Paul Weller: 66 review – sumptuous rumination on older age springs some surprises

Among the tracks on Paul Weller’s 17th solo album, A Glimpse of You isn’t really a standout. It’s melodically pretty, but a bit slight; pleasant enough, but unlikely to elbow The Changingman or Broken Stones from the setlist when its author plays live. Yet A Glimpse of You still has the capacity to bring the longstanding Weller fan up short. It happens in the second verse, which appears to depict Weller settling down on a park bench to contemplate his own mortality. “Into the gardens in blooming May,” he sings, his voice sounding weathered. “I find a wooden seat where I can wait until the end of the world.”

To which the more casual listener might respond: so what? It’s a long time since anyone considered rock music exclusively a young person’s game; we’re used to music that reflects the artist’s age. But this is Paul Weller we’re talking about, a man who spent the early years of his career making an enormous song and dance about the importance of youth – “you better listen man, because the kids know where it’s at”, “life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young”, “there should be a youth explosion”, “I want us to be like Peter Pan”, etc, etc – and indeed, expressing utter mortification at the very idea of growing old: “The man that you once loved is bald and fat-uh!” he snapped, on 1979’s Private Hell, as if hair loss and weight gain were a fate too horrific to countenance.

Yet here he is, admittedly neither bald nor fat, but trumpeting his advanced years in the album’s very title – although one suspects 66 is named not just for Weller’s age, but to commemorate the year he views as pop’s annus mirabilis – and blithely singing about enjoying a little sit in the park, like one of Simon and Garfunkel’s aged Bookends: how terribly strange to be 70, or at least thereabouts.

In fact, Weller has made a far better job of growing up in public than anyone might have expected in the Jam’s first flush of fame. This largely down to his restlessness, his willingness to suddenly change his mind. It happened most recently with the trio of exploratory albums he made between 2008 and 2012, which succeeded in confounding his more conservative fans and shaking off the artistic torpor that afflicted him in the early 00s. There are still hints of the experimentalism of Wake Up the Nation or Sonik Kicks here – one of their musical touchstones was Krautrock, and there’s a distinctly motorik cast to the rhythm of Jumble Queen, while In Full Flight, a fantastic collaboration with production duo White Label, offers up a kind of dubbed-out, psychedelic take on early 60s soul, if such a thing can be imagined.

But more striking is 66’s elegiac tone. Weller has talked about curbing his famously relentless work rate, and a sense of slowing down seems to have seeped into 66. It’s everywhere, from the preponderance of sun-dappled ballads, to the affecting weariness that soaks closing track Burn Out, a song which recalls – and Weller’s more strict mod adherents may wish to look away now – Meddle-era Pink Floyd, to his decision to hand over lyrical duties to others on a number of tracks. Two of his chosen lyricists are Noel Gallagher and Bobby Gillespie, which suggests that Weller is a brave soul when it comes to outsourcing words.

But once you’ve got your head around the idea of a more sedentary, ruminative Paul Weller doing things like grasping for the notion of an afterlife (“I want to believe in something greater than me,” he sings on Soul Wandering) or clutching on to fleeting memories of the past on the profoundly melancholy Nothing, 66 has a lot to commend it. If Sleepy Hollow slightly overdoes the flute-assisted whimsy, and the Covid-inspired I Woke Up feels a little overwrought, then they’re compensated for by Ship of Fools, a collaboration with Madness frontman Suggs that carries something of the Kinks’ Afternoon Tea in its DNA; and the lovely, slow exhalation of Rise Up Singing, bolstered by Hannah Peel’s sumptuous Philly soul orchestration and a guitar solo that nods in the direction of You’re the Best Thing. It isn’t the only moment that evokes Weller’s time as the head of the Style Council: the years when their Francophile tendencies extended to employing an accordion player are reflected in the gorgeous, chanson-like waltz of My Best Friend’s Coat.

Nor is 66 above springing surprises. Flying Fish rests on disco drums and burbling synths and features a distinctly Abba-esque melody: to be specific, it sounds pleasingly like The Winner Takes It All, but its gleeful buoyancy makes 66’s preoccupation with ageing and the passing of time seem curiously besides the point. For a man showing signs of slowing down, Paul Weller can seem remarkably like an artist still in the thick of it.