Paul weller hair5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() I thought every record was fantastic, just groundbreaking. “I bought all of Bowie’s records from Hunky Dory onwards, up until Scary Monsters. Low, which is the first of his Berlin albums, has always been my favourite record, and even more so recently the more I’ve listened to it.” Then, in a Quietus feature two years later, he selected Low as one of his top 13 albums of all time, alongside the more obvious Beatles and much less expected Tame Impala, keen to exhibit his fanboy credentials to journalist Mat Colegate: Weller told the NME in 2013 that “I think everyone is influenced by him. Unlike The Dame, enthusiastic embracer of technology, according to former friend and biographer Paolo Hewitt, his Modjesty professes to hate the internet. Bowie read the other thin white one’s comments and emailed him to say thanks, ending his message with a typically self-referential “Nice one, Paul. The pair made up and became online pen pals of a sort. That certainly could be the case with most other musicians of his age and stature George Michael’s Older album from 1996 being the obvious soul searching comparison. One could say that the deliberately paced, more sensitive approach Weller has taken is a great testament from an artist leaving behind middle age and beginning to settle down. These aren’t necessarily Weller’s greatest songs – You’re The Best Thing, That’s Entertainment et al can rest easy – but they are his loveliest a late career high from one of the most important, courageous songwriters in Britain. Though the material isn’t quite as thrustily energetic as The Jam or as wildly adventurous as the ever-changing moods of The Style Council, True Meanings succeeds on its own terms and is in all likelihood my album of the year. But this new song adds the kicker, “We miss you everywhere.” As much awe as Weller clearly holds for Bowie, the creativity of his solo albums suggests that he’s not just an acolyte but a peer. In this most personal of odes to a mass pop culture figure, there’s even a brilliantly moving answer back to the departed star himself -“Look up, you’ll see me,” paraphrases “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” the much-discussed opening line of Lazarus, Bowie’s “farewell“ single that was in the charts at the time of his death. “The depressing realisation in this age of dumbing down is that the questions have moved from, ‘Was Nietzsche right about God?’ to, ‘How big was his dick?’ Make the best of every moment. A series of observational bullet points mixing sage wisdom and glib crassness. “Make the best of every moment” is another quote from you-know-who, though this attempt at verisimilitude can be verified, coming from an article in the March 2004 issue of Esquire entitled What I’ve Learned. The tangled web he weaved Bowie’s lyricist Erland Cooper has clearly been trawling the web for inspiration. Too often people see death as the “end” of someone’s metaphorical “journey.”īut, at the risk of sounding super cheesy, with the endless Elvis-style repackaging of his core catalogue from Parlophone (the same record label Weller is currently signed to), it’s wrong to say that 10 January 2016 was the end of David Bowie. It’s especially important for music fans to remember in light of Bowie’s shock death. It’s not such a big deal because Weller paraphrases the words in a beautifully meditative way it’s impossible not to be moved by them. I’m conscious that, from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher to Alan Rickman (who spookily also died from cancer at 69, the same age as Bowie, four days after Bowie, and on Bowie Weller’s sixth birthday) the world wide web is tangled up, full of faked soundbites and philosophical quotations. The quote was much-repeated on the Internet after the Dame’s death, though I haven’t managed to source the interview from where it’s supposedly been extracted. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.” ![]() “The truth is of course is that there is no journey. Seasoned Bowie watchers will probably know that one of the most the most famous quotes attributed to their restless celebutante is: ![]() Gee, I wonder who they could be named after. Among Weller’s many children, Bowie has a twin, John Paul and an older sister Dylan. Bowie Weller was born on 14 January 2012, making him a Capricorn just like The Dame.
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