HELLO GOODBYE
It began when Weller pulled the plug on The Jam. And the end wasn’t what it seemed. Mick Talbot remembers The Style Council.
HELLO AUGUST 1982
Paul had just come back off holiday in Italy and asked me to meet him in the West End. He said, “I’ve got a new project,” and I didn’t know if he meant a one-off or a band or what.
I think the meeting went on for much longer than either of us expected. If you look at the cover of [1985 Style Council album] Our
Favourite Shop, that panorama of influences, a lot of that was in that chat we had in ’82. We were getting deep into Nell Dunn novels, and Ken Loach’s adaptations of them. We talked about Tony Hancock and George Orwell. I think I brought up George Bernard Shaw! It was more about your ethos to life than how you played the piano.
Our backgrounds were similar: suburban working-class from the south side of London. Paul was only four months older than me. In the slang of my area at the time we would both have been ‘peanuts’ – people who were a bit too young to be proper suedeheads.
We did two or three days recording very early in January 1983. It was just me, Paul and Zeke Manyika, the Orange Juice drummer. And we got three singles out of it: Money-Go-Round, Speak Like A Child and A Solid Bond In Your Heart, and the B-sides. It all clicked. And the lack of rules or doctrine was really refreshing.
The Jam thing? I don’t think that could be ignored.
There was an element that was very disenchanted that they had split up. One of our first shows was a Youth CND thing at Brockwell Park. There was only one way in, I seem to recall, and there were a few people banging on the windows of our minibus. A few people screaming. A few people crying. It was almost a religious thing.
GOODBYE MARCH 1990
The beginning of the end? I suppose we kind of lost a lot of people with The Cost Of Loving
[1987]. We knew we could have done another Our Favourite Shop, but it wasn’t what we’d done. We’d never made the same record twice.
My take on it is that we got too embroiled in changing our production, rather than the quality of the songs. We were trying to embrace contemporary soul, and maybe it didn’t suit us. But don’t forget that Long Hot Summer had some of that too.
When we did Confessions Of A Pop Group
[1988], we believed in it. We thought we’d done a pretty good job. But there’s always a domino effect and we suffered on the back of the one before. Then we did Modernism: A New Decade, and that was when we had a chat and went, I think this will be our last album. But of course it never came out. The new guy at Polydor said, “This doesn’t sound like a Style Council album!” But that was the whole point. None of them did.
The Royal Albert Hall show in 1989 is the famous show where fans apparently ripped up their programmes, but I sometimes wonder if a couple of those shows haven’t been combined in the mythology. Because there was a bit of unrest at the 1987 Albert Hall show too, when we screened our strange little film, Jerusalem. I mean, which one was our Judas gig?
Our last show was a benefit in February 1990, then I think there was a press release in March 1990 saying we’d knocked it on the head. But it didn’t feel like a brutal snap, because we were all really busy at [Weller’s] Solid Bond Studios, with Dee C Lee’s album [Free Your Feelings] and the Young Disciples and lots more besides. And then Paul got his solo deal and we did Strange Museum together on that. And I was on the next two solo albums.
When we did the Style Council documentary [Long Hot Summers], it was Paul’s idea that the four of us – me, him, Dee and [drummer] Steve White – played A Very Deep Sea [from Confessions…], it felt like a fitting end to the film. When it aired [on Sky Arts, in December 2020], all our phones went mad. It really touched a lot of people. And that’s all it’s about in the end. Danny Eccleston
After The Jam, there were no rules. But embroilments and domino effects ended it.
“I mean, which one was our Judas gig?” MICK TALBOT