Paul Weller has opened up about a terrifying encounter in which he was attacked by a lion on the way to a concert.
The musician, who was the frontman of rock band The Jam, got the fright of his life when he was forced to travel to a gig in Surrey with his father’s friend Ronnie, who kept the big cat as a pet.
“So Ronnie would drive the van and the lion would sit in the passenger seat,” Weller, 67, said in a new interview with Uncut Magazine. “You couldn’t get too comfortable, though.”
On the occasion in question, the lion, who “wasn’t fully grown at that point”, went for a teenage Weller when he “leant on the back of the passenger seat” that was occupied by the animal.
“You had to watch that, because one time, we were sitting in the back and I leant on the back of the passenger seat – next thing I know, the f***ing lion’s gone for me,” he said. “I nearly s*** myself, man. Attacked by a lion!”
The singer explained that he then had to then endure a journey home with the lion after the gig.
“Ronnie just dropped us off and came back later – with the lion, yeah,” he recalled.
According to Weller, known by his moniker the Modfather, Ronnie “kept [the lion] for a few years and then I think he had to give it up because it was getting too big”.
Weller co-founded The Jam in 1972 when he was just 14, and the band rose to prominence four years later with their first two albums In The City and This is The Modern World.
Their third album, All Mod Cons, rocketed them to global fame and played a part in reviving the Mod scene in the late 1970s, and No 1 singles “Going Underground” and “A Town Called Malice” followed in 1980 and 1982.
Weller decided to leave The Jam in 1982, explaining in 2015: “I wanted to end it to see what else I was capable of and I’m still sure we stopped at the right time.
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“I’m proud of what we did but I didn’t want to dilute it, or for us to get embarrassing by trying to go on forever. We finished at our peak. I think we had achieved all we wanted or needed to, both commercially and artistically.”
Weller, who went on to form The Style Council with keyboardist Mick Talbot, has had a successful solo career, releasing 17 albums in all.
The musician also said in Uncut he is currently content to keep away from touring so he can spend quality time with his wife Hannah and their three children: John Paul, Bowie and Nova.
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