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We’ve been talking about things moving and changing. It makes me think of that line Philip Larkin has in ‘Dockery And Son’: ‘And furnace glares of Sheffield, where I changed / And ate an awful pie.’ I like that and I use it because at Sheffield, I changed. I started to be interested in dance music or things that got me out of the house. As with The Smiths, I read The Jam. Their music was like a novel to me and The Style Council seemed like a continuation. It made a huge amount of sense. 

Unlike a lot of middle-aged men, Weller’s got the image right, even now. He’s the James Bond of music in that he’s quite stylish and can handle things well. And I think it’s a classic definition of ‘modern’ that he’s balancing contradictions. He’s presenting a Black soul idea to an audience of white meatheads. The way some of his fans look these days, it’s wrong on so many levels. Clinging onto the Roman cut, tonsured on top. They’re still trying to get into some ill-fitting 80s/60s rehash, and it looks awful. The Style Council were never retro, despite their fixation with Curtis Mayfield, it was extremely of its day. There’s a couple of dodgy raps on this album, but overall, I think of it as being very smooth. 

Around that time, there was always a sense of mystery in the not knowing, feeling that there was something out there, an answer. I connected with that. Sometimes when you do find the answer, it’s not worth it as it’s a bit uninteresting. The Style Council had that link to what was played at Jive Turkey, where we’d be dancing to Parliament. And you could hear that sound in The Style Council. God sent Mick Talbot to men like me, because you always wanted to look like Paul Weller, and if you missed it, you ended up looking like Mick, and he looked quite good in white denim, but he didn’t look as good as Weller. I could never get things right in terms of how I dressed. You know you’d be fully out, and then you’d suddenly go, Oh, why did I choose red socks? I thought this was going to look great. It looked great in the bedroom, but I got it wrong. If you were in a community of like-minded funksters they would say something, whereas I would just have to wait until I got there to realise I’d done it wrong again.