How The Jam electrified a generation
As Paul Weller tops the charts, Neil Mccormick recalls how the mods gatecrashed the punk party
Ionce spotted Paul Weller striding down Regent Street in the blazing sunshine, cutting through the crowd with focus and speed, so that by the time people realised who he was, he had already swept by. It might have been a metaphor for his musical career; the everchanging moods that carried Weller through the punk storm of the Seventies, the playful agit-pop of the Eighties, the Britpop revival of the Nineties and experimental rock soul fusions of the 21st century.
Heads turned as he passed, a ripple of smiles spreading in his wake. Because Britain loves the Modfather. Stylish and passionate, he has been a constant presence in our pop landscape for more than 40 years.
Weller is back at number one in the UK album charts today at age 62, with his 26th album, On Sunset. It is his seventh career number one, his first in eight years, since Sonik Kicks topped the charts in 2010, and its luscious, psychedelic soul proves the old warrior can still produce a finely-crafted song.
But Weller’s ongoing popularity is also testament to the extraordinary impact he had on a generation of teenagers when he first burst on to the scene, gatecrashing punk’s summer of revolt in 1977. Over five years, six albums, and 18 consecutive hit singles, including four number ones, The Jam were the most vital and life-changing group in the country. And one of the lives they changed was mine. I was 16 when their fierce debut single In The City came out, just a couple of years younger than this wiry, driven boy with a Rickenbacker guitar and sharp suit. I already identified with punk and was in the midst of a tumultuous engagement with music. There were two thunderous Jam albums in a row in 1977 and some electrifying appearances on Top of the Pops, all jerky movement, sharp style and fierce songcraft.
The Jam’s third album, 1978’s All Mod Cons, was the game-changer. I loved the cool pose of the cover and was enraptured by the thoughtful, philosophical, politically engaged lyricism set to elegant melodies and carefully layered arrangements. Epic closing track Down In The Tube Station at Midnight was devastating, its narrative of skinhead violence delivered like a Play for the Day set to Bruce Foxton’s nimble bass line and Rick Buckler’s racing percussion.
The album displayed a depth and variety unusual in punk. There were dreamily romantic love songs (English Rose, Fly), pastoral elegies (The Place I Love) and an anthemic cover of a forgotten Kinks B-side David Watts.
For Weller, punk had never been year zero in music. He was a fan of The Beatles and The Who, and covered Motown and Northern Soul songs. The pun of the album title connected to his devotion to Mods, those young men (it was mainly men) who donned Harrington jackets and turned up jeans, Ben Sherman shirts and suede loafers, and took to riding motor scooters in their badge-covered parkas. The Jam Army followed the band around on tour. Comedian
Ian Stone was among them, and has published a book, To Be Someone, described on the cover as “One Teenager’s Obsession With The Jam”.
“I was 14 and I felt Weller was talking to me,” recalls Stone, now
57. “As soon as I heard them, it became a bit of an obsession.” In his book, Stone describes his life as a north London working class boy, struggling at school, no money, few prospects, and a comically toxic home life. He and some friends went to see The Jam in 1978. “It blew my mind. I was 10ft away from the stage, and Paul was attacking his guitar like it had insulted his mum. The noise that three guys could make was insane.” After that, Stone followed them around the country. “For kids like me, everything was pretty horrible, our future looked bleak. Then Paul comes along, he’s not much older than us, his dad was a builder, his mum was a cleaner, and he was singing about things that made sense of the world.
“There was disillusionment with class division and the powers that be, but he was also romantic, and poetic, and hopeful for change. He really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. Paul was almost like the big brother that I never had, that helped me through to adulthood.”
That is key to understanding The Jam’s profound connection with their fan base and those fans’ lifelong devotion to Weller. There have been a lot of pop sensations over the years but The Jam were like a pop education. Weller started his own poetry fanzine and praised Liverpool poets Roger Mcgough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, whose Tonight At Noon he adapted into a song. He talked about George Orwell and William Blake as enthusiastically as he spoke about music and clothes. He guided fashion choices through his meticulous Mod dress code. As Stone puts it, “if you were into punk but didn’t want to look a right mess, Paul showed you a different way to stay sharp.”
John Wilson, the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s arts show Front
Row, was another schoolboy Jam obsessive. “The records had lots of beautiful overdubbed guitars and pianos, then live it was just this tsunami of noise for 90 minutes,” he says. “The crowd was seething chaos. I’d got a sense of that feeling on football terraces, but football back then was pretty menacing. At Jam gigs, everyone was on the same side.”
In 2010, Wilson edited Suburban 100, a book of Weller’s selected lyrics published by Century. “Jam songs were quite dense and sophisticated, full of characters, vignettes of ordinary life, pastoral reveries,” he says. “They didn’t always rhyme, and they could be formally daring, which is incredible when you think he was so young, and he’d had very little education. But he is emotionally intelligent, and he found a way to express his inner world very honestly.”
I only saw The Jam live once, an explosive set at the Top Hat Ballroom in Dublin in October 1978, the only time they played in Ireland. Not long after that, I was wearing skinny lapel jackets and paisley shirts fronting my own band The Modulators. The Jam’s popularity was expanding, and from 1980 they had a succession of number one singles including
Going Underground and A Town
Called Malice. In 1982, Weller announced the end of the band, bowing out with a final tour.
“I was gutted,” admits Stone. “The thing I loved was being torn away for no apparent reason. At the time, I wouldn’t even listen to his new band, The Style Council. I thought ‘f--- you, Paul, I’m not having that! Got your jumper tied round your neck? What have you become?’”
I did not share Ian’s sense of betrayal. I loved The Style Council’s political twist on blue eyed soul, and Weller’s music has continued to mean a lot to me over the years. At 62, he is still writing songs that express his inner world, and still at No1.
“I find it thrilling he’s still pushing himself 40 years on,” says Wilson.
Stone got a nice surprise after writing To Be Someone. “One day an unknown caller comes up on my phone. He said, ‘Hi Ian, It’s Paul Weller. I really liked your book. I’d forgotten how sh-t it was in the Seventies.’ It made me laugh. It was a tough time. Thank God for The Jam!”
‘I felt Weller was talking to me, it became a but of an obsession’