Paul Weller - Find El Dorado
★★★★
PARLOPHONE
In a TV title sequence, former pop heartthrob Adam Faith, in a faded denim jacket and a feathered barnet, grabs an unattended black briefcase off the back seat of a parked limo and scarpers. But what’s this? Faith trips, the briefcase falls open and its payload of lovely lolly is cast to the winds – a low-rent callback to the denouement of Stanley Kubrick’s classic track-heist noir, The Killing.
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READ MORE: Every Paul Weller Album Ranked!
The predicament of Faith’s character – Ronald “Budgie” Bird – is made more wretched by the show’s theme song, a mournful dirge voiced by a none-more-enervated singer who may or may not be The Kinks’ Ray Davies (the theme was released under the act name Cold Turkey in 1972) – although if it’s not him, it’s a good impression. Davies certainly wrote the tune, Nobody’s Fool, and can be definitely heard singing it in demo form on the bumper 2013 reissue of The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies.
Paul Weller remembers Budgie and its theme with great affection. Over two seasons in 1971 and 1972, Faith’s hapless petty crook engaged in doomed capers finely wrought by a 24-carat writing team – Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall – while somehow establishing himself as an icon of youth street style. And Nobody’s Fool, if not exactly the keynote of Find El Dorado, Weller’s thoughtful and surprising new covers album, is certainly illustrative of its themes and tone. While the writers of Weller’s selections may be a varied bunch – among them: Richie Havens, Felix Pappalardi, Robin Gibb, Incredible String Band founder Clive Palmer – Weller has imposed on them a flexible, but nonetheless simpatico aesthetic. There’s a relaxed, somewhat shopworn feel to much of the record that summons the dun hues, warm beer and B&H fug of an early-’70s social club – with the jukebox spinning a soundtrack of vain hopes and crushed expectations, the melancholy that Weller often identifies as his dubious English birthright. It’s all there in Ray’s lyric – a deft upending of the ‘nobody’s fool’ idiom: “I’m nobody’s shelter, I’m nobody’s cover / I’m nobody’s lover, and nobody’s friend.”
In contrast with his previous covers collection, 2004’ s mixed Studio 150 – often parsed as the dead end of his aughties’ slump, before the upswing of As Is Now and 22 Dreams brought the promise of soberer yet more adventuresome horizons, and whose selections seemed tied to an orthodoxy that had become somewhat sclerotic – Find El Dorado is an offroad escapade down tracks less travelled, finding inspiration in one-off songs outside of the canon of cool.
Here, notably, dwells Pinball, British singer-actor Brian Protheroe’s 1974 hit. Something of a novelty, albeit a groovesome one in its original form, in it Weller locates another lost narrator (“I’ve run out of pale ale/And I feel like I’m in jail”) a relative of Ray’s Fool. Like most of Find El Dorado’s tracks, the music is starkly drawn, frippery-free, with production mostly the work of Weller’s long-term guitar foil, Steve Cradock, with a small cast of Weller regulars – including drummers Steve Pilgrim and Ben Gordelier, OG Jam co-founder Steve Brookes on acoustic guitar, and reeds man Jacko Peake, wistfully great on Pinball’s extended coda.
Granted, their ranks are swollen by guest star appearances, but not grandstanding “feat”-type attempts at market crossover. Declan O’Rourke swops vocals on Richie Havens’ Handouts In The Rain; Noel Gallagher plays guitar, unobtrusively, on Eamon Friel’s El Dorado – the almost-title track. Perhaps the most effective and apposite intrusion is from kora player Seckou Keita, who adds beautiful embroidery to a version of Duncan Brown’s eccentric 1974 single, Journey. Weller encountered Keita at a 2016 Africa Express show where they shared a stage with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz and the Orchestra Of Syrian Musicians and has hankered after the kora’s airy tones ever since – the next best thing to having Alice Coltrane on harp. “It’s like someone’s opened the window and the breeze is coming in,” he tells MOJO.
“Eccentric”, in a good way, has described much of Weller’s decision-making, post 22 Dreams. It’s hard to imagine the 20th Century Weller sparing time for super-uncool session hairies White Plains and their deliciously odd When You Are A King. But the New Weller is cool-blind and context-ambivalent – it’s the song, not the singer. That’s even clearer on the album’s most anomalous outliers. Lawdy Rolla, rendered in muscular gospel-rock style by Weller, is a track by late-’60s Afro-French R&B combo The Guerrillas (featuring a young Manu Dibango on sax) – a real crate-digger’s gem but not an act in the pantheon. Another groove-based highlight, ensuring Find El Dorado breaks out of the ’70s saloon bar and onto the dancefloor, is Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire. Its previous existence was as a 1984 Willie Griffin single on obscure Dallas label, Grip: a weird, rubbery-sounding ‘outsider’ recording that must be heard (it’s on Spotify) to be believed. Weller’s version is stirring and, unlike the original, is mostly in tune.
This is another of Find El Dorado’s satisfactions. Besides the excellent music, there are stories everywhere you look – like the journey of One Last Cold Kiss from its source on Mountain’s 1971 album Flowers Of Evil (“Fucking terrible,” reckons Weller), via a transformative Christy Moore cover to the sinuous and dramatic Weller version on this LP. Then there’s the story of the day Paul Weller and Robert Plant made a record together, duetting elegantly on Find El Dorado’s curtain-closing Clive’s Song by Plant fave Clive Palmer. Weller in an Alison Krauss wig? It’s an enduring image.
Covers albums tend not to come with towering reputations. The words ‘contractual’ and ‘obligation’ are often employed in close proximity (NB. keen-eyed bores will note that Weller is back on Parlophone after three albums on Polydor). The superior ones are palate cleansers or re-fertilisations of barren songwriting soil. But the best are things in and of themselves – artworks the performer has shaped just as surely and idiosyncratically as the writers. Find El Dorado is one of those.
Find El Dorado is out on July 25 Parlophone.
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Find El Dorado Track List*:
Handouts In The Rain (Richie Havens)
Small Town Talk (Bobby Charles)
El Dorado (Eamon Friel)
White Line Fever (The Flying Burrito Brothers)
One Last Cold Kiss (Christy Moore)
When You Are A King (White Plains)
Pinball (Brian Protheroe)
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire (Willie Griffin)
I Started A Joke (Bee Gees)
Never The Same (Lal and Mike Waterson)
Lawdy Rolla (The Guerrillas)
Nobody’s Fool (The Kinks)
Daltry Street (Jake Fletcher / PP Arnold)
Journey (Duncan Browne)
Clive’s Song (Hamish Imlach)
*artist who originally recorded the track in brackets
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