Next week, Paul Weller releases his new album Find El Dorado. Featuring guest appearances from Noel Gallagher, Robert Plant, Declan O’Rourke, and Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita, Weller’s second album of cover versions following 2004’s Studio 150 finds the 67-year-old former Jam leader exploring the more diverse corners of his record collection.
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READ MORE: Every Paul Weller Album Ranked!
Among the tunes covered are Brian Protheroe’s Pinball, the Bee Gees’ I Started A Joke, When You Are A King by ‘70s session hairies White Plains, and the theme tune to Adam Faith’s TV show Budgie (browse the full tracklist and find out who first recorded each song HERE)
It makes for an eclectic, thoughtful and warmly inviting listen, and you can read MOJO’s full, four-star review of the album HERE. Ahead of Find El Dorado’s release, Weller spoke to MOJO’s Danny Eccleston from his back garden in West London to talk about the idea behind the album, his choice of songs, working with Plant and Keita, and the continual joy of discovering new music…
The album feels very different from your last covers record, Studio 150…
I’ve been putting it together in my mind for a few years now, thinking about the right tunes and how they might hang together. Whereas Studio 150 was more, get on the piss and, What shall we do today? There’s a couple of good things on it, but this is more of a proper record.
A lot of these songs come from the early-to-mid-’70s. Have you carried them with you all this time?
Funnily enough, a lot of them I’ve heard for the first time only recently. Mostly, they’re songs that mates send me late at night. [Duncan Browne’s] Journey – which comes from ’74 I think – I heard that a couple of years ago on a compilation. Pinball I only heard last year – Jake our bass player sent me it. I Started A Joke and When You Are A King by White Plains are the only two songs I knew from when I was a kid. But I felt a lot of these songs had a similar mood to ’em, a sort of melancholia.
The title Find El Dorado, comes from the Eamon Friel song you’ve covered, but it also encapsulates the magic of discovering a great song or record from the past...
I hadn’t thought about that aspect, but yeah, it’s a reminder that there’s just so much great music out there that I’ve not even heard. And I’ve heard fuckin’ loads. It’s exhilarating, isn’t it, when you find something brilliant you’ve not heard before? It’s a great feeling.
Many of these songs are from outside the canon of cool. Like White Plains – I think I’d have run a mile if I’d just seen a picture of them.
(Laughs) Yeah! They were session singers – they’d been in The Flower Pot Men and a couple of them had been in the Ivy League. They sang backups on a load of great records. I loved the record when it came out – but I’d have been about 12. I suppose it’s kind of manufactured, but it’s a fucking great song, right? And without getting too technical, the chords are so interesting, and the shift from major to minor… It’s a really clever song.
Nobody’s Fool is a Ray Davies’ song that was the theme to the early-’70s TV show, Budgie…
I loved that show. They only made two series and then Adam Faith had that really bad car crash. At the time I didn’t know it was Ray Davies, although I always thought it sounded like a Ray tune. I always like those minor key melancholic English tunes. There’s something fascinating about them. Probably connected part of my own psyche of being English or whatever.
The Budgie character – a petty criminal whose schemes all go awry – is kind of a British archetype, desperate for a way to escape the hole he’s in. And the narrator of Pinball is a bit like that, too: “I’ve run out of pale ale/And I feel like I’m in jail”…
It’s a similar sort of character innit? It’s that English working class thing of trying to escape your surroundings, of being trapped by your roots. I had that same feeling when I was 16 in Woking, with dreams of grandeur and escape in London. And all of that was only enabled by music. I’d have had no fucking chance otherwise. I wouldn’t be sitting in my back garden having this conversation with you.
The best-known song is probably The Bee Gees’ I Started A Joke. You’ve said it’s a song that made you “rethink songwriting”. In what way?
I just think the words are just so incredible. I don’t know what it’s about or when there’s literal, literal, metaphorical or whatever, but it makes you think. Even the first line – “I started a joke…” You immediately wanna know more. But the Bee Gees were just such great songwriters weren’t they. The melody on this is brilliant.
The guests on the album include kora player Seckou Keita. You bumped into him at a Damon Albarn-curated show in 2016 at the Royal Festival Hall, with the Orchestra Of Syrian Musicians…
Yeah, it was an Africa Express thing. I don’t think I’d even heard that instrument before. But what a sound, man! And he’s like a master musician, one of the best in the world and especially renowned in his own country. So we just kept in contact, you know. And I said I’d love to do something one day. Anyway, I heard the backing track to Journey and I heard kora. It’s just got that beautiful ‘air’ sound to it – expansive, but not over the top. I suppose I was thinking a bit of Alice Coltrane, her harp playing. It’s like someone’s opened the window and it’s a beautiful summer’s morning and the breeze is coming in. That’s the vibe.
Tell us about Robert Plant getting involved.
We cut Clive’s Song, me and [Steve] Cradock, and both thought it could do with blues harp, and we both thought about Robert. So Robert came down to play and Steve said, Wouldn’t it be great if we could get him to sing? And I was a bit… I didn’t want to overstep the mark, you know? In the end he was fine about it. He’s like all of us, really. He’s a music fan. And just a lovely person. He’s a real gent and his knowledge of music, not just blues and rock’n’roll but the North African thing, is amazing.
You told me once that you weren’t much of a Led Zeppelin fan.
Well, I persevered with Zeppelin, you know. I mean, there’s some things I like, but it’s a bit too histrionic for me. But I love his solo stuff. That album Carry Fire – 2017 was it? – that’s fucking classic. There’s blues, folk, North Africa, a Middle Eastern thing going on. There’s so many strands they’ve put together. It ends up just being something really magical and really different and psychedelic as well.
One of the surprises is a couple of country songs. A new thing for you?
You mean like White Line Fever? I just love that fucking tune. It’s Merle Haggard originally, but the version I know is the Flying Burrito Brothers. I bought it in a record shop in Amsterdam when I was on tour – like, early ’90s. I just thought it was a great title, maybe thought it was about gear (laughs). Well I heard it and realised it was about touring, something I can get quite sentimental about, that view from the window of the tour bus at nighttime, on the motorway or the Autobahn, watching the white lines coming at you. I love that feeling, especially if you’ve done a good show. If it was a shit show, that’s another matter!
And Small Town Talk by Bobby Charles – that’s kind of a country-soul thing.
Yeah, that was another song someone sent me late at night. Mick Talbot tells me Dr John played Hammond on the original. But it’s the album version I like – they cut another one later, as a single, with horns and strings on which wasn’t as good.
Do we have more of this to look forward to? Country & Western Weller?
(Laughs) Mate, you never know! I never thought I’d do White Line Fever. We were doing a playback of it in the studio, me and Steve Cradock and Charles [Rees, engineer], and I did a line dance to it – you know, taking the piss, and Steve said, very innocently, Oh, yeah, I suppose it is a bit country. Well yeah – obviously. It’s got a fucking pedal steel on it!
Photo: Dean Chalkley