‘Long Hot Summers’ hits the Dutch TV screens, Saturday on NPO 3.

Friend of MMF, Phil Tilli, has been interviewed by Het Parool ahead of the broadcast.

Here is a Google translation of the interview:

On Saturday the VPRO will broadcast the documentary Long Hot Summers about The Style Council. Superfan Phil Tilli considers for. “It was a redefinition of mod culture.”
Peter van Brummelen – June 10, 2021, 9:04 am
The scooter in front of the house in Ilpendam makes no mistake: a mod lives here. Phil Tilli fell for the quintessential British mod culture, where it’s all about good music and beautiful clothes, as a fan of Paul Weller, also known as the Modfather.
It is difficult to measure of course, but Tilli (49) – once guitarist in the Moke group, now artist manager – could well be the biggest Weller fan in the Netherlands. Three periods can be distinguished in Weller’s career: first there was the punk trio The Jam, then he founded The Style Council, after which he started a solo career that has continued to this day.
Phil Tilli prefers The Style Council (1983-1989). A suitable figure to watch Long Hot Summers, the British documentary that will be broadcast on Dutch television on Saturday through his intercession.
But first we take a tour of his house. Lots of guitars, a record collection in which Paul Weller naturally dominates, a gold record from The Style Council on the wall. Weller’s latest album, Fat Pop, has Tilli in seven versions, including music cassette. It’s the record with which Weller (63) recently topped the album chart domestically – not many other artists can boast of having reached that position in five decades.
Tilli does not have a walk-in closet, but an entire walk-in basement. In the basement of his house, Fred Perry shirts hang neatly on a rack and many shoeboxes are piled against one wall. “I’m the most effeminate straight there is,” Tilli says. “You-know-who also has such an orderly clothing collection.” (For the uninitiated: that you-know-who is Weller).
Pinking away a tear
Long Hot Summers has seen Tilli about three times already – the first time he shed a tear when the documentary turned out to be a reunion of The Style Council – but he likes to put it on again before the visit. Excellent documentary, he thinks: ”There is enough in it that is exciting for inveterate fans, but it is also interesting for people who are not that familiar with the group at all.”
The Style Council was a radical break with The Jam, making Weller hugely popular especially at home in the UK. The Jam was also a mod group, but the music was often very heavy. With The Style Council, Weller also threw himself into soul and – somewhat more cautiously – jazz, both forms of music that were already appreciated by the original mods of the sixties. He also derived influences from classical music (wonderful how Weller pronounces the names Debussy and Satie in the documentary with a flat English accent) and even from house in the twilight years of The Style Council.
“The Style Council was a redefinition of mod. Truly revolutionary,” says Tilli. Many fans of The Jam didn’t get it. It also took me a while before I understood that house album, which his record company did not want to release at the time. And it’s only in recent years that I buy jazz records: Art Blakey, Stan Getz. That’s the beauty of Weller: if you immerse yourself in his music, you also get to know and appreciate other things.”
Friendship
The Jam did especially well with boys. “The girls also joined The Style Council,” says Tilli. The clip that director Tim Pope made for The Style Council for Long Hot Summer (the song from which the documentary derives its title) was really at odds with The Jam’s rather tough image: a film with an unmistakably homo-erotic atmosphere. “Some fans of The Jam are still angry about it.”
Phil Tilli has known Paul Weller personally for years. “You have to be careful with the word friendship, but we always see each other when he is in the Netherlands. We got to know each other when he recorded his album Studio 150 in Amsterdam in 2004 and often visited café De Koe. At four o’clock in the afternoon we started talking, at four o’clock in the morning we were still talking. On a subsequent occasion he introduced me to a compatriot with: This is the guy that drank me under the table.”