Happy Together (The Gift, 1982)
Paul and Gill
THIS WAS THE first song written for The Gift, an album Weller tried desperately hard to make his finest to date. Instead, it proved to be his band’s swansong.
The song’s lyrics pertain to his relationship with his girlfriend at the time, Gill Price. Weller met Gill at a Jam gig in 1978. They fell for each other instantly, but the relationship was always highly volatile in nature. When I began hanging out with Paul, it was actually quite shocking to witness just how volatile things could get. Many was the time an evening would end with the pair arguing like crazy, taking separate cabs screaming back to their Pimlico flat, where the fight would continue.
Gill was certainly an individual. She was a lover of 1920s films, 1920s style. She even had her hair styled after Louise Brooks, a famous actress from the 1920s. She also, like her boyfriend, had a wicked tongue on her which cut quickly to the bone. At a party once, I wore a new pinstripe jacket. I asked her what she thought of it. Gill said with a perfect sneer, ‘you look like you’re in the fucking Sweeney.’ That was one of her nicer comments.
The pair argued continually, and the fights were not just verbal. One time Paul had to go to hospital after he brought a china cup down on his own head in frustration during an argument. Once I even saw the pair end up wrestling on the pavement outside the ICA, Gill clawing away at Paul, Paul trying to avoid her nails. Madness.
I remember meeting Paul and Gill at a bar in St Christopher’s Place one night. It was the early eighties. A new club playing psychedelic music had opened up on nearby Kingleigh Street. Gill wanted to go. Paul didn’t. You could see his point: whatever club he went to, it was odds on he was going to draw massive attention to himself, a nightmare scenario for the shy boy about town. Gill didn’t care. She spent hours wearing him down, trying to get Paul to change his mind, the conversation painful and distracting. Eventually, Paul gave in. ‘OK,’ he said in conciliatory tones, ‘finish these drinks and we’ll go there.’
Thank God that’s over, I thought. Stupidly.
Gill put her glass down, looked at him with drunken eyes and said, ‘It’s like living with a fucking monk, living with you.’
‘What did you fucking call me?’
Evening over, two cabs called.
It was a mad relationship, one that left everyone baffled. Why did Paul put up with it? He later explained his devotion to Gill by stating that he thought all relationships were like his, that the man and the woman fought each other all the time. His parents might have provided ammunition for that notion: they often snapped away at each other in public, albeit good-naturedly. But it was never to the level of badtemperedness Paul and Gill seemed to thrive on.
‘Any type of Jam love song,’ Paul said at the time, ‘I always write from my own personal relationship, otherwise to me love songs don’t mean anything unless there’s some kind of truth behind it. So it is kind of sarcastic because me and my girlfriend are always arguing, we are always so unhappy …’ Funny how Paul, the self-centred man of pleasure, suffered so long within a relationship where happiness was just a fleeting smile at best. It was as if he had accepted it as a cross he must bear. His quick temper and her acid tongue were a marriage made in a caged kick-boxing ring, and it couldn’t continue, it had to burn itself out, which it did in the early eighties. But the link between happiness and his main relationship is one that popped up again many years later (see Remember How We Started).