Together they explored different genres, flirting with cabaret, rap, go-go beats and house music. Two persisted for most of the band’s six years: Steve White, who, aged 17, impressed Mr Weller and Mr Talbot with his virtuosic jazz drumming and Dee Lee, a seasoned funk and soul singer (she married Mr Weller in 1987). They wanted their band to be a loose collective of musicians, with players coming and going as they pleased. “Long Hot Summers: The Story Of The Style Council”, a documentary, shows how the duo delighted in defying expectations. With Mick Talbot, the keyboardist for the Merton Parkas, another mod-revival band, he set about translating the sensibility of MacInnes’s book into music.
#THE STYLE COUNCIL THE COST OF LIVING MOD#
The Jam had enjoyed great success by marrying a mod image and punk sound with lyrics about working-class life, yet Mr Weller wanted to create more experimental music that incorporated jazz, pop, soul and R’n’B. He wrote a song inspired by the novel for the Jam in 1981 but disbanded the group a year later, fearing that it had become creatively stale. The protagonist was cool but he also cared about outsiders and underdogs the novel’s message was about “embracing all these different cultures and not being xenophobic”.
The post-war youth culture the novel portrayed was dominated by jazz, rock’n’roll, European clothes and new slang words.įor Paul Weller, the book was a “blueprint for modernism”. Set in the summer of 1958, the book follows its anonymous teenage narrator around the city as he meets friends, laments his failed relationship, takes pornographic photographs, mourns his father and witnesses racial violence. IN 1959 COLIN MACINNES published “Absolute Beginners”, the second novel in his London trilogy.
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