The Style Council: «Мүмкіндіктер мен Қайта қараулар»

Confessions of a Pop Group is the fourth full length studio album by English sophisti pop band the Style Council, released 20 June 1988 by Polydor. After the critical failure of The Cost of Loving (1987), tensions between Polydor and lead singer Paul Weller intensified, but Polydor paid Weller a hefty advance for the recording of Confessions. Backing vocalist Dee C. Lee became an official member during the sessions, while drummer Steve White left the group. The sessions were engineered by "Jezar" using two 24 track digital recorders, which allowed the group to experiment in ways they had not previously engaged before. Confessions is split into two sides, the first side (The Piano Paintings) featuring pieces inspired by jazz and classical music, and the second side (also titled Confessions of a Pop Group) featuring a more familiar, upbeat funk sound. The stylistic differences between the two sides is an idea not unlike that employed on the first record Café Bleu. Its usage of suites has led some to consider it similar to a concept album. Weller was inspired by numerous artists on the album, including composer Erik Satie and the Beach Boys, and his socially conscious lyrics on the album are unusually vitriolic and bitter. Each song on the album is accompanied in the liner notes by a painting by Dan Davies. With no hit singles and an unusual promotional strategy, Confessions was a relative commercial failure for the band, only reaching number 15 on the UK Albums Chart. The album received mixed reviews, with some citing its ambitions as successful and others feeling they were self indulgent. In the years since its release, the album has seen numerous reappraisals, with some critics posing it as the band's best album and as one which captured the mood of late 1980s Great Britain. Weller continues to think highly of the album. It has been re released several times. "How She Threw It All Away" and "Why I Went Missing" are often cited as lost Weller classics, having not been played live since the early 'rebirth' of Weller's solo career (around 1990/91). A key track from the album, "It's A Very Deep Sea," was featured when a reunited Style Council played the song at the end of a 2019 documentary about their work.

After achieving critical and commercial success in 1985 and 1986, The Style Council's third full length album, The Cost of Loving, was released in February 1987 to commercial success, reaching number 2 in the UK Albums Chart, but to hostile reviews from music critics. The album, which featured soul music and American style R&B inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, was dismissed by one later critic as "bland," and several years later, the NME included the album in a list of fourteen albums that "should've been an EP". Later on in 1987, Red Wedge, a collective of musicians, including Style Council lead singer and writer Paul Weller, who had gathered to help spread support for the Labour Party among young voters, failed to displace the Conservative Party in the 1987 general election, and the collective soon disbanded. The band's popularity was fading and the group were regularly being ridiculed in the music press, with criticism being aimed at Weller in particular. Tension between Weller and the band's record label Polydor was also prevalent, with the label becoming impatient with Weller's esoteric choices regarding musical direction and artwork. Weller was becoming more musically ambitious, and in early 1988 he and fellow band member Mick Talbot composed the songs for the band's fourth album, Confessions of a Pop Group, their most musically challenging project to date. The band set for recording the album with Polydor paying Weller a reluctant advance of £500,000. Tension between Weller and Polydor was especially prominent during the album's recording sessions. Long time guest vocalist Dee C. Lee, who was pregnant with Weller's child and would soon become his wife, became an official member prior to the recording of the album, This left The Style Council to become a trio of Weller, Talbot and Lee. However, White still plays the drums on four songs on the album. Jezar created a digital multitrack recorder setup using 48 tracks set across two separate 24 track Sony 3324 machines, giving him and the band the technical capability to try several things in the sessions they had not before. Using two 24 track machines rather than one 48 track machine allowed the band to use more production techniques on the album, including, in Jezar's recollection, "making perfect backup copies of projects, no cross talk limitations (no need to plan what was recorded adjacent to a timecode track), being able to copy tracks further forward or further backwards in time (to change the musical 'feel'), back up of multiple tracks (i. e. vocals) after you'd bounced or composited them down to free up space, spinning in (copy and paste) of one off riffs and musical sections into other parts of a song, non destructive editing of multitracks [and] immensely complex, overlapping multitrack edits." The Piano Paintings side features quieter pieces influenced by jazz and classical music, while the more upbeat Confessions side is closer to funk style pop music. Writer John Reed notes that the album's split motif, complete with the usage of subtitles, hints that the album could be a concept album, a sentiment shared by another writer who felt the album is "edged towards concept album status" by featuring two ten minute epics. A promotional text for the album described it as "somewhat conceptual." By far the band's longest album with a length of almost 57 and a half minutes, it is advised consumers playing the LP version increase the volume of side two as it runs for over thirty minutes. James Masterton wrote it was the band's most diverse album, presenting an "at times random blend" of progressive rock, avant garde and synthpop music. Composer Erik Satie was an influence on the album, particularly the atmosphere of his compositions. Weller regularly played Satie and Claude Debussy around this time, among other composers. The Beach Boys were also an influence on the album,

While Weller's lyrics on Confessions are socially conscious, as they had been on previous albums, Trouser Press felt the album contained Weller's "most dispirited lyrics," feeling his "general disgust at everything in sight is vitriolic and undisguised." The Trouser Press Music Guide called this section a "collection of jazzy songs with fancy vocal arrangements,"

The desolate "It's a Very Deep Sea" opens the album, described as "haunting" by one critic. Indeed, Weller saw the song as a "modern surf song Brian Wilson would be proud of, although he would have done it differently." The song's "emotionally explicit lyric" is, in the words of Dylan Jones, "unnervingly at odds with the lush arrangement, much in the vein of Elvis Costello."

quote box|quote="Widely ridiculed at the time, Confessions is, in retrospect, a curate's egg that’s well worthy of reappraisal. "|source=—John Lewis of Uncut, 2008 Dave Schulps and Ira Robbin of Trouser Press, however, wrote that the album was "a presentable outing." Michael Booth, writing in The Rough Guide to Rock, was generally dismissive but singled out two highlights; "Changing the Guard", which he felt was worthy of Frank Sinatra, and "How She Threw it All Away", which he felt returned the group to the sound of their early days. Paul Lester wrote very favourably of the album in Uncut, describing it as the magazine's favourite Style Council album and saying it provides "the most credible, and most compelling, depiction of 'the real Paul Weller' : the sentimental, wistful romantic luxuriating in European melancholy (strings, piano, synths); the suburban soulboy in love with modern America." Reflecting on the album, John Reed felt the album coincided with the passing of political idealism within pop music, and captured the period perfectly, writing: "As the country entered a major recession, and a year on from the failed Red Wedge initiative, Weller painted a vivid picture of a bleak, hopeless world, his previous idealism replaced by pessimism and personal regrets of hollow one night stands, of fraught relationships and feelings of guilt and shame. Coinciding with the death of political idealism in pop, this was arguably Weller at his most honest and, yes, soulful. Lewis wrote in Uncut that because the album made little effort to satisfy Weller loyalists, who were "horrified by the use of the Swingle Singers and the pastiches of Chick Corea, the Beach Boys and Erik Satie," they gave their copies to charity shops. Weller reflected on the album in 1998, rating the album four stars out of five and saying "Whatever I'd have written or done at the time would have been out of touch. But I still stand by it. I put a lot of time into it, and there was a better vibe than on The Cost of Loving. Lyrically, it was really good." Weller was angry at the decision: "I thought, I've made all you fuckers millions of pounds." Polydor released a remastered CD of Confessions of a Pop Group in 2000. Confessions was re released again alongside the band's other albums in the Classic Album Selection box set in 2013. A vinyl re issue of the album will be released on 15 September 2017, alongside a double LP version of Modernism: A New Decade. In 1991, after a stint with a group called The Paul Weller Movement, Weller launched his solo career with Go! Discs, initially featuring a more organic, rootsier sound mixing influences of soul music and rock group Traffic, pushing him away from the ambitions of the Style Council. Nonetheless, Weller would later take a more ambitious route that drew comparisons to Confessions. Writing for Record Collector, John Reed later wrote that Weller's solo album 22 Dreams (2008) "shares the passionate schizophrenia" as Confessions of a Pop Group and the Beatles' White Album, an opinion echoed by Lewis who felt that 22 Dreams was Weller's most adventurous album since Confessions.

All tracks written by Paul Weller, except where noted. Note: The above is the track listing for the UK release. In the US, the original halves of the album were reversed, with side B coming first, followed by side A.