Paul Weller has never treated music as something separate from the rest of life.
The politics are in the songs: class, racism, war, power, violence and the people left to deal with decisions made by somebody else. They are in the benefit gigs, the charity records, the causes he has supported and the moments when he has decided that saying nothing would feel worse than making people uncomfortable.
That has always created a tension. A concert can be a place to escape the news, sing along and share something joyful with thousands of strangers. It can also be a public platform, with an audience, money and attention that an artist may feel obliged to use.
Sheeran, Macklemore – and Gallagher
The argument has become particularly visible through the recent dispute involving Macklemore and Ed Sheeran. Macklemore used the stage to make pro-Palestinian comments and was subsequently removed from Sheeran’s North American tour. Sheeran has said the decision was made by promoters and venues, while presenting himself as someone who wants concerts to remain inclusive and non-political.
I can understand both positions. My own children love Ed Sheeran. They know the songs, the choruses, the Amazon music account is full of endless plays. A concert for them would be a place to sing along, have fun and share an experience – not hear a foreign-policy argument. That is not a trivial view of what music is for. It is one of the reasons music matters.
But Macklemore’s argument is also difficult to dismiss. If an artist has a platform and sees a humanitarian catastrophe being ignored or minimised, refusing to use that platform can feel like a political decision in itself.
There’s a third position worth putting alongside these two, and it belongs to a very different kind of British band.
Noel Gallagher has never exactly been apolitical. He supported Labour, met Tony Blair, talked about the minimum wage and Iraq, and later became increasingly cynical about party politics. But that is different from making politics part of the Oasis experience. Look at the songs: there is no Eton Rifles, no Walls Come Tumbling Down!, no Soul Deep. Noel was writing about escape, desire, alienation, friendship, fame and being young – not slogans.
In 2002, asked about the Stop the War campaign, he was blunt: “My opinion means nothing. The people in the White House can change this. I play guitar in a band and we’re really good.” In 2024 he was even more dismissive of musicians using festival stages to make political statements, complaining about artists waving flags and telling audiences about wars and politics, and concluding they should “play your fucking tunes and get off.”
Nobody seriously argues Oasis concerts were morally deficient for it. You can go to a gig, sing along with 80,000 other people, forget about the news for a couple of hours and go home. That doesn’t make Noel Gallagher indifferent to politics – it makes his distinction between being a political person and making political music much clearer.
And it raises an uncomfortable question for the Sheeran/Macklemore argument: why is an artist allowed to build one of the biggest live shows in British music history without being expected to use that platform politically, while another artist can be removed from a tour for doing exactly that? Part of the answer is expectation – Oasis fans never bought tickets expecting a political position from Noel Gallagher, while Weller’s audience has been listening to political ideas in his songs since The Jam. But that doesn’t fully answer the question. Once an artist has a huge audience, does the size of the platform create an obligation to use it – or does it simply give them a bigger platform on which to choose whether to say anything at all?
Noel’s answer appears to be the latter. Weller’s has generally been different. Neither approach automatically makes the concert more meaningful than the other. That is what makes the Sheeran/Macklemore argument so interesting – and it’s the question Weller has spent nearly 50 years negotiating in his own career.
It started in the songs
The political Weller is often associated with The Jam, and with good reason. But the politics were never simply a series of slogans.
‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ is about the threat of racist violence, but it works because it is a story. ‘The Eton Rifles’ is political, but it is also about class, resentment and the collision between two very different Englands. ‘Going Underground’ turns Cold War paranoia into pop. ‘Man in the Corner Shop’ observes ordinary working life. ‘Town Called Malice’ sounds euphoric until you listen to what is actually being described.
And then there is ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’, perhaps the clearest expression of Weller’s belief that music could be both joyful and confrontational. Its politics arrive with horns, rhythm and the sense that resistance might be something people could do together.
Weller’s political writing was rarely music designed to stop the music. The politics were inside the songs. You could dance to ‘Town Called Malice’ without necessarily thinking about unemployment or a town running out of possibilities. The message didn’t have to arrive wearing a placard — it could arrive with a bassline.
The darker side of the argument
There is also a darker strain in Weller’s political writing: a concern with violence, power and the way brutality can be made to look respectable.
‘Savages’, from his 2005 album As Is Now, belongs there. It is more accusatory than a straightforward protest song, directed at people who inflict violence on the vulnerable and then hide behind authority, uniforms, names and flags:
“You’re savages, he knows you are / Do you not think that God is looking down?”
“The children run, to mothers / You put bullets in their backs”
Its anger comes from the contrast between those carrying out the violence and the people whose lives are being destroyed. The uniform does not make the act less brutal. The flag does not make the victims less human.
Then the politics became more visible
By the early 1980s, Weller was becoming increasingly involved in political causes outside the records. CND was important — he wore the badge, supported demonstrations and played benefits. Then came the miners’ strike.
In 1984 he assembled the Council Collective to record ‘Soul Deep’, raising money for striking miners and later for the family of David Wilkie, the taxi driver killed during the dispute. This was more than writing a song about a cause; Weller was using the machinery available to him – a successful band, a record company, television and radio, the music press – to raise money and awareness.
There were benefits for miners, anti-apartheid causes, CND, homelessness and other campaigns. He appeared at Live Aid with The Style Council and later played charity shows for organisations including Crisis and Shelter. In 2005 he recorded ‘Come Together’ for the tsunami appeal and performed for UK Radio Aid. In 2011 he appeared at the Brixton Academy benefit for the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.
The pattern matters: Weller’s political engagement has not existed only in lyrics or opinions. It has also involved practical action – turning up, performing, helping to organise, using the attention attached to his name to raise money.
Red Wedge changed everything
Weller’s involvement with Red Wedge in the mid-1980s is the clearest example of what happens when political conviction and organised politics collide. The idea was straightforward: musicians and performers using their popularity to encourage young people to engage with politics and support a Labour government.
He was heavily involved, but eventually became disillusioned – he has since described the Labour figures involved as careerists, said he felt artists had been exploited, and was particularly uncomfortable with the idea of joining a political club.
That experience seems to have stayed with him. He could believe in something without wanting to belong to the organisation representing it. He would support a cause, play the benefit and say what he thought, but became increasingly suspicious of party politics. That didn’t mean he stopped having political beliefs – if anything, he wanted to keep them independent.
The songs became less obvious
Weller eventually stopped wanting politics to dominate the music. In my conversations with him he has talked about how if he wrote politically now, he would essentially be writing the same things he had written decades earlier – songs that still have as much meaning today (sadly).
And yet politics keeps finding its way back in. ‘Bullet for Everyone’, from 2002’s Illumination, was a direct attack on Tony Blair and George W. Bush, written in the shadow of the Iraq War – angry and accusatory, aimed at political leaders who presented war as necessity while ordinary people paid the price. It’s a recurring concern of his: the distance between those who exercise power and those who live with what power produces.
A political artist doesn’t necessarily have to write political songs. Sometimes politics simply determines what they notice.
The song written after George Floyd
Following George Floyd’s killing, Weller spoke directly about the event and the wider history of racism:
“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. When’s it going to stop? As a human being, to see your fellow human beings suffering is fucking wrong.”
The song that followed – ‘That Pleasure’, on 2021’s Fat Pop – was a direct response to that moment. It rejects racism, prejudice and hatred, and asks what people are prepared to do rather than simply what they feel:
“We’re all born free / And freedom’s our right / Then why do we have to ask at all?”
“Get up and get involved / It’s now or never / It’s time to make that change / Get in this together”
“Lose your hypocrisy / All your contradictions / Lose your prejudice / Lose this hatred”
This is different from ‘Eton Rifles’, ‘Bullet for Everyone’ or ‘Savages’ – not a character study or an accusation against armed violence, but an appeal to solidarity, written in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder. The song begins with questions about children: “How’s my baby boy? / How’s your little sister? / Will they see the dawn? / Will they get that pleasure?” The issue isn’t presented as an abstract debate about race, but as a question of whether children will inherit a world in which freedom is genuinely available to everyone.
The people without much power
This is where Weller’s lyrics and activism meet. He has always been interested in people without much power: the person in the corner shop, the bloke coming home from work, the unemployed, the kid with nowhere to go, the family trying to make ends meet.
Even when the songs are not overtly political, there is a clear sense of where his sympathy lies – with the vulnerable rather than the powerful. That doesn’t make every Weller lyric a political statement, but it gives the songs a moral centre, which may be a better way of understanding his politics than trying to fit him into a party.
Across the songs, that concern takes different forms. ‘Savages’ is an accusation against those who use violence against the vulnerable. That Pleasure insists on shared humanity and collective responsibility. ‘Bullet for Everyone’ turns towards the people who make decisions on behalf of everyone else. ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’ offers the most optimistic answer: people can organise, resist and change things if they stop accepting the walls around them as permanent. Together, they suggest a political imagination broader than party allegiance – concerned with power, violence, class, racism, solidarity and the possibility of collective action.
The benefits matter too
Not everything has to be a statement. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is raise money.
The recent Gig for Gaza shows bring musicians together, sell tickets, raise money and keep attention on people in desperate circumstances. The first, at Brixton Academy in December 2024, raised more than £125,000 for Medical Aid for Palestinians and Gaza Forever. A third, curated by Weller, has just been announced for October 2026.
That is tangible in a way an opinion isn’t. People bought tickets, musicians gave their time, money went to organisations providing aid. It’s a different – and equally legitimate – model of what a concert can be.
And then there is Gaza
Weller’s position on Gaza has been more explicit than most of his political interventions in recent decades. He has displayed Palestinian flags at shows and spoken publicly about Israel’s actions in Gaza. In May 2024, after the Israeli operation in Rafah, he told The Independent that people should be “ashamed of ourselves” over what was happening and questioned the UK’s simultaneous supply of weapons and humanitarian aid.
At a 2024 concert observed by The Guardian, a Palestinian flag was on display; Weller didn’t mention it from the stage, but later told the paper he opposed genocide and ethnic cleansing. He has continued to express his position on social media. In 2025 he took legal action against former accountants after they ended their professional relationship with him following his public comments about Gaza – his lawyers said he had consistently spoken out against injustice, including apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
This isn’t a case of a musician suddenly discovering politics because something became fashionable online. There is a history behind it.
But what about October 7? This is the difficult question. In researching Weller’s public statements around Gaza, I haven’t found a comparable public statement from him specifically addressing the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t condemn the attacks, but the absence is worth acknowledging.
It is possible to be appalled by the destruction and loss of Palestinian life in Gaza while also recognising the horror of what happened to Israeli civilians on 7 October. Palestinian suffering can deserve enormous attention without pretending Hamas’s actions don’t matter, and opposition to the Israeli government’s conduct does not require hostility towards Jewish people. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. But artists don’t always speak in complete essays – they speak in posts, songs and from stages, often concentrating on the people they feel are being ignored. That appears to be what Weller is doing.
Which brings us back to Sheeran and Macklemore
The comparison feels personal to me too – my connection with Weller’s music, the podcast, the book, the relationships I now have – but also because my children absolutely love Ed Sheeran. They know his songs through repetition, memory and the pleasure of singing along. They’re not going to a concert to hear a foreign-policy argument; they’re going because they love the songs and want to be part of something joyful. That deserves to be taken seriously.
A concert can be a temporary escape from the news. It can be a place where people from different backgrounds stand next to one another without having to agree about everything – a rare public space where the point isn’t to win an argument but to share a song. If an artist turns the stage into a political platform, some members of the audience may feel the event they paid for has been changed without their consent.
But Macklemore’s position is that a public platform carries responsibility. The stage isn’t politically empty simply because the artist doesn’t mention politics – the money, the companies, the countries being toured and the causes being ignored all exist before anybody picks up a microphone. From that perspective, Macklemore wasn’t trying to turn a concert into a political rally; he was arguing the concert already existed within a political world, and that pretending otherwise was itself a choice.
Four positions, four ideas about what a concert is for:
- Macklemore: I have a platform and I’m going to use it.
- Sheeran: I want the music to bring people together, not become another battleground.
- Gallagher: I have opinions, but you came to hear the songs.
- Weller: Sometimes the songs themselves are how I make the argument.
The question isn’t whether one side has discovered the only correct way to understand music. It’s whether an artist, a promoter and an audience can agree on what kind of space a concert is supposed to be.
Weller isn’t a foreign correspondent or a politician, and he isn’t pretending to offer a comprehensive history of the Middle East. His public position has largely centred on the people he believes are being oppressed, and on his desire to speak out on their behalf. But there’s a cost to simplicity – somebody listening from the other side of the conflict may hear not solidarity with one group, but the absence of solidarity with another. The counterargument is that neutrality can also exclude people: for somebody whose family or community is directly affected by a conflict, a concert that refuses to acknowledge what’s happening may not feel neutral at all.
The danger is preaching
Some political music dates badly. Once the immediate argument has disappeared, the song can become a pamphlet.
Weller has avoided that because his strongest political songs are rarely just arguments – they contain people, places, characters, melody, humour, anger and contradiction. ‘The Eton Rifles’ isn’t a Labour Party leaflet. ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ isn’t a lecture about racism; it’s a tense, human story about the threat of racist violence. ‘Town Called Malice’ isn’t an economics paper about Thatcher’s Britain. ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’ is a demand for solidarity disguised as a celebration. ‘Savages’ is an accusation against those who attack the vulnerable and hide behind uniforms and flags. ‘That Pleasure’ is a direct appeal to reject racism and prejudice, and to recognise that freedom cannot be reserved for some people while others are forced to ask for it.
They are songs, which is why they survive.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting music purely as entertainment, either. People have enough going on in their lives without being required to engage with every global crisis whenever they buy a ticket. Weller understands that too – he’s spent decades making records that aren’t political: love songs, instrumentals, soul songs, songs about getting older, memory and desire. I doubt anybody goes to a Paul Weller show specifically expecting a political rally. They go to hear classics – ‘That’s Entertainment’, ‘You Do Something to Me’, ‘Wild Wood’, ‘Start’ and ‘My Ever Changing Moods’ – along with the new material.
Perhaps that is the point
I keep coming back to something Weller said in my podcast conversation with him. Asked whether he felt a greater need to address politics through his music, he said he only wrote something political if it came naturally.
That may be the best explanation of his career. He notices things. He gets angry. He sees somebody being treated badly. Sometimes that becomes a song. Sometimes a gig, a benefit record, a Palestinian flag or an Instagram post. Sometimes it becomes nothing at all – and that matters too. We shouldn’t demand that every silence is a political statement, or that every musician give us a perfectly balanced position on every international conflict.
The difference isn’t simply that Weller cares and Sheeran doesn’t. It’s that they have different ideas about what music is for. For Weller, music can be a way of noticing, challenging and organising. For Sheeran, music’s power may lie partly in its ability to create a space where people aren’t required to agree before they can share something. Both ideas have value.
The question isn’t whether Paul Weller is political. Of course he is. The more interesting question is what he thinks that politics is for – and I don’t think it’s about changing governments or winning arguments. It’s something smaller: to notice, to care, to recognise violence when it’s dressed up as authority, to reject racism when it appears in front of you, and to believe that walls can come tumbling down.
To raise your head. And, when you can, to do something about it.