The band are the Style Council. The new LP is Our Favourite Shop. The studio is Solid Bond. The breakfast is served.

Weller furrows his brow and munches thoughtfully on his toast, Talbot sips his tea and suddenly looks very old. Breakfast with the Style Council was a strange enough notion but nobody had expected to get into elementary musical existentialism before the croissants.

"I suppose it depends a lot on your definition of the word but I am a musician," decides Weller. "I definitely take myself more seriously as a musician these days. That's probably because I've worked with Mick and Steve White who are both really good musicians. There's been much more of an incentive for me to come up to standard."

"Although you develop anyway," adds Talbot. "You may reach a peak as a musician but you develop and learn all the time if you stay in it. You can develop in ways that you don't even appreciate yourself."

So the term musician is no longer a dirty one?

"It's a fact that if you make money from making music then you are a musician," concludes Talbot. "That's what I understand by the term musician."

By this definition Paul Weller is a musician. His gifts as songwriter and guitar player would comply with the various creative criteria by which musicians are judged but he has certainly made money from making music. This wealth tempered ironically with Weller's socialist principles has produced a number of good things. Firstly he was able to shake the debris of The Jam from his shoes and inaugurate the Style Council. This not only served as an excellent outlet for contemporary British Soul but provided a showcase and a stepping stone for many young musicians — a sort of musical YTS that paid properly and got results. The other project which became a target for a lot of Weller wealth channeling was Solid Bond Studios. Formerly Polygram studios, Paul and father/manager John took over in September '83 and set about making it their own.

"This place came up for sale and because we'd done so much work in here they offered it to us first," Weller explains. "It was the chance of a lifetime blah blah blah. Technically we only had to make a few embellishments but the main thing we did was decorate it. The biggest change it will undergo in the future will be when we get a Solid State desk which should really get things moving.

"I've always really liked this place though. I've always really liked the atmosphere. When they put it up for sale I didn't really consider the equipment it had in it, I just liked the fact that the room was good and it was well located. The technical side of things you can always bring up to standard but you can't upgrade the atmosphere of a place. You can't buy that."

Breakfast in the studio canteen has been arranged to discuss the current state of the Style Council and Our Favourite Shop, the new LP recorded, naturally, at Solid Bond. The environment makes for good musician's talk. Paul Weller makes a decent cup of tea.

"It's very much a group sound on the LP," says Talbot. "It's more self-contained. I think the last LP could have given the impression that there were a lot of different ideas being thrown about but this one seems to have more of a direction. The breaks and the bridges are more intuitive and the interplay on those parts between guitar and keyboards and rhythm section is a lot more confident."

"It's more structured," adds Weller. "We spent a lot more time in preparation before we actually recorded it. Then we kept demoing and re-demoing until we whittled the songs down to exactly what we wanted sound wise and arrangement wise. Like a process of elimination until the tracks couldn't possibly, to our minds, be any better. With some tracks we didn't demo them, we just rehearsed them like it was live and then recorded them. Some of the stuff was just rehearsed with me, Mick and Steve with no bass or anything and then we worked the other instruments in as we went along. I think that contributed towards that tight combo sound.

"Mick normally sorts out the technical side because he's more au fait with music and that, notes and all that stuff. So he arranges the brass and the keyboards and that type of thing. I sit about and sing the odd tune to people and make the tea."

"After we've sorted a song out or demoed it," says Talbot, "we'll either give the band demos up front or work it out gradually in rehearsal. Rhythm section first, then the keyboards and then the brass."

The zest and enthusiasm projected by the Style Council as a complete unit leaves the tired session clique wallowing in their own cynicism. Some unsavoury run-ins with our seasoned brothers have reinforced the Council's youth policy.

"We had this really crappy experience with the session musicians we used on Shout to the Top," rants Weller, "and we got these session players in to do the strings who were meant to be the be all and end all of string playing and they were fucking awful. Their playing wasn't fantastic for a start, they weren't half as good as they thought they were and they were so arrogant. They'd do a take and it would be out of tune. I mean you don't need to be a mastermind to recognise something that's out of tune but the leader would come in and give us all this crap about how perfect it was. That attitude makes me sick, just 'cos they can play a couple of crappy fucking concertos they think they're the last say on strings."

"We got this bunch of young string players in now," reasons Mick, "and they're really enthusiastic and they listen to Pop music so you can make references. They even know our music!"

But youth isn't an automatic passport into the Style Council and, as with Weller and Talbot's playing, technical expertise never takes precedent over feel.

"If they can't get it right after a couple of days," says Talbot, "the best thing to say is 'ta-ta' and you get someone else, because it's very important to pick the right people. You don't want them to play everything you did — including the mistakes — note perfect. So you choose someone with the right feel who can interpret the songs the right way. There's no point in getting carbon copies of yourself."

"We were trying to get a bass player," recalls Weller, "and you'd get all these people who could play that very Funky style but when it came to the bass line for Speak Like A Child they just couldn't do it and it's a very simple bass line. A lot of them just couldn't get the swing of it. It's very hard to get people who don't play all over the place. We're very conscious of space in the music and we're always very aware when we do too much. A good example of a band who use space well was the MGs. Forget about the music but their sense of space and the way they arranged their rhythm tracks was brilliant. It's all those little gaps that give the track life. It's like that old saying, 'it's what you don't play that matters.'"

The Solid Bond control room is littered with Weller's excellent guitar collection. Surprising, considering that two years ago he was seldom seen with anything but a Rickenbacker in his hands. But with the assistance of his charmingly neanderthal guitar roadie, Dave, he has accumulated a fine assemblage including a beautiful matching Epiphone bass and six string guitar, a dead tasteful Yamaha semi and a shapely Aria acoustic. Has he discovered a bent for guitars?

"Some of them have got bent necks, yeah," he laughs. "I think the lay-off I had really helped. In the first year of the Style Council's existence I didn't play too much at all, even on the first three singles there wasn't much guitar. I purposely steered away from it but I'm much more interested in it now as a result of that. I've improved. If I see light at the end of a tunnel it always gives me hope and spurs me on. The sounds that I wanted, you just couldn't get out of a Rickenbacker or a Telecaster and this situation demands a broader variation of sounds. Having said that I have been using a Rickenbacker 12 string on the LP not for rhythm but for lead — it sounds like a bloody bouzouki actually — and I'm thinking of having a Rickenbacker converted to natural gas for use in the Style Council. Actually I had to use a Rickenbacker when we played live last year because I had one guitar nicked and I'd smashed an Aria so the Rickenbacker was all I had at the time.

"Some of the acoustics I've got at the moment are on approval," he adds donning guitar reviewer's hat. "I've got that Takamin classical with the pickups in the top frets. It's a good idea but it plays like a pile of shit. It really falls between two stools. It doesn't cut it as a classical guitar and it doesn't cut it as an electric acoustic. The width of the neck is just ridiculous, you can't get your hand round it. I need a classical for one track but I think I'll have to get a decent one. One with a smaller neck. The Aria acoustic is really good, it's got a good tone and it feels good to play and it sounds alright as well."

Are the aesthetics still important?

"The looks are still important but the sound has become a major consideration," he says. "I don't think I'd play a crappy looking guitar still. I've got the Epiphone Casino which looks great and it's good for the harder sounding stuff. For the sort of round sounding things I use the Yamaha Jazz guitar and that's beautiful, really rich."

Do you listen to many guitarists?

"I think Ben Watt is brilliant as a rhythm guitarist, probably my favourite. Billy Bragg? No, I don't think so."

"It's funny," interjects Talbot, "a lot of people thought that Ben played on more than one track on the last LP but it was actually Paul."

"I suppose it was in Ben's style," admits Weller, "not that he invented that fucking style. I think that style only developed in my playing because I was listening to a lot of early Donald Byrd and Herbie Hancock and Modern Jazz Quartet. That had quite an influence. But the new LP has got a lot of different styles of playing on it. I've used a wah wah guitar sound on the seventies type Funk tracks. It's actually a harder sound than they used on those tracks but it's probably the closest reference point. I really like that sound because it is dated but it sounds really, really good. You shouldn't not use a sound just because it's dated. I mean you listen to guitar on a track like Precious in a club and it sounds great."

"Sometimes we try out these clever sounds and we end up thinking 'Hey, revolutionary idea, let's use a piano'"

"More and more we find ourselves coming back to classic sounds," adds Mick. "We do experiment with sounds but we always seem to come back to equipment we know makes a good sound. Like if a chorus needs an organ sound there's no point in us getting in, say, a DX1 and getting a good organ sound when we've got a really good organ here. Sometimes we try out these clever sounds and we end up thinking, 'Hey, revolutionary idea, let's use a piano."

"So we end up using the piano, Hammond, guitars, real drums, real sounds," shrugs Weller.

This would appear to imply that the Style Council are opposed to synthesizers, but Talbot refutes the suggestion.

"We've been using a DX7 for ages," he says, "and we used an Emulator for a sort of Rhodesy sound with added brightness. We used this old Roland Vocoder for a string sound which was surprisingly very good and we use a Pro One quite a lot. I like it for bass lines. I used that on the bass line to Long Hot Summer. You know, don't get us wrong we're not pre-Moog people or anything but we prefer real sounds. Like if we're going to get a really good flute sound that is very close to a flute we might as well get a real flute in. We did the trumpets on Money-Go-Round on the Emulator but I didn't want them to sound like real trumpets so I pushed the old wheel at the end of the brass breaks so you could tell they weren't real. But again that track has really developed live with real trumpets. It sounds much better with the brass belting it out."

"Thing is," says Weller, "the more you learn about electronics the more you realise how limited they are. Like we've had a DX7 for quite a while now and the sounds on it just make me fucking puke — toytown sounds. So it leads you right back to where you started from."

So there's a lot of Hammond and acoustic piano on the LP?

"There are bits and pieces," says Talbot, "and there's quite a bit of Hammond. I tend to get heavily associated with the Hammond for some reason. I've probably used it more than on the last LP but whereas I used to try and get maybe two sounds out of it I'm now using six or seven different ones."

Does this reversion to real sounds apply to drums?

"Steve White's played drums on every track," states Weller, "although we use the odd clap here and there. He used a completely different set-up with his kit for each track because they're all quite different. Like it goes from Latin Jazz type rhythms to Pop, so the kit and the percussion set-ups kept having to be changed around."

Is the LP cohesive in its diversification?

"It has more of a theme than the first LP," claims Weller, "and there is more cohesion between the tracks I suppose. But some of the tracks are very hard to describe. Like Come To Milton Keynes is very hard to categorise, isn't it Mick?

"Oh, terribly hard."

Prior to the interview a Solid Bond engineer had been spreading rumours about it's owner's penchant for lavatories. Weller seems nonplussed by the idea.

"What the fuck are you talking about? A toilet? Do you mean my toilet bowl fetish? Well that's another magazine really. I've never used the toilet. I can only think that it was when we had two Leslies linked up and fed a lead through the wall through to this little chamber, a sort of tiled bathroom or shower room. It was to get a sort of natural reverb for the organ. Of course it didn't work. Didn't make the slightest bit of difference apart from breaking about four blokes' backs."

"We had one in the studio anyway," Talbot chips in dryly, "we just treated that instead."

During the photo session Talbot hammers out a little New Orleans Jazz on the Yamaha grand and Weller lays down a punchy four four behind the kit. I pick up a nearby semi and whip out a few Django licks but nobody seems to notice. (What he actually means by this is he plays like he's only got two fingers - Ed) Weller later picks up the selfsame guitar and in a flurry of diminished sevenths and neat Jazz runs proves just how much he has developed as a player. He says he's much happier with his playing now but gets worried about his voice.

"It was good for a while but I'm not so sure about it at the moment," he confides. "It's come to a bit of a halt again. I think I got a bit over-confident. I did a couple of singles and thought that it had got really good so I started writing things in my head that were actually beyond my capabilities and got very frustrated. The intention was there but the ability wasn't. I don't actually think that singing lessons or anything would help that much because I either think you've got it or you haven't. The Pop things I sing are good but on some of the Souly or Funky numbers it doesn't quite come off. We normally go for first takes and nine times out of 10 it's just a first take with a few drop-ins."

In the Style Council's situation honest where musical matters are concerned has become imperative.

"We've both a good sensibility abut things. We've got a mutual sense of good and bad musical taste."

Despite the youthful essence that courses through the band's collective veins there seems to be an overriding element of maturity.

"Well we've both been playing for donkey's years," smiles Weller, "but when you get into a new situation it doesn't matter about your past experiences you still, in each different situation, have to let things find their own level naturally and that's always exciting".

Weller coolly dismisses allegations that the Style Council are musically lacklustre in comparison to the power he produced in previous setups.

"What, you mean The Jam? That's bollocks. You can't compare the two. It's a different band, a different sound. I listened to some Jam stuff out of interest recently and some of it's really, really good. The latter stuff was very strong. But the first album was made up of songs written when I was 17... enough said really."

Whilst immersed in the subtle nuances that make up the Style Council's music does Weller ever feel the temptation to thrash a loud guitar?

"I do sometimes," he admits. "For example there's a track on the LP which really cried out for a loud guitar. It only needed one ingredient and I was convinced that it should be a really storming guitar. But then I thought that's too obvious. It's too simple to turn everything up and say 'this is angry'".

Whether you condemn or condone that decision is academic now. Suffice to say the condemned men ate a hearty breakfast.