Everything Has A Price To Pay (B Side of Above The Clouds, 1992)
Paul and the Art of Songwriting
AS THE PROCESS of self-searching continued, it was not long before Paul began to examine that which was of most importance to him – songwriting. One of Paul’s greatest impulses is always to demystify, to hold things up to the light and rip away all pretence. Songwriting is no different. Although many place songwriters in a romantic tradition, see them as damaged souls waiting for the muse to visit them, Paul strongly disagrees. For him, songwriting is a job. It is his work.
‘I’ve got a family, I work for a living,’ he barked at Mojo.
OK, he will tell you, some songs come to him as if from above, but this is the exception, not the rule. The majority come through hard graft, and he wants that to be made clear. Most people think he conjures up songs from nowhere, but this is wrong, he states, far off the mark. Songwriting is hard, difficult, requiring hours and hours of effort and worry. With each new composition you shoot into the dark, nervously wondering if people will like it, if the talent to dazzle is still there, or if your time is nearly up.
Paul likes to write at night, in his kitchen. He loves the idea that as the world is sleeping he is beavering away, creating magic (‘At midnight’s hour when the world is sleeping’ he sang on Out Of Sinking, making a reference to this penchant of his).
How do songs come to him? Various ways and means. Sometimes a riff, a lyric, a piece of music will come to him from nowhere; other times he plays guitar relentlessly until something happens. My theory, based on what Steve Brookes tells us about their early days with The Beatles songbook, is that one way Paul writes is to play other people’s songs on his guitar until they mutate into his own compositions. Sometimes he thinks of ideas he can work on, such as Wings Of Speed, where he hit upon the notion of marrying the style of an English hymn with an American gospel feel. It was then that he began work on the song. Of this act of creation, composer Aaron Copland noted, ‘it must either be entirely spontaneous, or if not spontaneous, then cajoled, induced, gradually perceived, so that each day’s work may spell failure or triumph. No wonder many creative artists have been reputed to have had unstable characters.’
Our very warm and intelligent friend Anthony Storr places creative people in several different categories. Paul, what a shocker, has elements pertaining to many of these types. First, there is the creative person as schizoid (let us not forget Paul’s quote in the introduction about his girlfriend calling him psychotic). This is someone who is preoccupied with the inner self. ‘An individual with this chemical structure,’ Storr says, ‘gives an impression of coldness combined with an apparent air of superiority which is not endearing.’ This is Paul on playing a festival where the group REM were also appearing: ‘I’d never watch a band like that. No, I didn’t talk to them. They talked to me.’ You may recall how John Entwistle bored him, ‘so I gave him my autograph and went home’. The advantage for this songwriter or artist, Storr continues, is that they get to choose what they reveal. ‘He cannot be betrayed into confidences which he might later regret. He can choose (or so he often believes) how much of himself to reveal and how much to keep secret. Above all, he runs little risk of putting himself in the power of another person.’
The second type Storr recognizes is the creative person as an obsessional character. Money, for example. Why are most successful artists so tight with their money? Because, as we know, ‘free spending is a form of letting go’. Obsessionals have a compulsive need to control ‘both the self and the environment’, and Paul certainly controlled others, while resisting every attempt to control him. (These musings on his character will absolutely enrage him, as will every attempt to pin him down. ‘I don’t recognize myself in any of the interviews I do,’ he once said, which I think tells us more about him than inaccurate journalism.) Paul feared change, too, not particularly in himself or his music, but in those around him. He confessed this fear to me on a couple of occasions. His major worry was that people would change so much they would become different characters who would then walk away from him, hence his insistence on loyalty to the cause. You are either with or against Paul Weller. No middle ground exists in this battlefield.
Obsessionals also ‘look ahead in order that they may not suffer the anxiety of the unexpected’ – another aspect of Paul’s character we have already had cause to touch on. Paul was forever thinking of the future, pencilling in provisional tour and recording dates, making endless plans. He doesn’t like surprises. The world is too unstable for his taste and planning ahead is one way of imposing some kind of order on it.
His passion for all things Mod ties in with these characteristics (see The Peacock Suit), as does his neatness. In every house of his that I visited, I never once saw a room of his majorly cluttered or untidy. There were always neat rows of records, clothes, books or any other items to be seen. Storr mentions the observations made of the desks the composers Stravinsky and Rossini worked at. ‘It is probable that the extreme orderliness of the desks and the tools of the trade,’ he writes, ‘is an outward and visible sign of the order which these composers wish to produce in their compositions.’ And indeed the world: a dislike of dirt is another symptom of this type. ‘Dirt is commonly regarded as disorder,’ Storr explains, ‘as something alien which has intruded itself into a system …’
Storr then moves on to the creative ego, observing that independence is of paramount importance to the artist. ‘This shows itself particularly in the fact that they [the artists] are much more influenced by their own inner standards than those of the society or the profession to which they belong.’ The expectations Paul had of himself were always huge. He rarely satisfied himself, and when he did, the feeling was fleeting. Every song had to be better than the last, every song had to mean something, every song had to say something memorable. This takes a heavy toll, he tells us in this key song. Paul shot for his moon so that he could reach the stars. That journey is not for free, he reminds us. There is a price to pay, and I pay it.
Maybe, one finally wonders, that price is happiness. ‘Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness,’ the French author Georges Simenon once said, before adding, ‘I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.’