Class War
Fighting Maggie Thatcher. With jazz.
The Style Council
Our Favourite Shop – Deluxe Edition.
Four stars out of five.
When Paul Weller broke up The Jam at the end of 1982, many people thought he was committing commercial suicide, his father/manager included. With hindsight nobody need have worried. Setting aside Weller’s iconic status today, The Style Council still sound like an insane proposition: a pop group rooted in soul and jazz, mixing left-wing politics with comedy videos and an array of haircuts and cycle wear. Yet somehow it worked.
Forever wide open to ridicule, The Style Council were a defiant success: five consecutive Top 20 singles in their first year alone, second onstage at Live Aid (between Status Quo and Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats), and with 1985’s Our Favourite Shop, a number 1 album. Placed in context of his entire carer, it’s an album that effortlessly ranks alongside 1980’s Sound Affects and 1995’s Stanley Road as one of the high watermarks. Certainly it’s his most political work, released during Margaret Thatcher’s second term in office and sizzling with indignation at the state of 80’s Britain, be it the nationwide heroin epidemic (Come To Milton Keynes), mass unemployment, (Homebreakers), or Mrs T herself (The Lodgers, pithily subtitled She Was Only A Shop Keeper’s Daughter).
Like the spoof of Paul Hardcastle’s 19 on the rousing Walls Come Tumbling Down, such lyrical content has dated considerably; ditto a cameo rap from Lenny Henry. But the glory of Our Favourite Shop is as much to do with its musical courage as socialist dogma: incredibly, delivered his agenda to a soundtrack of bossa nova (With Everything To Loose), chamber music (A Stones Throw Away) and French chanson (Down In The Seine).
One of the most original pop albums of it’s decade, with an extra B-sides and demos disc, this is an unequivocal landslide victory.
Reviewer:- Simon Goodard
DOWNLOAD:- Walls Come Tumbling Down
--