 |
Current mood:soulful
Category: Life
Those who are fans of
Paul Weller would know that his father and manager of some 30 years,
John Weller, passed away earlier this year. He was 77, or 78. Paul
Weller has gone on to say that his dad was the best drinking buddy
anyone could ever have. But it's quite obvious he was more than just a
drinking buddy, and much more than a maverick rock manager even. The
man was just plain extraordinary. There he was, uneducated, a worker, a
former boxer, turned into one of Britain's most successful and enduring
rock managers, charting and following the path his son led as one of
Britain's most loved performers and songwriters.
People
will associate the immensely musical and talented Paul Weller as the
star with his incredible body of recorded work, his awesome live shows
and his perpetual suave mod looks and fashion sense. Yet John Weller
had that extra-special something, you just have to watch and listen to
him talk on videos to see that. He appeared to possess a most convincing
psycho-physical presence. With his large, handsome face and big hair,
and his persuasive manner of speaking, he was just so captivating. He
was blunt, forceful, passionate, gruffly-spoken, and to the point. He
had no vestiges of useless intellectualism whatsoever, and he spoke in
a kind of broad cockney. But he was smart, very much so. Not all men
and women are created equal. This doesn't only apply to talent and
ability, but also to presence and personal power. Some people have more
pull than others, a certain kind of charisma that you can't help but be
swayed and captivated by that person. John Weller had that charisma,
totally. That's why, in the space of under five years, he was able to
get his son up on the local workers club stage at age 14 to have him
headline the Hammersmith Odeon not long after his 19th birthday. "Give
my son a gig!" "yessir". Pure working-class street-smarts and bluntness
certainly served he and his family a long way. Paul's mum has it too.
Paul was amazingly lucky to have the parents he had, and when you look
at it, he and his dad made the perfect team, the perfect duo. Each of
them, with their unique talents and abilities, have served each other
well.
It
takes a kind of boundless energy and unerring dedication to do the kind
of thing John Weller did for his son's band, The Jam. John was a
brickie during the Jam's formative period and he managed the band
outside of work hours. But whatever he did for Paul and the band, it
worked. Paul not only fronted Britain's most successful band of the
era, but managed three distinct careers with John as manager for each
of them. Most critically it was John, with his boundless enthusiasm,
who kept the Jam going during its sometimes shaky formative years. His
was the mind and body of the doer, not the intellectualiser or the pontificator. He was certainly no Hamlet. Nothing ventured nothing gained, being his motto.
I
remember my old man when I was growing up and he held similar traits to
John Weller. My dad was a brickie too with a very handsome face and big
head of silver hair. He was everyone's mate and he always had loads of
friends, and his was a gruff, direct manner. The difference between
someone like John Weller and my dad was that my dad was very musical
himself - and I've inherited my musicality and passion from him - and
that my dad was a very sensitive man, although he would never show it.
The other difference between John Weller and my father is that my dad
was not close to me or the rest of us in the family. He wasn't
demonstrable, and sadly he preferred to sozzle himself at the pub on a
nightly basis. But if he enjoyed himself, all the best to him.
It
all comes back to intelligence and smarts without the unnecessary
intellectualism. Neither of my parents - like a lot who fled their
war-torn Mediterranean homelands at a young age - had formal schooling.
Yet they were both smart, smarter than me that's for sure. My mum had
(has) innate poise and wisdom, dad a natural intelligence and social
nous.
My
dad's sister, my late-auntie Angelina was a true case in point. She
lived in farms throughout her time in Australia. A softly-spoken demure
thing she certainly ain't never was; she had a loud voice even when
speaking softly, but when she spoke loudly or yelled - which was often
- she could be heard on farms all the way from Griffith to Wagga and
back again. She was amazing for her verbal capacity. She was sharp,
witty, cheeky, and masterful with language (albeit Calabrese) though
she barely read and had no real schooling. I love that sort of thing -
true salt-of-the-earth smarts. Something that appears lost to our
generation, especially those of us born and bred in the big cities. I
tell you there's nothing more amusing than hearing the Calabrese
dialect of Italian yelled out - it's true farm language!!
I
think about psycho-physical presence a lot and apply it mentally to the
people around me, and to my friends. I can't be objective about myself
but I sense that I have this disparity between my gentle and almost
effete side, and the part of me that's passionate, determined and even
a little aggressive. It could be a generational thing. I think my
sister and brother are both stronger than I in some ways. They're of
the generation born in the fifties, I was born in 1970. I know I
possess a delicate quality that they don't quite have; my brother is
certainly a lot tougher than me in outward appearances. He's taller
with broader shoulders, more rugged looking with a deeper voice and
with a tougher personality. I'm a mixture. I love the beautiful,
wistful dreamers like Eva Cassidy and Nick Drake and can relate to them
intimately, particularly Eva Cassidy. But equally I'm into fist-wavers
and piano-smashers like John Lennon and Beethoven. And Paul Weller.
Ultimately, the spirit of Beethoven within me is what I most relate to. That's where I'm like my father's son.
As for John Weller, what a fucking legend!!!
10:48 AM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|