The song was over, but the audience was still singing.
At the second night of Paul Weller’s three-night run of performances at the Irving Plaza in New York, the focus of his musical retrospective was on the music from his band The Style Council. But as he had done the previous night, when the focus was on the music of The Jam, after performing about ten Style Council songs Paul said, “OK, that’s enough with the nostalgia for now”, and continued with amazing performances of his more recent work.
But he wasn’t completely finished with the nostalgia. He repeated a song from The Jam that was one of the high points of the first night, That’s Entertainment. Among the multitude of great songs from The Jam, That’s Entertainment is among their greatest. It is certainly The Jam’s most acclaimed song, coming in at #306 as The Jam’s only appearance on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, it was also the song my brother Kevin had requested to hear by cell phone when performed on the first night, and getting a repeat performance on the second night was an unexpected bonus.
The song is great live, as it has a very easy to join background chorus, which written text cannot do justice to, but is essentially a slowly delivered “la la la la la la-ah“. Now obviously that may not seem like much, but having a club full of enthusiastic fans singing along and hitting their parts with unity and precision is something great to be a part of. When the song concluded, and Paul and the band members took a moment to change instruments, or take a drag from a cigarette, the audience kept on going with an extra, room-filling verse of our “la la la la la la-ah’s“, and in unison, as if well rehearsed, the singing gently faded out to a perfect on-cue stop. By this point Paul had moved from his center stage guitar stool to the piano in preparation for his next song, and he watched and listened to the audience’s bonus ending to his just finished song. When it ended he said, “Awesome, fucking awesome.” It was one of the nicest moments of seeing a performer genuinely enjoy an audience that is likewise genuinely enjoying a performance that I’ve ever seen.