Hewitt meticulously charted Weller’s shift from mod-punkster to reflective soul boy: he even assumed the role of inner circle confidant under the nom de plume the Capuccino Kid, a title that echoed the re-emergence of a London café culture, paying more than a passing tribute to the Soho coffee bars that had flourished in the 1950s and earned a fresh lease of life when Colin MacInnes’ classic account of that earlier period, Absolute Beginners, gained new currency with the release of the movie version in 1985.

The fact that Weller pinned his colours to the resurgent interest in MacInnes’ novel, sometimes regarded as the first and even the best account of British teenhood, did this promotional bandwagon no harm at all. The paperback had been something of a cult item since its publication in 1959, but it took the long-delayed big screen production aided by the endorsement of the Style Council’s respected frontman to propel Absolute Beginners into the limelight.

Even though Julien Temple’s movie was widely panned and made no huge headway at the box office, the general media furore surrounding this rare example of a British, big screen musical did at least give MacInnes belated recognition as an author of wit and wisdom and also drew attention to his wider oeuvre: his other novels City of Spades (1957) and Mr Love and Justice (1960) and his journalism which peppered the weekly political press for a couple of decades.

The MacInnes cross-reference is more than relevant to Heaven’s Promise, the novel Paolo Hewitt published in 1993, a tale of the capital in the later 1980s rather than Absolute Beginners’ late 1950s, but one that trawls surprisingly similar ground – young love and the power of popular music, the diversity of London’s community and the pleasures and tensions that emerge out of that cultural intermingling.

If the central player in MacInnes’ piece is a photographer, Hewitt places a DJ at the heart of Heaven’s Promise, striking an autobiographical note as the author has been and remains a record spinner within the capital’s club network. The un-named hero (an echo again of Absolute Beginners) stalks a London just succumbing to the rise of a re-energised dance culture, fuelled by the arrival of the drug ecstasy.

But it is also a city strained by black and white tensions. Although Hewitt’s DJ is immersed in a multi-racial metropolis and its pleasures – his friends are of Caribbean and Asian background, he spends hours in a family-run Italian café – he encounters the stresses cultivated by extremism, too. On the one hand, black activists mouth their separatist doctrines; on the other, racist whites maraud around the sink estates where the far Right threatens a revival.

But Hewitt also manages to interweave some well-detailed cameos of everyday life, from the domestic (some neatly drawn passages on adolescent relationships)  to the musical (with a rich vein of references to classic soul, R&B and dancefloor tunes), from the literary and literate (name-checks for Sam Selvon’s black British novel The Lonely Londoners and Nelson George’s seminal overview The Death of Rhythm & Blues) to the political  (including sections on Thatcher, the Rev Al Sharpton and the onset of global warming).

The voice of Heaven’s Promise is strongly reminiscent of the MacInnes volume, perhaps overly so. Yet the fact that Hewitt’s story unwraps themes so familiar – in Absolute Beginners, the Notting Hill riots and the thuggish relics of Mosley’s pre-war blackshirts cast their sinister shadows – seems to confirm that we learn only one thing from history. And that is, we learn nothing from history.

Note: Heaven’s Promise is now out of print and unavailable. Do try the various websites specialising in the remaindered and second-hand markets if you want to track it down. Find out more about Paolo Hewitt, his writing and in his inspirations in the feature Q&E in this issue.