and their significance, which you might be able to find – but even with a fairly hazy concept of what it all means, the cover has always evoked a complex and complete world to me.
That less languid, more urgent second album, which features some of the best activist songwriting I know of, is my favourite from their catalogue. Who knew “When are you going to get to realize/the class war’s real, not mythologized” is something you could dance to? There’s a lot of back-and-forth with singer Dee C. Lee; Paul Weller plays guitar like he’s still in The Jam. Fun fact: Dee C. Lee, a Style Council stalwart -- and later Paul Weller’s wife (they divorced years ago but have two adult children together) -- also performed and recorded with Wham!: the pre-Pepsi sidekick to Shirley! Dee C. went from lip-syncing “DHSS” (the agency then responsible for unemployment insurance, “the dole”, in the U.K.) in the video for “Wham! Rap”, to belting out “Governments crack and systems fall/’cause unity is powerful!” within three Thatcher-era years.
The video for “Walls Come Tumbling Down” — one of the highly political, highly catchy songs from Our Favourite Shop — features a very suave Paul Weller and band playing to an indifferent crowd in a grimy café, interspersed with footage of band members running over and over to catch classic Eastern Bloc-issue trams in what appears to be a very dingy 1980s Warsaw. There must be a story behind this. Highly recommended period viewing.
But first things first. It’s still summer, and while there’s still some of it left, take some time to pour yourself a glass of something cold, press play, and enjoy the falsetto harmonies, soaring synthesizer, and lush saxophone of “You’re the Best Thing” at least once more before it’s over.
*Long Hot Summers was on Crave on Canada, but now seems to be in temporary streaming limbo (will update if that changes). Available for rent on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Video and others in the U.S..
I have that "Another Country" poster!