Or how they threw it all away, one might lazily and easily (and wrongly) respond. Regarded as some kind of joke by most of the popular media since their demise, and by 1988 devoid of anything resembling a public profile (their every action was viewed with an indifferent, disinterested yawn), The Style Council recorded a long, melancholic heatwave of an album, Confessions of a Pop Group, split evenly between a reinvocation of hazily-recalled childhood summer days, a set of melancholic love songs, and a depressed, dissection of Britain in the late Thatcher era. They weren't so much committing commercial suicide, as signing the final confirmation of their commercial death warrant. And they did it. In all its perversity and unlikeliness, it remains, perhaps, Paul Weller's artistic high water mark.
This song was, absurdly, Weller's first single not to make the Top 40. They're relaxed, calmed down, recovering the self-confidence of their early work (along with Why I Went Missing, this is the only song on this album to recreate the atmosphere of Long Hot Summer and You're The Best Thing, celebratory sunlit afternoons in suburban parks rather than oppressively humid West End nights where everyone seems to have a filofax and cumbersome mobile phone, which is precisely the atmosphere of the title track to Confessions). It's a love song whose backdrop of Thatcherism never overpowers or confines it to its era, there's nothing strained or forced about Weller's voice, and for itself it's near-perfect.
The last line of this song is "With all the things that money can be / You'll never be alone / But thankfully you remembered the words / To I 'Can't buy me love'". It should sound nauseating, Weller ruining a well-intended attack on 80s commercialism with a fundamentalist assertion that it was all wonderful in the 60s, that recognising Beatles lyrics makes the victims of yuppiedom somehow immune. Such an assertion is indeed depressingly predictive of his artistic self-destruction after 1990, but it inspires no negative feelings here. The Style Council, commercially a spent force, critically reviled from all corners, raging politely against their own irrelevance. There are fewer better positions for a great pop group.
Robin Carmody, 26th August 2000