Paul Weller: The Piece Hall, Halifax – Live Review

Paul Weller
The Piece Hall, Halifax
15th June 2026

Paul Weller is 68 years old and stillrestless,a songwriter who has spent nearly fifty years dissolving himself and starting again, from the mod fury of The Jam to the silk-and-brass sophistication of The Style Council to a solo career that has outlasted and outrun almost everything around it. Armed with a six-piece band, a three-piece horn section, and thirty songs drawn from across five decades, he brought that catalogue to The Piece Hall in Halifax on Sunday night. Thomas Sidwell was there.

There’s a particular kind of gravity that pulls certain music into your life and anchors it there permanently. For many in the sell-out crowd filling every corner of The Piece Hall on a long summer evening, Paul Weller is that gravity. He arrived in their teenage bedrooms via a crackling copy of All Mod Cons, or a battered Setting Sons pulled from a parent’s record shelf, or some feverish late-night listen to Sound Affects where suddenly, for the first time, someone was speaking directly to them.

For this reviewer, it was a boxset of the Direction Reaction Creation box set pressed into my hands by my dad, along with a stack of vinyl that permanently rewired what I thought music (and art) could be, and The Jam playing constantly on every car journey before I was old enough to know why it mattered.

Then, just as they’d pegged him as the angry young man of British punk, he dissolved The Jam at their commercial peak and reinvented himself entirely, The Style Council’s sophisticated blue-eyed soul and jazzy continental cool arriving like a dispatched from a smarter, more stylish parallel universe. And then, when that chapter ended, Stanley Road in 1995 pulled off something improbable: a record that sat comfortably alongside the Britpop moment without being remotely defined by it, a mid-life statement of such authority that a whole new generation claimed him as their own. That’s what Weller does. That’s what he’s always done, moved forward, shedding skins, refusing to stay where you put him.

Walking into The Piece Hall is itself an event. Britain’s only remaining Georgian cloth hall, this vast, colonnaded quadrangle of honey-coloured stone in the middle of Halifax, is one of those rare venues where the building itself feels like a participant. As the warm evening light fell across the balconies already packed two-deep, Miles Kane wrapped up a taut, confident support set (with some incredible leopard print amps) with now near-classics like Rearrange and Come Closer landing with a partisan crowd.

Then Weller arrived. Navy Harrington, white jeans, sunglasses, sixty-eight years old and still the sharpest man in any room he walks into. Mod cool not as affectation but as philosophy. As a way of being.

He opened with Rip The Pages Up, a deep cut from the 2008 double-album 22 Dreams, a record that, at the time, felt like Weller tearing up his own rulebook and starting again. It was a bold, slightly wrong-footing choice, and entirely typical. He’s never pandered. He’s always made you work just slightly harder than you expected to, and then rewarded you for it. That opener sent a message: this isn’t going to be a nostalgia exercise. Strap in.

Precious followed, once the B-side to A Town Called Malice but a song with its own angular, urgent momentum, before he detonated Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up and the whole venue ignited. Mayfield is woven deep into Weller’s DNA. The Jam covered the song in 1982, The Style Council returned to it in ’85, and here it felt not like a cover but like homecoming, the brass section (Jacko Peake on saxophone alongside two trumpets, all three on blazing form) turning the Piece Hall courtyard into something approaching a Chicago soul revue circa 1970. The crowd, a cross-section of mostly (shall we say middle aged?) who have lived entire lives soundtracked by this man, were suddenly twenty again.

Come On/Let’s Go surged in behind it, followed by The Weaver, which Weller introduced as the first song he and guitarist Steve Cradock ever played together, a detail that lands differently when you know Cradock has now been at his right hand for over thirty years. Some musical partnerships outlast marriages, bands, fashions, and governments. This one appears to be for life.

Strange Town from 1979, played, Weller noted, for “all the old boys like me”, drew one of the night’s first enormous, full-throated singalongs, its mod-revival urgency losing none of its charge across the intervening decades. Man In The Corner Shop followed it, bass player Jake Fletcher taking the lead vocal on a song whose lyrical portrait of English working-class life at the turn of the 1980s has only become more poignant with time. Weller has always been a class-conscious songwriter, not in the performed, collegiate sense, but the real kind, rooted in the terraced streets of Woking and a political fire that has never fully dimmed.

Which brought us to the moment of the night that transcended the concert entirely. Before My Ever Changing Moods, Weller spoke plainly to the crowd about Palestine. The bass drum skins were already wrapped in Palestinian flag colours. His piano bore the flag. The merch stand carried Free Gaza T-shirts. And now he said, with anger audible beneath every word: “Tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered. This is not a political thing – it’s a humanitarian thing. If you’re not disgusted by that, there’s something very wrong.” The performance that followed, dedicated to the people of Gaza, was galvanised by something beyond musicianship. The Style Council’s My Ever Changing Moods has always been a song about restlessness and yearning, but in that moment, played in that courtyard, under that dedication, it became something else. A lament. A refusal to look away.

This is what Weller has always understood and what his lesser imitators have never quite grasped: pop music at its most powerful is not all fluff and decoration, but an argument and a challenge to the listener.

The set moved through the eras with the confidence of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to offer. Have You Ever Had It Blue and Shout To The Top! from The Style Council years gave the three-piece horn section their fullest moment in the spotlight, Weller at the piano, the sound suddenly enormous and blue-eyed-soul-sleek. Stanley Road, introduced with wry self-deprecation (“from an album that was popular in the ’90s, God knows why”), showed a man who can acknowledge his own commercial peak without being consumed by it.

You Do Something To Me was, as it always is, a moment of near-religious experience for a significant portion of the audience. Long Hot Summer, updated and shimmering with some gorgeously languid guitar work from Cradock, was Summer itself, bottled and released into the Halifax air. Out Of The Sinking and Can You Heal Us (Holy Man), mid-nineties solo cuts that the casual fan might have forgotten but that any proper Weller devotee holds close, sat alongside Village from 2020’s On Sunset, a reminder that he has continued to make records of genuine quality deep into his sixth decade.

Peacock Suit snarled and glittered. Shadow Of The Sun extended into a lengthy guitar exchange between Weller and Cradock that was less a solo and more a conversation between two people who’ve long since run out of need for words.

The encore began with just the two of them: Weller and Cradock, acoustic and electric, stripping English Rose down to its bones. Written for All Mod Cons in 1978, it is one of the most quietly devastating songs in the entire English-language canon, a love letter to home from someone who already knew, even then, that home is a concept as much as a place. Played like that, in that beautiful courtyard with the sunset on the precipice, it was nearly overwhelming.

The band returned. All The Pictures On The Wall, then The Changingman soaring, then The Eton Rifles, and here Weller delivered his verdict on its most famous alumni with full-blooded profanity, dedicating the song specifically and savagely to Boris Johnson and company. The crowd roared. Forty-odd years on from its release and Eton Rifles remains one of British punk’s most perfectly aimed political missiles.

Wild Wood, introduced as “a song of hope,” brought the temperature back down from its white heat to something gentler and more enduring. And then Rockets closed proceedings, dedicated to David Hockney, who died last week, a giant of English art and a man who, like Weller, spent a lifetime insisting on his own vision regardless of fashion. “What a brilliant man and what a brilliant artist,” Weller said. The same could have been said from the stage back at him.

Thirty songs across two-and-a-quarter hours. Three chapters of an ongoing story: The Jam, The Style Council, the solo years, all woven together by a band playing at the very top of their craft, in one of the country’s finest outdoor spaces, on a summer(ish) night that felt, for a while, like the world had contracted to precisely these stone walls.

Paul Weller is not a heritage act. Heritage acts look backwards because there is nothing left ahead of them. Weller still moves forward, politically engaged, musically restless, uninterested in the comfortable option. He just happens to have fifty years of extraordinary work to draw on while he does it.

Paul Weller Website | Instagram | Facebook

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Words by Thomas Sidwell, more work on his author profilehere

Photos by Andrew Twambley. You can find Andrew at hiswebsite