The Modfather Does The Business

[Keith]

>You ever have one of those nights where you want to go up to somebody,
>maybe a complete stranger (of either sex) and just kiss them...?
>
>The deal? Paul Weller's tour
>rolled into Newcastle. The city was rife with rumours. Noel Gallagher
>was doing the support. Yeh. Right. Sure.
>
>Funny thing was, he *was*.
>
>You know, there's something sickening about the "There's Nothing
>Highbrow About the Eyebrow Brothers" strain of British rock critique.
>Something thin, and weedy and green-eyed and fucking WRONG. There's a
>magic about kid Noel that's almost ephemeral, he just oozes it. It's not
>his words (thought Talk Tonight is one of the few songs that means
>something to me on a personal level high above the normal sigh of "hey,
>*that's" a nice song")... He's just A STAR. He'll be a star even if he's
>broke and penniless, dying in the gutter of too much nosecandy in the
>way that most of these third division DO NOTHING wankers will
>only ever *dream* about. He played Stand By me, Talk Tonight, Cast No
>Shadow, Wonderwall, Don't Look Back in Anger and Live Forever. On his
>own. With only an acoustic guitar and two thousand people for company.
>The moment that made it was turning around just as he'd left the stage
>and seeing a bloke walking in behind me, gob-smacked and well, well,
>well pissed off. He'd been in the bar and missed the whole thing.
> Where were *you* the night Noel supported Weller? In the bar.
> Pass the valium. pass out.
>
>Ah, but the Weller fellah. The Goddam Modfather of Heavy Soul. The
>Changing Man. 'Van Morrison with a decent haircut'. Poet, renaissance
>man and *still* the best dressed forty-year old in town. Although his
>set sagged a little in the middle when he slowed it down, the opening
>salvo of Into Tomorrow and Peacock Suit was as good a blast of kick-
>arse rock and roll as you'll hear all year, and the set smouldered,
>including near definitive versions of Mermaids and Out of the Sinking
>and reached a climax with a positively *evil* take on Walk on Gilded
>Splinters.
>
>The call it dadrock. They say, you're old enough to leave your Free and
>Faces licks in the cupboard, young 'un, so get out and listen to
>something else. *They*. They facelsss "they" who are in charge of the
>great whatsit. Fine. I was 15 when I first saw Paul Weller perform, in
>1978 in the same place as I saw him tonight, and he was 20. I'm nearly
>35 now and he's nearly forty. He is I dad, I could, and probably should
>be. We've grown up and grown old together, Weller and me...

'I don't want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction...
I can get all that at home...'

[Cliff Clarke]

That's pretty fucking heavy man!!!!!