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The Jam
Snap!
***Preliminary liner notes, subject to change. ***
EXCERPTS FROM THE JAM: a beat concerto
By now The Jam had started to attract press attention and when they played a Saturday morning gig in Soho Market, with The Clash watching, they received their first reviews. One of these was from Caroline Coon in the Melody Maker who accused them of being “revivalists,” noting Weller’s Townshend-influenced guitar playing. When the review appeared Weller cut it out, stuck it on a bit of cardboard and wrote underneath it, “How can I be a fucking revivalist when I’m only 18?”
He then tied it around his neck and wore it down the pub that night. Strange cat.
The Jam had now secured a residency at the Red Cow and the Nashville, playing to packed enthusiastic audiences every time. “Then Chris Parry (Polydor A&R man at the time) turned up on the scene,” recalls John Weller, “and took quite an interest. He finally came to the Nashville Rooms one night when it was packed with about 500 people, and he was kind of knocked out by that. So he said about doing a demo. The first Saturday we had the demo arranged we couldn’t make it because the IRA had just bombed some part of Oxford Street and it was closed: so nobody could get to Polydor or anywhere else. Then we had to wait about two weeks, and that two weeks seemed like an eternity.
“Parry had just been let down by The Clash at the time. He’d also been let down by the Pistols, who he was after. So he didn’t want to let this one go, so that was that.
“But in those days I couldn’t afford to pay the phone bill so it had been switched off. He was trying to get in touch with me and the only way he could do that was at the building site I worked at down in Ash Vale. I told him the house number I was working at and that’s how he got in touch. He said, you got to have your phone on and I said I ain’t got the fucking money. I used to call him from a phone box in Ash Vale but in the end I thought fuck this, I’ll give you the number of the house. So I’d be working away and the woman who we worked for, Caroline, used to say, there’s a call for you John. Anyway he took us for the demo and signed us up…”
That Paul, with his natural in-built shyness, was also becoming a pubic figure didn’t help either. “I remember going down the Wheatsheaf pub,” a friend of his Steve Carver remembers, “and this girl came up. It was her birthday and she had all these cards and said would you sign them all. I don’t think he was very struck by it, thought she was taking the piss probably. Also I remember once he and Gill told me that they were walking down Oxford Street and they saw these two kids. One of them had a T-shirt on which said, I Know Paul Weller and the other one had So Do I on his. Although Gill was egging him on with the story, I think he was quite pleased with it…”
By the tail-end of 1977 not a lot, in Weller’s view, was happening. Bands who first influenced him — The Clash, the Pistols — had not crystallised into what Weller had hoped they would and he became lost.
“There was no direction for a time,” he says. “After that first LP and that period of time leading up to ‘The Modern World,’ there was no real direction because the punk thing had more or less finished and I think we were all left without a direction.”
In an attempt to come up with decent songs for “The Modern World,” The Jam packed their bags and headed for a rehearsal studio in the country. “The idea,” recalls Foxton, “was we’ll go down to this rehearsal studio in the country, somewhere like Aylesbury, and try and bash a load of half-baked songs into shape, the idea being that because we were in the middle of nowhere we wouldn’t have fuck all to do and be very productive. We just finished going up the pub every day because it just wasn’t working…”
To promote ‘Modern World’ The Jam undertook another British tour. One night in Leeds, Paul and Bruce ran into some rugby players staying at the same hotel. They ended up brawling with them.
“We were standing up to get some drinks,” says Bruce, “and some words were exchanged. The next minute Paul was in a bit of a ruck and I tried to help him out. He just finished up being like a rugby ball. They went berserk. They went mad. It was really frightening. They were after our blood, literally, and we had to leave about three in the morning and check into another hotel. It fucked the rest of the tour because I had badly bruised ribs.”
The fracas ensured that Paul Weller had to make an appearance at Leeds Crown Court where he was greeted on the steps by a message some fans had scrawled: Paul Weller Is Innocent! He was and was discharged straight away.
On their return home the group began putting new material for their third album together. But Weller still seemed nonchalant about the group.
“It wasn’t so much being lazy,” he says, “but I just lost interest. As I said I let go of the reins and I wasn’t particularly interested in picking them up anymore.”
It was to be Chris Parry who finally shook Weller out of his complacency. He came down the studio, heard the new songs and told the group what he thought. “His actual words were, this is shit,” Weller recalls. “And in that instance he was right. It was good that someone actually came out and said it. It was a big relief really.”
Scrapping the stuff they had recorded, Paul moved back to Woking to live with his parents for a while. It was the first time he’d been home in ages. “I never went back to Woking for months and months, till about maybe a year,” he states. “And I never went out with other people at all, even within the band, and I really think that makes you lose the open-mindedness that maybe you had before.”
The move back to his home town, albeit for a short while, coupled with the precarious position of The Jam, pushed Weller back into concentrating on his talents more fully.
Weller, with his back against the wall, responded by producing a batch of songs that were quite easily the best of his career till then. The Jam’s renaissance had begun…
It was on Weller’s insistence that the people who came to see the group were treated as well as possible. “We don’t get a lot of trouble,” says Kenny Wheeler, The Jam’s tour manager since ’78. “I used to say to the kids that nobody is here to hurt you. The worst place was the Rainbow, you’d get two kids jump on the stage but you’d never throw them out of the hall, they’d go straight back into the audience. I’ve told people to fuck off and had a right bollocking from Paul.”
Intended as a double A-side, the group preferring the psychedelic overtones of ‘Dreams’ to the straight forward standard Jam sound of ‘Going Underground,’ a pressing mix-up in France ensured that ‘Underground’ came out as the A-side. It didn’t matter. ‘Going Underground’ entered the charts at number one.
Weller was of course affected by the news. But as usual his feelings were mixed. “I was a bit sort of shocked,” he says about his first number one. “The other thing with me as well is that I try and keep calm about things like that because I get worried that I’m going to turn out like the rest of them. So I try to keep calm about it, look at it logically. At the same time, from my own point of view, my sort of ego, of course, I’m pleased.”
In fact, Paul Weller was close to tears the day he went to number one.
All three of them stressed constantly that idolatry was not what they wanted…
“I’ve never really taken the attitude that I was a famous person,” Rick says. “I still get shocked when people come up and say, Oh, you’re so and so out of The Jam…”
Three months after the release of the LP, the Jam’s follow up single to ‘Going Underground’ was released. Their worries about the success of ‘Underground’ and the effect it might have had on The Jam had proved unfounded. Up until their triumphant demise, there wouldn’t be a pop group in Britain to touch them…
It was important for Weller to present these shows along the lines of an old soul review with a different group supporting each night and a Northern Soul DJ spinning discs. Unfortunately the variety of the shows bypassed a lot of the audience who greeted acts like Bananarama and The Questions with mindless chanting and abuse…
“I want this tour to be the shake-up music needs, I want it to cut through the increasing fucking apathy…” but it never could. The Jam were simply too huge to make the kind of impact Weller dreamed of. It was time to make that move….
the
authorised
biography
by
Paolo Hewitt
1
Small town minds hinder: move on out and head city central way. Mixing up the ’60s and ’70s, tired of inconsequential clubs and pubs, weddings and the local social, he Jam arrive in London amidst the electric chaos of punk.
Black and white suits: spearheaded by a brash 18 year old in love with his age infatuated by an era gone by, talented enough to stop people in their tracks and frustrated by his world. Only good can come from this.
Hair by Schumi: vigorous shows, backstage fights, mum ironing and drying white shirts, leaps in the air, sweat, Paul and Bruce back to back, fanzines, Rick Buckler’s shades, Familiar Faces in the crowd, pogoing, ‘revolution,’ a contract just an ink dot away and yes! You can change your world if you want to.
A new art school: a time for doing, expression, laughs and breathing in the mood of a generation. They make their first LP, wind up purists, tour, Thursday’s Top Of The Pops, ten new ideas a day, ideals and the best of your life. A thousand things to say and The Jam just one of them.
Cool.
Off the track now because you fall in love for the first time. Because ideals cherished are banished for the balance and because things spin out of control. Listless, no vision, splashing around in the pond of mediocrity, nearly drowning but somehow surfacing. The fine art indeed!
When the rules you live by are burnt down you either suss it and build better ones or let go of the reason. The Jam balance between the two, waste no time in the land of neon, push themselves blindly around the maze looking for the spark.
Then one day you wake up and snap! you’re out of it.
Hard, fast, The Jam in control and they spiral upwards cool and collected. A joy to watch. Hearts and charts are reached, a fashion defined, music, great music, shot through with compassion and anger, tenderness and smashed dreams a triumphant first.
The Rainbow, crowd expansion, communication, that special show you’ll never forget, middle partings and white socks, straight in at one, the anticipation of the next record, trust angry in print, articulate on vinyl, feedback exotica, heart in the right places, felt by the True Faces and The Jam were more than this.
All their own work too.
I’m on my way.
Lonsdale shirts and bowling shoes, Weller reactivates his soul instincts, hears the call from all directions, sees the creation in motion lumbering uncertainly: too large to be nimble.
Pull of the unexpected? Surprise and subvert? How can they? The stage set is too big, the context too constricted and the playing too familiar. Even saxophones, keyboards and new voices can’t infiltrate the nucleus. Stifled and sullen, only one box to put his tick next to, only one colour flag to be waved.
So? So a true beat surrender, dignity maintained, the future to master with a past heavy on pride. Standards. Take sustenance. And The Group. No other word needed.
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