![]() ![]() It was a great show, but she was right, the crowd was predominant with 40 somethings. I went to the SF show which got bumped to a smaller venue (which personally was happy about), but as my lady friend and I walked in, her first comment was “it’s all people our age”. I give props to Paul for hopping off the singer/songwriter train at times and showing he still has angst enough to pull off songs like Echoes round the Sun, From the Floorboards Up etc.Yet still magically pulls off the acoustic sessions that focus more on his songwriting, or at least in a different way. I think those of us who appreciate Weller music either come from an era where The jam/Style Council meant something to us or we can see a world class songwriter or both. You can’t blame any one entity for this, the crowds, the promoters, publicists….it is what it is. The difference being,somehow Paul missed the “I respect this 80’s era music bard” mentality that the younger folks have for people like Strummer. I was very interested to know what happened in Coachella for Paul, knowing he would be put into a land of MTV/Indie college kids. Wait, what? You didn’t catch that killer moment? Oh well - your loss, our gain. ![]() Instead, to cap his Sunday show, the now silver-haired Weller, looking Armani casual cool in a black outfit, was left to kick against the pricks in a chugging rendition of his minor MTV hit with help from … well, how nice, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, who strummed a bit and shared in on the bop-bop-bop-bop harmonies. Surely casual ears would have recognized “A Town Called Malice,” although probably only as “that song by that guy who did that other song.” They still would have bounced and wiggled along to its deceptive Motown glee. Perhaps then he’d have gotten his due around here, maybe via the chanting of “Eton Rifles,” one of the most biting Jam songs, about a different, even refined sort of class struggle than the Third World uprising M.I.A. Had Weller been squeezed onto the main stage, people might have at least taken notice of the old leader of the Jam and the Style Council. Like Atmosphere says, when life hands you lemonades, you paint that s*** gold, (bleeper-bleeper)! Not exactly the right way to treat a Coachella forefather.īut suffice to say -– and I’m talking to you, Mozheads, after you watched your ’80s idol act the diva Friday night –- this is how an English icon soldiers on when faced with a demeaning concert situation. Let the man play! Imagine how much more fulfilling this set could have been with more morsels served up within another 20 minutes, instead of a flat 50. There was no reason to quit early: Public Enemy didn’t need an hour to set up, it wouldn’t have harmed My Bloody Valentine any to have Weller carry on, and yet another rumor that No Doubt would turn up for a five-song surprise never came to pass. “Just not long enough in the desert,” he sniffed in between expletives. Look for that sometime Tuesday.)Īfter roughly a half-hour of top-notch rock ‘n’ soul, culminating in some extra-fine space-jamming on “Porcelain Gods,” Weller was informed that he had a measly 15 minutes left. (It also might make my annual Kill List, a rundown, in ranked order, of the weekend’s greatest performance. ![]() I just might blather more about it once I get home and have time to properly assess and convey why it was such a meaningful (albeit needlessly stopped) performance, both for artist and audience. I could go on endlessly about the excellent yet heartbreaking Paul Weller set no one watched. ![]() Coachella ‘09: Paul Weller Gets Robbed, Johnny Marr Saves ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |