The Paris Match: Revisiting a Tracey Thorn and Paul Weller collaboration

Later this month, a revamped version of the 1984 Style Council album Cafe Bleu will be released, and Paul Weller & co. have been goosing the deluxe treatment with social media posts.

On YouTube, there’s an extended version of Paris Match, a travelogue of a song that Weller and Style Council colleague Mick Talbot reinvented from an original Weller-fronted version from the year before. For the album (it was released in Canada and elsewhere as My Ever-Changing Moods), they recruited Tracey Thorn to sing. Everything But The Girl was just getting going, and this was the song that helped make me a fan of her talent for life.

Thorn is a gifted writer, too; apart from her columns and several books, check out her perfectly titled 2013 memoir Bedsit Disco Queen. In addition to her EBTG work with partner Ben Watt and her voluminous solo work, Thorn is renowned for teaming up with folks, from Massive Attack to Lloyd Cole.

Here’s the newly released version of Paris Match.