Gig review: Paul Weller at The Piece Hall, Halifax

Paul Weller isn’t joking when he tells a 6,000-strong audience packed into the courtyard and onto the balconies of West Yorkshire’s most picturesque venue: “How lovely to be back here at The Piece Hall in Halifax. We’ve got a long set tonight, so hold on and strap in. There’s something for everyone.”

Across the next two-and-a-quarter hours he and his eight-piece band will reel off 30 songs from his considerable catalogue that span the Mod pop of The Jam, the breezier blue-eyed-soul-meets-jazz of The Style Council and the broader vistas of his solo career that launched in 1990 and shows no sign of slowing down as he approaches his seventies.

The first hour positively rattles along, with Weller, buoyant in the midsummer sunshine, in unusually chatty mood. Starting with a rarity, Rip The Pages Up, from the 22 Dreams sessions, they move at pace through The Jam song Precious and Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up before bursting into one of his punkier solo numbers, Come On, Let’s Go.

The Weaver, once a staple of his live set in the early to mid 1990s but heard less frequently in later years, is introduced as the first song that he and trusty lieutenant Steve Cradock ever played together; Strange Town is dedicated to “all the old boys like me” who are much in evidence in the audience tonight. Performed with gusto, it draws a huge cheer, as does another Jam number that follows it, Man In The Corner Shop, whose astute lyrical portrayal of working-class life at the turn of the 80s is here mostly sung by bass player Jake Fletcher.

They mix up the tempos with the languid Up In Suze’s Room and the busy Afro-funk rhythms of That Pleasure; either side of the excellent Village, from 2020’s On Sunset, one of his best albums of recent years, are two crowdpleasers from the mid 90s, Hung Up and Broken Stones. The latter features Weller at the keyboards, which he’ll come back to for Have You Ever Had It Blue, Shout To The Top and Stanley Road – that last of which he says, tongue-in-cheek, is “from an album that was popular in the 90s – God knows why”. Here, the three-piece horn section led by long-time Weller saxophonist Jacko Peake is much in evidence.

A powerful rendition of My Ever Changing Moods is dedicated to the people of Palestine. “Tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered,” he says of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip with anger evident in his voice. “This is not a political thing, it’s a humanitarian thing. If you’re not disgusted by that then there’s something very wrong.”

The mood brightens with You Do Something To Me and a glorious updating of Long Hot Summer with some lovely shimmering guitar from Cradock and percussion from Ben Gordelier before they return to the 90s again with Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) and Out of the Sinking.

The era-swapping continues with More, from 2020, followed by the rapturously received Jam classic Town Called Malice, and Peacock Suit and Shadow of the Sun from the 1990s – the last of which allows Weller and Cradock to engage in a lengthy guitar jam.

The pair re-emerge for the encore with a tender duo version of “a very, very old song from way back”, English Rose, that ends with a fist-bump, before the rest of the band rejoin them for All The Pictures On The Wall and a soaring version of The Changingman. A coruscating Eton Rifles raises the temperature even further, with Weller swearily declaring: “That’s for f***ing Boris Johnson and all those other c***s.”

The altogether gentler Wild Wood, by contrast, is introduced as “a song of hope” and they end the night with Rockets, whose pretty tune is dedicated to the late, great David Hockney. “What a brilliant man and what a brilliant artist,” Weller says approvingly.

The same could very well be said of the singer himself, in the form of his life at the age of 68.