Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation (10th Anniversary Remix Edition)

UMC/Island

£12.33

Format: 1CD
Catalogue No.: 862466
Barcode: 06025 08624667
Release Date: 27th November 2020
Genre: Rock

Nominated for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize.

Reflecting the urgency and claustrophobia of city life, the record dispensed with the acoustic, folky and pastoral influences of Weller’s recent work and introduced more jagged rock styles with angry, urban and metallic influences – Diamond Dogs, Low-period Bowie riffs.

Very experimental, mostly short songs but with a sense of adventure – often packing a suite’s worth of twists into one song – the updated New Orleans shuffle meets bonkers music hall of Many of the left turns arrive via the arrangements – witness the careening chaos after the chorus of Grasp & Still Connect, or the mutating psychedelia of Andromeda

Amongst the experimentation though, Jam fans will love the tightly wound collaboration with Bruce Foxton on Fast Car/Slow Traffic, the dense dangerous heartbeat and militaristic sound collage of 7&3 Is the Strikers Name (featuring My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields).

Style Council fans will appreciate the jazz waltz of In Amsterdam or No Tears to Cry – a sublime Walker Brothers style ballad, as well as Aim High, his finest blue-eyed soul ballad in ages.

The album was dedicated to “absent friends” …

John Weller – Paul’s Dad and manager

Pat Foxton – wife of bass-player Bruce, who died in early 2009. It was the first of Weller’s albums since 1982 to feature contributions from Bruce Foxton, formerly of The Jam:

“We’d both lost loved ones, and without getting too spiritual that was the spur of it. I spoke to him this time last year when his wife Pat was ill and that broke the ice” Paul

Robert Kirby – arranger of string sections for rock and folk music, best known for his work on Nick Drake albums (also worked with Vashti Bunyan, Elton John, Ralph McTell, Elvis Costello and Paul Weller – on the Heliocentric album)

“Stockhausen meets the Small Faces” …!!

Tracklists:
CD / Download
Moonshine
Wake Up The Nation
No Tears To Cry
Fast Car / Slow Traffic
Andromeda
In Amsterdam
She Speaks
Find The Torch, Burn The Plans
Aim High
Trees
Grasp & Still Connect
Whatever Next
7 & 3 Is The Strikers Name
Up The Dosage
Pieces Of A Dream
Two Fat Ladies