Paul Weller will be a father again this summer. It will be his eighth child. The announcement came hard on the heels of the news that The Modfather’s 13th solo studio album, A Kind Revolution, will be released on 12th May. Shortly after that a film called Jawbone will reach the movie screens. The soundtrack to Jawbone was written by Weller and is available now as an album from all the usual places.

Paul Weller

One of the tracks from Jawbone came up on my Release Radar playlist last week and it surprised old mister Crotchety. Bottle is a simple folk ballad – just two acoustic guitars and a male voice in reflective mood. I haven’t been keeping abreast of Paul Weller’s work but this was so very different from what he was doing with The Jam in the late seventies and The Style Council in the eighties that I felt I had to investigate further.

The first thing to say is that the Jawbone album is the soundtrack from the film, not separate recordings of the songs. The first track, Jimmy/Blackout, is over 20 minutes long and consists mostly of atmospheric sounds rather than conventional music. Several of the other tracks include dialogue from the film, which gets in the way of the songs. This is a collector’s album for those who loved the film, not a recording purely for listening pleasure. Having said that, though, Bottle does stand up in isolation.

Words are never enough to convey the effect of a piece of music on the listener and that’s particularly true for Bottle. The lyrics tell the thoughts of a man who has lost his way and must move on if he is to rescue himself from the wasteful life he has been leading. Here, ‘bottle’ seems to stand for both the ‘courage’ he has lost and the undefeated demon of ‘alcohol’. The singer regrets many things hidden in the dark of the time tunnel called the past but there is a glimmer of light up ahead, the promise of a better future if he can but face it. And all that comes across in the simple tune and folksy guitar accompaniment.

I haven’t been able to find any credits for the songs on the Jawbone album so I don’t know if Paul Weller is playing or singing on Bottle. I can say, though, that it has an insidious charm brought out beautifully by a stripped down production. If this is what Paul is doing these days he deserves to be taken as seriously now as he was in his days with The Jam. It’s completely different material but he still has the knack of making compelling music.

Notes

1. There’s a quite different song called The Bottle on Paul Weller’s 2004 album, Studio 150. Videos of The Bottle exist on YouTube but there are none that I can find for Bottle from the new film.
2. Jawbone is a film about a former youth boxing champion, Jimmy McCabe, who returns to his old haunts in the hope of picking himself up off the canvas after taking too many of life’s hard knocks. “In a battle between fear and faith, Jimmy risks his life, as he tries to stand tall and regain his place in the world”.