![]() ![]() I couldn’t swear to it though, as like pogoing to The Pistols at The 100 Club, as much as I`d have loved to have been there – I wasn’t. Legend has it – I think – that Shout To The Top was one of the tunes in the carrier bag full of records that Andrew Weatherall played during his debut at Shoom – down on the farm. Redefining “Mod” minutes before Red Wedge and Acid Jazz. ![]() Cool, clipped, positive, left-leaning prose from the “Cappuccino Kid” printed on the reverse. The artwork featured photographs of hip young things leaping what look like Parisian steps. A repeat-until-you’re-hoarse chorus of don’t fucking give up, with the “WE`RE gonna” – i.e. Was a call, a secular prayer, of encouragement to and for the disaffected youth of Thatcher’s Britain. “When you’re knocked on your back, and your life’s a flop,Īnd when you’re down on the bottom, there’s nothing else but to shout to the top” With orchestral strings and racing piano, set to a northern soul tempo, to say the song`s stirring is a definite understatement. Practically on his knees testifying, pleading, begging for revolution and resistance. A working class hero with head and heart fixed on convincing the country’s dead-end kids that they were alright, Weller was a man incensed, driven near insane by inane tabloid headlines, and public ignorance and apathy. It was impossible not to be taken by Paul’s fire back then. I`d been a big fan of The Jam – and similarly, what Weller did next. ![]() I bought a 7 – with silver “injected” labels. Please enable JavaScript if you would like to comment on this blog.The Style Council released Shout To The Top in 1984. Regardless, it's an awesome tune that I forcibly crammed onto many a mixtape that summer, bookended incongruously by tracks by T.S.O.L., Killing Joke, Naked Raygun and the Smiths.Ĭrank it up and enjoy your summer while you can. Lee and drummer Steve White escape with any semblance of dignity. And is that lipstick he's sporting? Only lovely backing vocalist Dee C. While he'll always be a figure of untouchable coolness in my book, here he is looking like an blind, emaciated Italian bicycle pimp. Watch as he strains to look emphatic and committed at the piano, gritting his teeth keenly and looking more as if he'd been sternly informed that he would only be permitted to use the restroom after the video was complete. The video, however, is another story, one that only reinforces the pain felt by die-hard Jam fans.įor a start, there's keyboardist Mick Talbot, something of a helpless "wally," as my lovely British wife might describe him. It's just a beautiful, breezy bit of music with an uplifting message, like a spirited bike ride down pleasantly empty, sunlit Manhattan avenues on a hot July afternoon. I mean, what the fuck happened? I think I practically spat up at my first hearing of "My Ever Changing Moods."īut, let's be honest, there is simply zero arguing with the brilliance of this single, effortlessly melding the Style Council's penchant for jazzy pop with Weller's stubbornly assertive delivery (you can take the man out of the punk band, but you can't take the punk out of the man). I mean, here was the man who'd written such incendiary barnstormers as "Eton Rifles," "In the City" and "An 'A' Bomb in Wardour Street" suddenly slipping on a pair of top siders and crooning some of the softest blue-eyed soul imaginable. I'd just graduated high school and - in my arguably narrow teenaged worldview - still regarded Paul Weller's defection from punky mod squad, The Jam, to the pointedly twee ranks of the Style Council as complete heresy. If I'm not mistaken, this single originally surfaced in the fall of 1984, but I don't believe I heard it (much less gave it a chance) until the Summer of 1985. Everyone has a list of what they consider perfect summer songs.
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