There's an honest way to tell a life lived in three acts, the way Paul Weller's was, and it is to let the people who lived those acts beside him do the talking. That is Dan Jennings's choice in this authorised oral history: no biographer pulling the threads from above, but a montage of voices — bandmates, producers, friends, collaborators, Weller himself — that chase and sometimes contradict one another. The result is closer to a documentary on paper than to a conventional biography, and it is exactly what suits a man who made reinvention his trade.
The book runs the whole arc: working-class Woking and the birth of the Jam, the mod-punk that conquered England and the break-up at the peak in 1982; the elegant, divisive turn of the Style Council; and the third life, the solo years, from the near-oblivion of the early Nineties to the Britpop title of "Modfather." The oral form captures the fractures especially well — the moments when Weller burned down what he had built to start again elsewhere — because it sees them from several angles, including those of the people who paid for the choices.
A note on method, because at Groov-illa honesty matters: this is a considered flag of a monumental volume (over seven hundred pages), not a verdict from a cover-to-cover read. For anyone who loves Weller, or who came to his music through one of the three doors and wants to understand the other two, it is one of the widest-ranging references available. We told the story too in our reportage on the three lives of Paul Weller, of which this book is the natural companion: there the thesis, here the voices.
