“I had the Dubliners, Brendan Behan in mind, like an old Irish drinking song.”Paul Weller (343)

“I wanted to try and write an Irish drinking song that Brendan Behan or someone would have written. Originally I was going to make it more folky, like an old traditional drinking song. But it didn’t turn out like that, fortunately. If anyone can say I’ve copped them chords from somewhere, they can have a Blue Peter badge, they’re pretty strange chords, to say the least. I spent a long time fucking doing it. I wouldn’t say any of these songs came that easily, I spent a long time on a lot of them, I really wanted to impress meself, play some songs where the chords started to interest me again.”Paul Weller (904)

“I was trying to write a modern-day folk song, in the true sense of the term. When I play this live I can tell it means a lot to people, they sometimes take the words from me and raise the roof. The wood becomes a metaphor for life in the city, the tides of people, the boom of the traffic.”Paul Weller (344)

“This definitely strikes a chord in people’s hearts, a song for lovers. I’m told by some many people they had it played at their wedding, the first dance…Ironically, it’s really about unattainable love. But you can interpret it whichever way you want.”Paul Weller (345)

“People are still chewed up and spat out after working all their lives, paying their taxes, helping their community and country, only to be left waiting in grotty hospital corridors literally dying for a bed. The idea of the genie in the shed, it’s back to the Liverpool poets again, to “Heaven and Woolworth’s”.”Paul Weller (346)

“There’s some stuff about the National Health Service. ‘How’s your father today/Was he caught in the rain?/Waiting on a bed.’ This is someone who worked all their life, paid their taxes, all that shit, thrown back on the heap, dying in a hospital corridor, just the lack of dignity that people are afforded. These faceless fuckers who still control everything, the Establishment. Not the Labour Party, people we never even know about.”Paul Weller (904)

“We’re all just particles of dust, cooling down, reshaping, resolving. There are two levels to this lyric – the woman left alone contemplating her future and then the cosmic stuff, the bigger picture, and her place in all that too.”Paul Weller (347)

“Me trying to get a grip on becoming a thirty-something and the great grey mass that lies between the simple black-and-white world of my youth.”Paul Weller (348)

“I wrote it for his [son’s – Ed] fifth birthday. I managed to sing it on American radio on the same day as his birthday – it was me sending a message to him. Did he appreciate it? He will. He’ll get the sentiment when he’s had his own children.”Paul Weller (114)

“‘Love-Less’ is me soul-searching again. Loneliness is in everyone, isn’t it. There are always moments when you start thinking, “What am I doing in life? Have I done the right thing? Where am going?”Paul Weller (117)

“”I shake and fall/Underneath my sheets/The sunlight creeping/From my head down to my feet”, that’s how it starts off. Whitey [drummer Steve White – Ed] is a very straightahead sort of feller and he really related to that song. He said it felt like, “I’m 30-whatever, I’ve got two kids and a wife, and sometimes I’m just fuckin’ scared about what’s going to happen. Is the money going to be there, can I pay the bills?” I mean, if people think I don’t have my periods of self-doubt they’re very much mistaken. Those demons will always get you.”Paul Weller (117)

“I wanted to write about that macho thing, not against it but the other side of it. One member thought it was about coming down off booze or drugs or whatever. Steve White – who very rarely drinks and never does any gear – saw it totally differently. Just imagine you’ve got two kids, mortgage, bills and some mornings you wake up and just think, ‘Fucking hell, what more the spirit of the song, you got to be strong but there’s times where you wake up thinking, ‘Fucking hell’.”Paul Weller (904)

“Yeah, written for me daughter. Obviously there’s a fine line with those songs about your kids, some can be awful, but I like it. The way she makes me feel, to see her little face, her warmth. Her smile alone makes me feel good about the world – optimistic.”Paul Weller (904)

“Well, it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, I was actually on the ocean when I started writing it, it just popped into my head. It started off like an eco-song but I thought I don’t know whether I can go down that road, so I just sort of turned it around into a dual thing. So some of it is about the music business as well, based on one particular person – it’s not worth going into, another MD. Another useless bit of blubber. He’s gone now. Just all this, ‘Oh the music business is going downhill, the sales are not as good,’ it’s always the musicians who get the blame. The music business is so fucking greedy, you should look and see why the music business is going down the pan: your own greed and lack of creativity. They never start anything, do they? They just leap on it and make as much as they can out of it. Then when it’s all dead and redundant, it’s always someone else’s fault.”Paul Weller (904)

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