The Style Council – Gold Diggers – Chippenham – March 10, 1984 – BBC Radio 1 In Concert –
The Style Council this weekend – recorded at Gold Diggers in Chippenham on March 10, 1984 and broadcast as part of BBC Radio 1’s In Concert series. If parts sound familiar, I ran an abbreviated version of this concert last year via BBC 6 Music’s Live Music Hour from a few years earlier – that one ran around 20 minutes and this run around 40; so it’s the first half of the concert presented here.
What I wasn’t aware of at the time is this was the second concert of their very first Tour, on the eve of the release of their debut album Café Bleu, issued in the U.S. as My Ever-Changing Moods. So there is an energy and a tightness that only comes with doing something new and not yet succumbing to the grind of a same set each night for weeks and months on end. The audience is charged up because its finally hearing a full-on concert from a band that have already issued five singles – so there’s the excited energy back and forth between band and audience.
The tour would extend to the U.S. in May of that year, and like Paul Weller’s previous band The Jam, they achieved a modest amount of success, but not to the level they did in their native UK, which ironically was also true with The Jam – something I found baffling at the time, but maybe not surprising.
Sadly, The Style Council were relatively short-lived, with Paul Weller going on to establish a solo career and achieving international success as a result and he’s been doing it ever since.
Tonight though, it’s dialing back some 37 years and the excitement of a new band, a first tour and a bright future.
Settle in, it’s a good show.
