Paul Weller: Wild Wood

When Paul Weller released his second solo album, Wild Wood, in 1993, two quips did the rounds.

The first was that it had taken Weller 15 years to go from being a mod to being a hippy, when in the Sixties people managed it in 15 months.

The second was that it owed so much to Traffic that it should have been called Winwood.

Never mind. I was pleased Weller was back and connecting with the ruralist strain in English culture. And, more than 30 years on, it still sounds good.

A recent Mojo article describes how Weller and his collaborators got it together in the country, not at a Berkshire cottage, but at Richard Branson's residential studio The Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell in Oxfordshire.

In it, Weller talks about the influences on the record:

Elsewhere, in The Manor’s living-cum-listening room, records were spun, and cassette mixtapes played into the wee small hours, shaping the contours of the album. Traffic are often cited as the chief source of inspiration for Wild Wood. “Definitely an influence,” Weller nods, “but I mean, people were probably saying that because it had a flute on it!

“From the ’90s onwards, I was listening to so much different music which I’d cut myself off from in the past. I was sort of blinkered when I was younger. To the point of not buying records because someone had long hair or a beard. I dropped any sort of barriers at all and so it was a real learning curve as well.”

Other names on the Wild Wood sessions playlists included CSNY, Nick Drake, Free, Donald Byrd, Shuggie Otis and A Tribe Called Quest, whose Luck Of Lucien from their 1990 debut People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm led Weller, via their sample usage, back to jazz-funk trumpeter Billy Brooks’s 1974 album, Windows Of The Mind.

That's an interesting list, particularly as Nick Drake was not then the ubiquitous figure he has become in the 21st century.

Another Mojo article ranks all of Weller's solo albums and has Wild Wood in first place:

A classic with a capital C, Wild Wood has lost none of its allure and magic over the last thirty years. The aforementioned Sunflower was a more nimble version of future hit The Changingman, Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) could be Traffic themselves, while the title track was a folk standard for a new decade; mystical, soulful and stoned. The formula would be tweaked to more commercial success a couple of years later, but here is Weller truly finding his voice as a solo artist.

 This is the title track.