If Paul Weller hasn’t included this in his memoir, he probably should.
In a recent interview with Uncut, the Modfather casually dropped a story that’s part road-trip, part fever dream: in the early days of The Jam, a teenage Weller was attacked by a lion on the way to a gig in Surrey.
Not at a zoo. Not in Africa. In the passenger seat of a van.
According to Weller, the lion belonged to his dad’s mate Ronnie, who apparently thought it was totally fine to cruise around with a literal apex predator riding shotgun. “
So Ronnie would drive the van and the lion would sit in the passenger seat,” Weller recalled. “You couldn’t get too comfortable, though.”
Understandably. Because, as Weller tells it, when he leaned forward from the backseat, the “not fully grown” lion lashed out. “Next thing I know, the fing lion’s gone for me. I nearly s myself, man.”
Despite nearly being mauled by wildlife en route, the show still went on, and Ronnie, lion in tow, picked them up afterward like it was just another Thursday.
Weller’s long and winding career has never exactly been boring. From teenage punk prophet in The Jam to soulful genre-hopper with The Style Council, to a revered solo artist about to drop his 18th studio album Find the El Dorado this Friday, his path’s been anything but ordinary.
And yet somehow, “briefly mauled by a lion in a van” still manages to be one of the wildest detours in the Weller story.
He did publish a memoir—Magic: A Journal of Song, back in 2022. But if this surreal lion encounter isn’t in there, it absolutely deserves a chapter of its own.
