#Paul weller best album mod

The lines 'With Jesus at the helm' and 'one candle left to light the way' refer directly to the painting. The song is about how I feel when I look at John Waterhouse's painting, The Lady of Shalott. Then she did another take, then another, and she wouldn't play them back so we put them all together, weaved them in and out of each other. She sang one verse free-form and we put it down. I said at the time that Carleen Anderson's voice on it is the nearest I'll get to hearing angels sing. I didn't see him again until Ocean Colour Scene came down to record their debut LP in our studio and I thought, I recognise you from somewhere. We had to chase him off in the end because he was a pain in the arse.

#Paul weller best album mod

He was a massive Jam fan and was in a dodgy mod band and he gave me his tape to hear. When Steve was 16 he came down to our studio at the time. He joined the live band at that point and is still in my band today, although he did go off with Ocean Colour Scene for a while. It was also the first of my albums to feature guitarist Steve Cradock on most of the tracks. There had been a good year-and-a-half of playing on the road in between Wild Wood and the making of Stanley Road so I'd written at home, on the tour bus, in hotel rooms, wherever I could snatch the time, and we had a chance to play a lot of the songs in on the road. A lot of the material had been written up front. We were very buoyant when we entered the studio. On a personal level it was a fucking nightmare, but artistically it was a very exciting time. Stanley Road was a way for me to vent a lot of those things, turn them into something positive. So on the one hand I was having a whale of a time and a second youth, and on the other I was coming back in the morning and asking, 'where's my life heading?'. I was doing a lot of drugs, staying out all night. I was feeling tremendous guilt about splitting the family up, and worried about my relationship with my kids. I had split with my wife Dee a year before. At the same time I was going through a lot of different feelings and trials.