There are lots of songs about now. Start now, the time is now, this is your moment, all that sort of thing. I love this one for a different reason.
I know it’s never too late
Paul Weller, Brand New Start (1998)
To make a brand new start
And it isn’t.
Brand New Start was the one new song on Modern Classics, Paul Weller’s solo greatest hits album, and Island released it as a single in the autumn of 1998. It reached number 16 in the UK. Weller produced it with Brendan Lynch, and the credits on the single say it was recorded in Studio 2 at Abbey Road in May 1998.
A new song on a greatest hits
That’s the detail I love as a DJ. Modern Classics gathers up most of his solo singles to that point, from Wild Wood to Peacock Suit to The Changingman. It’s an album about looking back. And sitting among all that looking back is one new song about starting again.
You’d forgive anyone for treating a greatest hits as a full stop. Weller used his to put a fresh line on the page. Turn the 7-inch over and you’ll find Right Underneath It and The Riverbank on the B-side.
When to put it on
This is my reset record. Play it when the day’s gone sideways and you’re tempted to write the rest of it off. Play it after a setback, or on the first morning of a new month, or any time you catch yourself thinking it’s all a bit late now.
There’s something about hearing it from someone who’d already had a whole career by then. The Jam and The Style Council were behind him, and the album it came from was full of solo hits. If anyone had earned the right to rest on what he’d done, it was him. He sang about starting again instead.
If you want to know why I still rate him after all this time, I wrote about Paul Weller: Dancing Through the Fire.
Never too late. Never, ever. Don’t lose sight of that.
