Paul Weller Dancing Through The Fire author Dan Jennings: Live4ever Interview

Dan Jennings' book Paul Weller: Dancing Through The Fire

Dan Jennings talks Live4ever through the exhaustive background of his new authorised oral history of Paul Weller.

Thankfully it’s been half a decade since the UK was in the midst of the second of three lockdowns because of the COVID pandemic.

And while you undoubtedly and understandably try and block out those long, dark months, there were some reasons to be cheerful.

The podcast boom for one. With time to spare and little else to do, countless enthusiasts took to the airwaves to share their wisdom on a variety of different subjects, and music was no different.

Yet while many ventures fell by the wayside, one former broadcaster lasted the course.

“My background was always audio, I worked in the broadcasting space for a long time,” explains Dan Jennings, creator of the Desperately Seeking Paul (Weller) podcast.

“I loved audio and missed elements of that because I hadn’t worked in audio for maybe 15 years, properly. I worked for Absolute and Magic in branded content up until 2019 and I missed that thing that I loved.”

“I had this idea that I wanted to do a podcast about Paul Weller, but I just couldn’t think of the angle. Anyone could do a podcast about Paul Weller, what am I going to do, just chat to Jam or Style Council fans every week? So what?”

“I can’t remember where it came from, but it just suddenly popped into my head, which was a truth, that I just had this regret from my time in radio that I never got to interview him.”

“When I worked at the BBC in Bristol we’d have guests come in, like David Gray, but Paul Weller never came in, and I never thought to make it happen.”

“I don’t know why, he obviously toured and did Bristol in that time. He did go into radio stations, but maybe not at the time when I was properly doing radio shows.”

“Then I moved from the BBC to commercial radio, when it was ‘Pop and Prattle’. I couldn’t fit an interview with Paul Weller into a ten second speed link so it wasn’t going to happen. I was never that type of presenter.”

So, with an idea in his head and experience in broadcasting alongside the obsessiveness that only comes from music fans, Dan Jennings put together the first few episodes of his nascent project.

“It was kind of tongue-in-cheek, and I didn’t genuinely think that would be a thing,” he explains. “Most podcasts start, they do maybe 10-20 episodes, then they fizzle out.”

“Most people realise that you’re starting from an audience of zero, and its bloody hard work. So I thought of that, thinking it would be a fun thing to do and working in the audio space.”

“Then it went nuts, from really early on! I was thinking, ‘Hold on, I think there’s something here’. It just got out of control. I thought it was just a silly idea at the beginning.”

But the momentum kept building, with more guests close to Weller agreeing to take part, including current and former bandmates such as Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton from The Jam, Mick Talbot from The Style Council and other musicians and friends from his solo career.

Managers, pluggers, photographers, journalists were all interviewed in a series spanning 180 episodes. Jennings was making such a positive noise with the project that word got to Weller himself, who eventually agreed to be interviewed, but also came with a suggestion.

“We did the finale and Paul had suggested the book,” Dan Jennings explains. “He gets asked all the time to do an autobiography and he often says in the press as well, he’s never going to do it. He’s got no interest.”

But he said, ‘Look, you’ve spoken to everybody, you need to turn this into a book’. This was before he’d agreed to come on, I bumped into him…I said, ‘yeah but you need to come on’. He said he’d think about it. What do you mean, think about it? Anyway, at the end of the evening he came up to me and said, ‘Let’s do it, Christmas special’.

In case you weren’t aware, the book in question is Dancing Through The Fire, the brand new authorised oral history of Paul Weller.

A hefty tome which spans his whole career, it’s the most detailed dig into what makes Weller who he is and the journey he’s been on, all collated from interviews taken from Dan’s podcast.

However, as a fan and completist, Jennings was conscious that there were many more voices that needed to be heard to make the book an essential read.

“His manager emailed me the following day,” he explains. “‘I hear you bumped into Paul, shall we get it sorted?’.”

“We got it organised and a few weeks before she said, ‘Paul wants you to hear the latest album’. It hadn’t been announced at that point, it was 66.”

“’And also, would you mind interviewing Paul about the album, track-by-track, and we can film it and use it on the marketing’? I was blown away. It then became part of the deluxe edition book which was brilliant.”

“I then thought it would be a good idea to interview everyone who had been involved in the making of the album, probably because I thought I could get Suggs and Noel Gallagher!”

“I did another 21 episodes with everyone who was on the album, from the horn section to the backing singers, to Noel and Suggs.”

“Then the book deal happened as publishers were talking to us. There were two options: we could either turn the podcast transcripts into a book, some of the publishers were happy with that. I wrote a proper treatment with chapters etc, and turned it into a proper oral history like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“I wrote the first three or four chapters, which haven’t changed much for the book. It was really nice, so we pitched that and got a publisher signed up.”

“As part of that, there were people I wanted to get that I hadn’t so it becoming an official book, authorised by Paul and the team, made that easier.”

“I was then reaching out to some of the people I wanted to get on the podcast and was getting introductions to Graham Coxon, Richard Hawley, even Dee C. Lee.”

“I’d been trying to get in touch with her management for a while, but we never connected. I did another 70 interviews.”

“Some won’t ever be podcasts, some were just little chats topping up guests I’d spoken to before. Then it was about crunching it all down into a narrative for the book.”

Easier said than done. The book comes in at over 700 pages, a huge amount of work and too much for one man.

I put it out to the audience as I hadn’t transcribed things as I went along. I had 200 episodes of podcasts that hadn’t been transcribed and you can do it with computers but it’s not the same. I did a whole load myself and then I got a community of podcast listeners and asked for their help. As each transcript got done I would then put the relevant bits in the right place, but at one point it was it was 1.5 million words because every single bit of Paul Weller content I had was in the right place.

“What I then had to do was edit it down. I spoke to a few people early on, like (music writer) Pat Gilbert, who really helped me in getting rid of some bits…it was meant to be 150,000 and it ended up being 250,000.”

“I couldn’t get it down any further because I wanted to do the whole career. As a fan, you want the whole story.”

“I had a really good conversation with (author) Daniel Rachel because he’d done a couple of good oral histories that I loved.”

“He said to imagine it like a play, where people are talking to each other and building up a story, but you’ve got to take the names out.”

“Just because you’ve got a showbiz name the content has got to stand up on its own and be interesting. That was really helpful, because I was so close to the podcast content, with people I now know, and you want to get everybody in, but it’s impossible.”

“You just have to take out who the people are, and does it drive the story forward? Is it going to make the narrative work and move on, and if not then it has to go.”

“That was the hardest bit, what do you keep and what do you not? One of the key narratives in the book is the story of Paul Weller’s father, John, who managed him from the beginning of his career right up until his death in 2009.”

However, being a loving tribute means it doesn’t shy away from his problems. “That was also one of the things I wanted to keep, was those stories about John,” Dan Jennings confirms.

“Good and bad, because sometimes there were people who were critical of his approach as a manager, or the naivety or whatever, but I thought it was really important to tell the story.”

“At the beginning of the book Ann (Weller’s mother), Paul and Nicky (his sister) all say it wouldn’t have happened without John.”

“If you tell the story of Paul as a musician you have to tell that story of John as well, otherwise none of it would have happened.”

“Rick and Bruce agreed: if The Jam doesn’t happen then none of it happens. The book wouldn’t have a story. Also, I think with what happened to John, obviously it’s devastating for the family, but it does light a fuse under what comes next, with 22 Dreams, Wake Up The Nation, Sonik Kicks.”

I don’t think that’s just an age thing, it’s got to be connected. Life’s short, let’s do what I want to do type of thing. If the book is a stick of rock, John is the name all the way through. It’s certainly the bit where Weller threw all the rules out of the window, in terms of making an album. And so many of the stories about John are funny as well.

The book also touches upon Paul Weller’s drinking at various stages in his career, and some of the contributors are honest in their perception.

Yet, being an official Weller project, surely Dan Jennings was conscious of having the former Jam fan lurking over his shoulder? Apparently not.

“Obviously I’m a fan first and foremost, and I wanted to ensure you saw other sides of it, but I didn’t want it to be a tabloid thing.”

“The drinking started from such a young age, and you couldn’t really avoid it. The amount of booze back in the Jam days…then there are the periods where Paul goes teetotal when he realises it isn’t good for him.”

“But when he knocked it on the head 15 years ago, telling that story of the resolve of being able to kill something that way, and not returning to it, echoes The Jam.”

“He can just cut something off and seemingly not want to return to it. I think that’s a very interesting character trait.”

With a career spanning half-a-century the stories are nearly endless, so asking the author to pick a favourite story seems a fool’s errand, but Dan Jennings gives it a go.

“My discovery of Paul Weller was in the early 90s, so all the stuff of him without a record deal and the industry thinks he’s washed up, I found that fascinating.”

“I spoke to him and he told me he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. They were playing a gig in Italy and the band didn’t know how to finish a song.”

One of the interview excerpts with Weller made headline news a few weeks ago, when he admitted that he was planning to take a break, at least from writing.

Fans were concerned but, Weller being Weller, he announced a series of 2026 shows within days, to much relief.

“I last saw him in March and I got the sense that he wasn’t writing anything particularly,” Dan Jennings clarifies.

“He’s done a few little collaborations but he wasn’t actively writing, which is a change. There aren’t many periods where that’s happened. Maybe it is just to recharge the batteries and see what’s next.”

As for Dan Jennings, the future is equally uncertain, but he knows for sure that a break is also much needed.

There’s been a lot of sacrifice, family-wise. It’s been a lot of work; the research, the interviewing, the writing, the promotion, all the social media stuff you have to do. It’s been a lot on the family, and I should have been spending more time with them than doing this nonsense.

“There’s the 50th anniversary of The Jam coming up, so maybe there’s something in that. I’d love to be able to expand it up, but you don’t want to feel like you’re cashing in.”

“On the other hand, the content is so rich and there’s so many people I didn’t speak to. And he keeps on making albums!”

Long may that continue. Even as the man himself keeps moving forward, there’s immense value (and fun) in pausing to take in the work, the stories and the legacy Paul Weller has built along the way.