Paul Weller - Tin Soldier - Live Songs, 1990-1992

I've already posted some Paul Weller albums, both with the Jam and solo. I'm pretty much done with stray Jam material, but I have a heck of a lot more solo material from him to turn into albums.

Weller is the kind of guy who regularly writes way more songs than he puts on his albums, and he does lots of cover versions too. (He's a particular fan of putting out lots of songs only on B-sides.) For the first few years of his solo career, I found so many good songs that I had to figure out how to organize them into more than one album. What I ultimately decided to do was split the material into three albums: a live one, an all-acoustic one, and one of studio material that isn't acoustic. I'm going to post all three here so you can see how they fit together.

This is the live album. By the end of the 1980s, Weller's band the Style Council had fizzled out. Weller tried to start a solo career instead, but he was suddenly considered so uncool and so unpopular that no record company would give him a contract, even though he'd had dozens of hit singles both with the Jam and the Style Council. Those record companies would be proven spectacularly wrong, because he would be selling millions of albums only a couple of years later.

But in the meantime, Weller had to start from scratch, playing first in small clubs as he tried to rebuild his career. These live songs are from that time, from when he started playing solo in 1990 until he finally got his first solo album released in 1992. Not surprisingly, he didn't have many new songs yet, and I don't want to include any songs here that were also on his first solo album (simply called "Paul Weller"). Thus, many of the songs here are actually Style Council or Jam songs, as well as some cover songs, but all done in his somewhat different solo style.

The vast majority (eight out of twelve) actually are Style Council songs. I love the Jam and I love Weller's solo career, but I'm not much of a fan of his Style Council period. Many other Weller fans feel the same way. I think a big problem with it was the production, making the songs into slick, generic 1980s dance music that didn't fit Weller's style very well. So one nice thing about this album is that Weller got to redo a bunch of his Style Council songs and record them in a better way, avoiding the earlier production pitfalls.

01 How She Threw It All Away (Paul Weller)
02 A Man of Great Promise (Paul Weller)
03 Homebreakers (Paul Weller)
04 My Ever Changing Moods (Paul Weller)
05 Precious (Paul Weller)
06 Work to Do - Pity Poor Alfie (Paul Weller)
07 The Piccadilly Trail (Paul Weller)
08 Tin Soldier (Paul Weller)
09 Ummh (Paul Weller)
10 Shopping (Paul Weller)
11 The Cost of Loving (Paul Weller)
12 [When You] Call Me (Paul Weller)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15849054/PaulW_1990-1992_TinSldierLive_atse.zip.html

The cover is of Paul Weller playing at a Tower Records store in New York City in 1992.