The BFI London film festival spearheaded its opening gala last week with Blitz, the new film by Steve McQueen, the Oscar and Bafta-garlanded writer-director of Hunger and 12 Years a Slave.
Blitz, which will be released in cinemas from 1 November and then on Apple TV+, is set in the second world war, with strong resonance for our modern volatile climate. It tells the story of George (played by Elliott Heffernan), a nine-year-old mixed-race boy evacuated to the countryside for safety, who absconds to make his way back to his factory worker mother (Saoirse Ronan) in London.
Heffernan, 11, is not the only one making his screen debut. George’s grandfather is played by Paul Weller. Yes, that Paul Weller – the musician and self-declared Beatles/1960s obsessive known as “the Modfather”, formerly of the Jam and the Style Council, and creator of 17 solo albums such as Wild Wood (1993), Stanley Road (1995), On Sunset (2020), and the latest, 66, released earlier this year, the day before his 66th birthday.
What’s more, Weller is getting glowing reviews: “An impressive debut” (the Times); “Superb” (Deadline). Such a response is by no means de rigueur for the musicians-turned-actors. After all, for every mesmeric David Bowie in 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, there’s an oiled and glistening Sting strutting in what appears to be a futuristic adult nappy in David Lynch’s Dune.
If Blitz is an unexpected move for Weller, it has paid off. You can also trust the connection between him and McQueen (who also made the award-winning Black British history anthology Small Axe). Still, it’s quite the transformation for an artist who, in a five-decade-plus music career, never showed the remotest inclination to dabble in other artforms, least of all acting. One might even say it is a quintessentially anti-Weller move.
Or is this a lazy misreading of Weller? Is it simply that British culture’s changing man has changed yet again? McQueen clearly saw something in Weller. At a press conference for Blitz, he said: “I just thought he had an authenticity to his face. He looks like a person from that time”. By email from the New York film festival, where Blitz was showing last week, McQueen tells me: “I needed someone with a certain weight and depth.”
He says Weller prepared for the role by working with an acting coach. “Paul is extra-generous in his contribution to the film. His work with Saoirse and Elliott was particularly tender.” What are McQueen’s thoughts on Weller generally as a cultural force? “The fact that we are still talking about him after more than 50 years tells you he is a pillar in British culture.”
Suggs of Madness, aka Graham McPherson, a friend of Weller’s since the 1970s, was in the studio with him when McQueen called. “Amazing to read he’s playing a grandad,” he laughs over the phone. “He’s dealt with being the Modfather. I don’t know how he’s going to deal with being the Mod-grandfather.”
Suggs says Weller’s immediate reaction was uncertainty: “He seemed confused – about whether he wanted to be an actor … He was always going on about how he hated doing videos.” But he says Weller was intrigued, primarily about McQueen: “He’s got some respect for that guy as a film-maker.”
Suggs was one of the artists who worked with Weller on 66, which had lyric contributions from a number of artists. “It was very nice working with him. People see him as being tough, but he’s very easy going. A very charming, funny person. I’ve always liked his attitude, his work ethic, his constant drive to change and reinvigorate himself.”
Few would deny that Weller is one of the major arteries of British music and culture. Still, looking at his trajectory, there’s also a marked pattern of almost bullish restlessness.
Born in Woking, Surrey, to taxi driver John and cleaner Ann, his late father would become his manager, while his mother ran his fanclub. As he cut his teeth in the unfashionable environs of working men’s clubs, the Jam, the band he formed in 1972 with Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler, were a suited, booted, punk-adjacent, mod-suffused clarion call to the times, pumping out songs such as Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, Going Underground, and The Eton Rifles, the track Old Etonian David Cameron said he liked.
Weller, not one for hanging back in the class war, responded in his signature bracing style: “It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps … ‘Which bit didn’t you get?’”
When I interviewed Weller alongside Noel Gallagher around the recording of Fire & Skill, a 1999 album of Jam covers, Weller was similarly forthright about the politicos he’d encountered during his mid-80s involvement with the Labour party youth drive Red Wedge: “Once I met the people involved, I thought, ‘Get me out of here.’ Forget showbusiness, these people had egos the size of that barn.”
Arguably, this uncompromising attitude runs through Weller’s creativity. In a move that makes grown men with feather cuts weep into their beer to this day, he audaciously broke up the Jam in 1982 to form the Style Council with Mick Talbot, accompanied on vocals by Dee C Lee, who was to become his wife. Purveyors of what was termed cappuccino-soul, the Style Council (the antithesis of Little Englanders, gadding about with jumpers tied around their necks) couldn’t have been further from the Jam. Likewise, when the Style Council’s fifth album was rejected by Polydor in 1989, it was because it was full of house beats, with acid jazz thrown in.
It was followed by a tough period in the wilderness for Weller (“It needed to happen,” he told me bluntly; “it brought me down to earth”). He then went on to enjoy the fabled Modfather mid-90s solo resurgence, almost at times serving as a human junction between eras: from the black-and-white 60s music he loves (the Kinks, the Who, Small Faces, Northern Soul and US R&B), through to modern innovations and styles.
Indeed, Weller’s solo albums have proved to be a diverse mix, incorporating soul, rock, house, psychedelia, and more. All of which eclecticism and experimentation seems at odds with the rather reductive “dad-rock” persona he, Gallagher, and even Paul McCartney are routinely lumbered with. Weller is very much a father (of eight children from four different relationships), but while the dad-rock tag isn’t without amusement, is it strictly fair or true?
When I ask Suggs where he sees Weller in terms of culture, he mock-sighs: “I really don’t want to go on, because that’s not what we do – be nice to each other. David Bowie’s the epitome of all we dug about British culture, and I think he’s not far behind. You think of the Jam, then jumping right out with Style Council then going off on his own again and starting out playing those small clubs.”
Could this be the explanation for Weller’s latest manoeuvre into film? Maybe not the dad-rocker. Maybe not even, for now, just a musician. And definitely not as first appeared, an anti-Weller move. Rather, as Weller has so often been, the creative embodiment of the classic shark philosophy: “Move forward or die”.
