I'll take this Brit award, but no royal honours, please ... Photograph: PA
News that Paul Weller turned down a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List last summer has provoked some predictable responses. Whilst the Daily Mail despatched reporters to Somerset House with orders to discover blue blood in the Weller family tree (probably), the Mirror put it down to sheer grumpiness, which is a bit like suggesting The Beckhams are only moving to Hollywood for the weather. Staunch anti-Wellerites in the music media, meanwhile, have been strangely quiet, flummoxed that their guitar-toting nemesis could have delivered such an unexpected curveball.
Yet Weller has long been the master of the artistic googly. At the peak of The Jam's powers he insisted on CND stalls being erected at gigs, despite the fact they would often end the evening resembling driftwood. In the days of The Style Council, songs about everything from from the Miners Strike (All Gone Away) to fox hunting (Bloodsports) to Thatcherism in general (Life At A Top People's Health Farm) came as standard, driving a (red) wedge between the singer and the hard of thinking.
Whilst grizzled veterans like Eric Clapton would blather on about Enoch Powell the minute conversation veered off the subject of guitar strings, Weller set a leftwing precedent adhered to by every working class pop star since, from Ian Brown to The View.
In recent years, however, Weller's solo career has allowed critics to portray him as culturally irrelevant. More interested in Traffic than the Congestion charge; desert boots than his carbon footprint, he has been cast as Chairman for the Campaign For Real Rock, a card-holding curmudgeon in line with Noel Gallagher's memorable description of him as "the Victor Meldrew of Rock".
Until now. Having joined David Bowie and, after a fashion, John Lennon, in his refusal to tug his forelock, Weller clearly draws the line at gongs. In the process, he's both underlined his integrity and proved that the New Labour apparachiks responsible for the idea really are losing their marbles. After all, who'd make an offer you couldn't refuse to The Modfather?
