I'm really excited now as Weller has acknowledged in the press he will be doing as advertised songs from the Jam, The Style Council and solo material. I admittedly was beginning to give to much credence to those claiming the three themed nights were the invention of the promoter in order to sell tickets and that the three shows were just going to be regular shows possibly with similar setlists. Taking my typically zen approach to such things, I knew regardless of what was played each night I was getting to see one of my heroes in a great city.
I'm sitting here listening to "Stanley Road" and "Wildwood" realizing just how amazing these shows will be!
From the Village Voice
"It's a bit of a challenge," he says, "to play some tunes we haven't played forever, or for a long time anyway. I mean, it's not like each
night's going to be exclusively Jam and Style Council. We're going to play more songs than we normally play, but it'll still be a mixture of
things."
Uh oh. Maybe Jam night won't be as pure as you might assume. But however this holy trinity of anticipated performances goes down, know that none of thisâ??not the boxed set, not the linked concertsâ??was Paul Weller's doing. "None of them were my idea," he says. "If it doesn't work out, it's not my idea."
From Newsday by Ira Robbins
"I don't want to give too much away," he says, "but we'll start off and do 10 Jam or Style Council tunes, and then a normal set. People [shouldn't] expect us to do a greatest hits thing - we don't really do that. Hopefully, my audience will understand that it's going to be more B-sides or album tracks as opposed to [The Jam's 1980 British chart-topper] 'Going Underground.'"
...
Weller normally includes a few Jam oldies ("That's Entertainment," "A Town Called Malice," "In the Crowd") in his sets, but others, he says, "I haven't played since I wrote them, which is a long, long time ago. So I've had to relearn them [using] songbooks, which is quite weird. As a middle-aged man of 49, which I'm going to be this year, I have to find an emotional connection to sing them properly."
