But the ear-fondling imbroglio is just the first step on the Style Council's increasingly erratic path. "Merton" Mick's crestfallen expression will become a familiar sight while Weller variously dresses as a cyclist, collaborates with Lenny Henry and is photographed wearing loincloth and bodypaint. Things come to a particularly barmy head with the Style Council's final gig, at which Weller wears fluorescent shorts and performs a choreographed dance routine to booing from the audience.
Fluorescent shorts, choreographed dance routines, loincloths, pretending to be gay: today, the Style Council's career seems less like something that actually happened than a particularly weird dream someone once had about Paul Weller. That it does is testament to the success of his 1990s reinvention as precisely the dependable trad-rocker his fans always wanted him to be. It brought him vast commercial success, but diminishing artistic returns: his recent albums have been so workmanlike the writer Jon Savage cruelly dubbed him Paul Welder.
The first sign that something markedly different is up comes with Weller's ninth solo album. Echoes Around the Sun is a single so strange and gripping that it's almost impossible to believe the dread hand of Noel Gallagher was involved. But apparently he and Gem Archer were responsible for the backing, a grinding Stooges riff overlaid with corrosively distorted drums, bursts of morse code-like feedback, melodramatic strings and a crashing piano. It all keeps threatening to drown out Weller's muttering vocal. What on earth is going on?
As it turns out, what is going on is a fairly dramatic rethink that suggests the maverick spirit behind the Style Council has once more been unleashed. No one gets their ears fondled - at least not literally - but 22 Dreams is eclectic, deeply strange and cheeringly unlike anything Weller has done before. There are atonal, improvised synthesiser pieces and instrumentals that recall the outer limits of the Beach Boys' Smile. There is acid folk, in the shape of the Pentangle-influenced opener Light Nights, the glorious Sea Spray and an alternately troubled and celebratory meditation on fatherhood called Why Walk When You Can Run. There is a song called Empty Ring that seems to be taking place on top of the Avalanches' Since I Left You. And there is stuff that doesn't just sound like anything else, including the implausibly exciting Push It Along, a raging mess of frantically-thrashed acoustic guitar, marimba, noisy abstract soloing and grunting backing vocals allied to a song that lurches forward in ways it's impossible to predict.
Even the most straightforward tracks are lent a strange depth by careering, ramshackle performances: the ballads sound shifty and troubled, the rock songs gleefully propulsive. Meanwhile, the more excessive moments - including a piano instrumental called Lullaby Für Kinder that sounds rather more like Richard Clayderman than you suspect Weller realises - add to the delightful sense of a previously constrained imagination suddenly running riot: no matter how baffling it may be, everything here sounds purposeful rather than weird for weird's sake. The songs crash into each other in a way that recalls a tipsy friend ripping records from the turntable before they're finished in order to play you something else they're wildly enthusiastic about.
Quite what has provoked all this remains a mystery. Perhaps he was jolted from his comfort zone by the nascent pop career of his son Nat, who describes himself as "kind of a mix between Victoria Beckham and Marilyn Manson". Perhaps the horror of having David Cameron announce his love for the Jam's The Eton Rifles has alerted Weller to the possibility of being too conventional for your own good. Or perhaps, after boring everyone else with album after album of grimacing man-rock plod, Weller finally succeeded in boring himself. Whatever the reason, 22 Dreams is a triumph of the most unexpected kind.
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