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“I can only say that anyone, regardless of race or colour, should be horrified by what happened, and is still happening, and that has happened for centuries. He wrote it immediately after seeing the murder of George Floyd. Fat Pop, the LP’s heart, is about how music can get you through the bad times Cosmic Fringes is Weller imagining the life of a keyboard warrior: “I’m a sleeping giant, waiting to awake, I stumble to the fridge, then back to bed” That Pleasure is his take on the Black Lives Matter movement. “It was a conscious decision to make it like that.” Weller talks about some of the tracks. “Yeah, they’re all short, like three minutes, and they’re all immediate,” he says. It’s a strong album, a collection of banging singles. This preparation meant that last summer, when Britain started opening up again, everyone was ready to record, and Fat Pop (Volume 1) was finished by October. A couple of songs involved other vocalists (the Mysterines’ Lia Metcalfe Andy Fairweather Low) and they did the same. At Black Barn, he’d record his voice and guitar, then send the resulting tracks to his band – Steve Cradock (guitar), Andy Crofts (bass), Ben Gordelier (drums) – who’d work on their parts. Black Barn consists of a large, comfy studio, an adjoining office (platinum discs, selection of old photo-booth pictures), plus the house next door, with garden and trampoline. “I was working a three-day week.” He had “four or five” tracks left over from the recording of his previous album, the chart-topping On Sunset, so he worked on those at his home in London before popping here, to his Black Barn Studios, every so often.

“Nothing else to do, was there?” he says. Work-wise, though, his lack of patience seems to have become even more acute recently he’s brought out an album every year for the past four years, and used the most recent, locked-down 12 months to create his 16th solo record, Fat Pop (Volume 1). Though he’s not cross all the time, by any means. By his taste shall ye know him (he’s also wearing old Prada trousers, and a jumper he designed himself for Ivy League outfitters John Simons)… alongside a just-under-the-surface anger, a time-is-ticking impatience, a suspicion of the elite. He is, and has always been, about music, and clothes, and details. In an inconsistent world of ever-changing rules, Weller is a constant. “This part here used to be a few millimetres deeper,” he says. He is explaining the subtle differences between this pair, and another pair he owned a few years ago. I n the kitchen of a recording studio, down a long lane, off a village high street, stands the wiry, wired figure of Paul Weller, looking at his shoes.