The Jam: About The Young Idea (2015) Movie Script
1
Put your hands together for the best
band in the fucking world, The Jam!
When I first saw The Jam, it was almost
like a hit my soul kind of thing,
almost like a spiritual thing.
If it hadn't been for The Jam, I'd have
probably still been a window cleaner,
or probably serving
time, a ne'er-do-gooder.
So, they kind of elevated and
changed my life for the better.
I remember often playing those songs when
I had to climb into a different mood.
Songs like that were a beautiful
solace. Better than the meds.
The Jam definitely inspired me
to look beyond the burbs.
I know every lick
of those records.
I know every lyric of those
records. I know every beat.
It's definitely a huge
part of who I am.
Paul Weller. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1958.
Coming from Woking,
which is a little suburban town,
I think it just gave us
a different perspective.
We were never sort of looked to
as being sort of trendy,
and I guess we were kind of
outsiders from that point of view,
because we were from this little
hip town from outside London.
This is what used to be
Woking Working Men's Club.
Obviously derelict now.
This is where I did my first gig when I
was 14. Me and Steve Brookes, my mate.
It was me and him
that started the band off.
We got a little gig on
a Wednesday evening,
which my dad managed to blag off
the fellow who run the club.
So, there was about maybe six
people in there. Eight with us.
Steve Brookes. Born
London, England, 1958.
- We were better than that, weren't we?
- I don't know if we were.
Well, we first hooked up
in school, at Sheerwater.
And I'd just moved into the area
down from London.
He was definitely cooler
than most of the other kids.
Thought you were going to say,
"He was a twat."
He was a bit of a twat as well,
but I found that out subsequently.
But, no, he was
definitely cooler.
And I think it's that sort of,
you know, when you're that age
there's a sexuality thing
that's waking up in you,
and you're sort of
like, you don't know,
is this the boy you wanna be
or the boy you wanna have?
What is it? But it's an attraction,
whatever it is. I don't know what it is.
- You didn't tell me that before.
- No, I kept it to myself.
Yeah, so, we started knocking up sort
of a few little, old '50s songs mostly,
wasn't it, Elvis
and stuff like that?
- Yeah, rock 'n' roll tunes, R&B, weren't it?
- Yeah.
- We didn't play them particularly well.
- Yeah, three chords.
But there were only three chords and we felt
like we were doing a reasonable job on them.
Some may differ.
We never considered being a duo.
We wanted to be a band.
Yeah, so, it was really hard to
find other musicians in Woking.
There was maybe two drummers in the
whole of Woking that were our age group.
One of them we tried out, which
didn't work, a big lad called Nell,
who was more into
brass band music, really.
And then we found Rick.
Rick Buckler. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1955.
They were looking for a drummer,
I sort of pretended
to be a drummer at the time.
The first thing that I was
struck by was the fact that,
"Hey, there's somebody who can
actually play guitar properly."
Then you start to realise
that you can form songs.
And there is the possibility,
then, of playing proper gigs.
One of the first shows
was at the Sheerwater Youth Club.
And Paul said to me, "Well,
look. There's a stack of albums.
"Listen to all of these,
learn as many as you can."
And so, we came up with a set.
Fuck, it's been a long time
since I was in here last.
Must be over 40 years.
I remember there wasn't a huge
crowd of people in here, really,
just the usual youth club lot,
with everybody
just going bananas,
and probably too much drink
for our age at that time.
But weird being back in here because I
haven't been back in here since then.
Probably that was what set the seed
of, "I think we wanna do more of this."
We wanted to be bigger
than The Beatles, definitely.
That's true. I mean, that's
what we wanted to be.
The next Beatles.
That was the scheme.
And we weren't.
My dad started managing
us, right. He just loved it.
No one said, "You're the
manager." That just came about.
Obviously, everybody knows
he's my son, Paul.
And you have to know
his talent for music.
So, I said, "Well,
I'll push you."
I can't give him an education.
I can't give him money.
So, I give him what I can give him.
Inspiration. Shall we say that?
Or a push, whatever a
father can do in that cause.
He was just always
encouraging, weren't he?
And he was always hustling,
trying to get a gig, or get a van,
or a bit of equipment.
John was always out sort of hustling
for something on our behalf.
I think he was great.
John took on the role of chatting to the
right people at the Working Men's Clubs
and the CIUs, and what have you, and
putting us forward to play there.
It was just three-piece
for a long time, weren't it?
Yeah, two guitars and drums for
quite a long time, with no bass.
The original plan was that
Paul was gonna move onto bass
because Macca was his big hero.
And that was the sort of lineup we
envisaged, with another guitar player.
Me on guitar, another guitar
player, Paul on bass, and drums.
Bruce Foxton. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1955.
I think I saw some sort of ad about The
Jam were looking for a rhythm guitarist.
So, I went along for that, and met
Paul, and Rick, and Steve Brookes.
And it just clicked,
and we got on well.
And they were gigging, which was
right at the top of my shopping list.
You know? I wanted to
get out there and play.
Originally, I was playing bass
when Bruce came around
and he was gonna
play rhythm guitar.
But Bruce wasn't a powerful enough rhythm
guitarist, really, for what we wanted.
Paul, I think, suggested to me, he said,
"Well, look, why don't you have that,"
gave me his bass, "and I'll
take over on rhythm/lead guitar?"
And it just worked. You know?
We disparaged everything that
was current during that period.
'Cause we had Gary Glitter
and the Bay City Rollers.
And we were really, really, totally
against all that sort of stuff.
So, we didn't model ourselves at
all on anything that was current.
The only band that made any sense
was Dr Feelgood
because they had that kind of brash,
aggressive R&B for a start as well,
but violence to it, and it was
everything you want as a kid.
When we saw them we just went,
"God, this is just something totally
different." Nothing like we'd...
And it was just hard-edged R&B.
Real sort of distinctive.
Paul and Steve were very close,
they were really good mates.
So, it was a bit of a blow when Steve decided
that he'd had enough and he wanted to leave.
I mean, we weren't earning a great deal
of money, but we were working quite hard.
So, it was sort of understandable
that he had enough of that, really.
With Steve leaving, it kind of
allowed me to become
the leader of the band.
- I guess is right.
- Yeah.
I think that's another
reason we parted,
was because we were
sort of struggling for dominance.
- Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
- Do we do this one, do we do...
Whereas we'd always agreed
on what we were doing.
I just think it's that thing,
unless you are totally united,
every band needs a leader in it
or someone who can focus
and have a vision for the band.
I came late to The Who, right.
I have no idea why, but I don't
remember them from the '60s.
And then I managed to get a copy of
their first album, My Generation,
which is still my
favourite Who record.
And by far, the
sound was amazing.
Again, it had that kind of real edge
to it and sort of violence to it,
or aggression, however
you wanna look at it.
But anyway, it caught
my imagination for sure,
and so much so
that I tried to rewrite the
record, really, on our first album.
Sorry, Pete.
I'd had this vision from God saying, "You
shall be a Mod from this day onwards."
And that was it for me, mate.
I was fucking off. I was away.
So, I said to the others, "Look,
this is where we're gonna go,
"this is the direction, we need to have
a look. I mean, this is gonna be it."
And luckily they
went along with it.
It was a good image
and it felt sharp.
The look was very important. It
reflected a lot about us. It worked.
During the '70s, I was kind
of waiting for our time, really.
Not just me as a person,
but I mean our generation.
And I found that when
I saw the Sex Pistols.
And just to be in the audience,
seeing those bands
and seeing all people my age, which you
just didn't have that scene in Woking.
I tried so hard to be nice.
Then I saw the Pistols and Clash
and all those bands.
I felt there was a
connection there, really.
I thought there was a connection between
what I was into and the whole Mod thing,
but it was also a contemporary
connection as well.
Not that I thought we should
go off and be a punk band,
but I just thought,
"This is such a great scene.
"This is people our age,
we can play to these people."
Once we discovered that
there was a good scene in London,
and it was only an hour drive, it
was definitely the place to head for.
So, our aim was to get into London,
hopefully get a bit of press,
get the name about a bit more.
Possibly get record
companies down.
They weren't really that prepared to
come out to what they saw as the sticks.
Adrian Thrills. Born
London, England, 1958.
First time I saw
the band I was 16.
It must have been around September '76.
And I went along with a couple of friends.
We'd heard about them
through the grapevine.
So, we went along expecting
another down-the-line punk band,
so it was quite a surprise
when you saw this group.
One of them had pretty long hair, which
just wasn't the done thing at the time,
wearing sharp black suits and
having strong '60s influences,
and being slightly more melodic,
maybe slightly more musicianly
than most of the punk bands.
After the gig, my friend, Shane MacGowan,
and I, we started chatting to Paul.
He just seemed very much like the
kind of kid I was at school with.
We're doing this film.
And I was living in the new town
of Stevenage at that time.
And Paul was from
Woking, almost...
We were kind of kids from the satellite
towns coming up to the Big Smoke.
And there was
definitely a bond there.
We had a four-week residency
at the Red Cow, right,
which was a pub in Hammersmith.
The first week there
was 50 people, maybe.
And the next week
there was 100 people.
And then by week three and four, there
was fucking queues around the block,
and I thought that
was sort of amazing.
You could just feel this thing
growing, organically growing.
In 1976, The Jam wouldn't really get
much of a look-in in the music press.
And so, it was left to the likes
of myself and Shane MacGowan,
who were doing
some of the early punk fanzines.
This one's mine, 48 Thrills,
in which you have, possibly, the
first-ever Jam interview, perhaps.
It wasn't really until the publicity
that the punk thing was getting
that I think the
record companies,
their attention was turned to
what the hell's going on here.
It almost became a bit of a fight
that the record companies
had to sign somebody.
Chris Parry. Born Warrington,
New Zealand, 1949.
In '76, I was an A&R man
for Polydor Records.
I was on the hunt for punk bands at the
time, trying to bring them into the label.
So, I was at a show, Shane MacGowan
came up to me and says, "Here, Chris."
He says, "Look, there's a
band playing this Saturday night.
"First on, check 'em out, they're
great, they're called The Jam."
The whole approach
was very, very exciting.
And I thought Paul particularly
was outstanding as a frontman.
They just seemed like
a group that was gonna deliver.
Paul was obviously
the special one.
He was pretty determined,
he was pretty sure about himself.
He said, "Chris, I'm telling you,
"I am gonna be quite something
in this country.
And I said, "Good on you.
"Well, you're 19, go for it."
Chris saw something in us.
We signed for 6 grand, which
was more money in those days,
but it still weren't
that much money.
We would've been signed for 600
fucking quid, to be honest with you.
Do you know what I
mean? We were skint.
When they gave us the cheque,
my old man was like,
"Well, we ain't got a bank account,
how are we gonna fucking change it?"
Vic Coppersmith-Heaven.
Born London, England, 1945.
I'd been working at Olympic Studios
at that time for about five years.
I worked with the Stones,
I worked with George Harrison,
who was producing Billy Preston.
And I was asked to engineer The Clash,
Billy Idol with Generation X, and The Jam.
And it was almost like, "Choose one of these
bands to work with, what do you think?"
And I just really wanted to see
The Jam, and went to see them,
and was just
completely blown away.
There was no question about who I
should direct my energies towards.
They had a very interesting set. It was
very vital. It was highly energetic.
It was sharp,
really enthusiastic.
And it was just... I mean, it just captured
every imagination you wanted to have
as a producer as well.
To want to be able
to capture that sound.
And In The City did stand out as a
pretty strong single at the time as well.
It was such a great song, we'd
play it three times some nights.
We start with it, end with it,
and if we got an encore,
we'd fucking encore it as well.
That was a great
song, I loved it.
And I thought that would
always be the first single.
There was never
any doubt in my mind.
Making their debut on this week's
Top of the Pops, here's The Jam
and an effervescent new 45
called In The City.
That was fabulous to get on Top
of the Pops for the first time.
That was really one of those
milestones that you tick off,
because it was
the major music show in the UK.
Amazing. Because I used to
just watch bands on the Pops
and think, "God, I'd
like to be doing that."
And there I am doing it.
It was amazing, because I'd been
watching Top of the Pops
since I was a little kid, right,
religiously, every Thursday, without fail.
Once we got on there and actually
done it, it was less amazing.
You know, it's like,
"Really, is that all it is?"
Barry Cain. Born
London, England, 1952,
That was the start of my
love affair with The Jam.
I was about 22,
quite old, really,
working on a local newspaper
in South East London,
doing the music
entertainment side.
I was a working-class
kid in the council flats.
That's why it meant so
much to me, this music.
It was modern music,
with the emphasis on "Mod."
It was The Who kissed by Motown,
with a dash of Clash.
And it really was a new kind soul,
I found. It was just wonderful.
Right at the forefront of a new
phenomenon known as the New Wave,
they're called The
Jam and In The City.
They had that imagination to know that,
if you appeared on Top of the Pops,
you got to a generation of kids
that bought records.
They tapped into that
and they got to those kids.
We were gigging so hard as well.
It was like five, six
shows at least a week.
And travelling up and down the length
and breadth of the country, really.
It was a huge swell. You'd sense that
there was a big change happening.
For me, they were probably
my favourite times,
because there was this sort of
sense of innocence about it still,
and yet there was this excitement because
we'd feel we're getting somewhere,
we're getting an
audience together.
Derek D'Souza. Born
Bombay, India, 1959.
I first heard The Jam in 1977.
There was a lot of new stuff around
that came out at that time that I liked.
The Police, The Stranglers,
Sex Pistols, The Clash.
But The Jam stood out
because they're probably younger than
a lot of the bands, I think, anyway.
It felt like they're one of us.
And I liked them because, you
know, much as I love the punk idea,
and I loved a lot of the bands,
I was never into ripped-up
clothes and safety pins.
That was just never
gonna be my thing.
A lot of the punk bands
treated 1976 as a year zero.
Anything that existed before that
was history.
Whereas Paul, he wasn't
afraid of reaching back.
I remember going to his house in
Woking after one of those early gigs,
and it was at the height of punk,
and he had a bedroom festooned with
Beatles magazines, '60s memorabilia.
He had an obsession
and a real love of that era.
Their early sets were, a good 30 or 40%
of the songs were covers from the '60s.
We were seen as being, yeah, a bit
of an anachronism, I suppose, really.
Showing all our '60s influences,
and that's, you know, openly.
I remember seeing Joe Strummer
come to one of our gigs,
when we played in Ronnie Scotts,
and he had a shirt on that said,
"Chuck Berry is dead."
I was like, "You don't
mean that, mate, do you?
"Because we fucking love
Chuck Berry, you know?"
And I'm sure Joe
didn't mean that either.
So, there was a lot of posturing
and a lot of bullshit as well.
Even from the first album, you
could tell that the skill was there
and there was the
melody and the lyrics.
They weren't just like
a three-chord band.
That album, the songs
were pretty much our live set.
It was a big deal, of course,
to make an album.
But we were kind of at the
mercy of the producer, really,
because what the
fuck did we know?
There wasn't very
much over-dubbing
as essentially we wanted
to just capture the live set
and make that as
powerful as possible.
I did have some...
I think I tried to get Paul
to do some double-tracking,
but I used a harmonising thing, which
he didn't like very much at the time.
I remember being disappointed with
it. I didn't feel it was our sound.
Because Vic would always
get us to track stuff up,
which I guess in some ways did become
what people think of as Jam sounds.
Keiko Egawa. Born
in Tokyo, Japan, 1960.
I think it was around '77
that the New Wave
started coming into Japan.
The record company arranged
this so-called film concert,
to show people a
promo video at the time.
And it was quite good because,
obviously, we didn't have any Internet,
or they weren't
showing it on television.
And that's when I saw The Jam,
and it was on at school.
I still remember seeing it there.
I couldn't speak English at the time, but
I did understand a little bit of words.
But it wasn't enough to be able
to understand the whole lyrics.
So, basically, I didn't know
what they were singing about,
but music was
really, really good.
Martin Freeman.
Born Aldershot, England, 1971.
I first became aware of The Jam
when my brother Tim,
who's 10 years older than me,
brought home In The
City, the album, 1977.
And I remember hearing swearing
on it, and that was exciting.
It was scary for me, because
I didn't want our dad to hear it.
It wasn't until a
couple of years later,
where I thought, "Hang on, now I'm
gonna discover this now for myself."
And that's when
I really went to town on them.
It wasn't just about
smash it up kind of punk stuff.
But they were as much as a punk band,
or anything, they were a pop band.
And a really, really good one.
The Jam had quite
an uneasy relationship with punk.
The punk influences were obvious.
And yet they were never quite as kind
of hip with the London punk crowd
as maybe the
Pistols and The Clash.
There was a bit of a kind of
fashionista, art school element.
For a supposedly non-elitist
scene it could be quite exclusive.
And The Jam, I think, coming from Woking,
they almost seemed slightly as outsiders.
We did this interview with NME,
our first cover story with NME.
And we were saying
we're probably going to vote Tory
in the next election and
all that, which is bollocks.
It was to be contrary
and to set us up as opposites
of Pistols or The Clash.
The Pistols were kind of anarchy and
The Clash were kind of left wing,
and we were like, "Yeah, we don't
mind the Royal Family, really."
But it did us no favours.
Eddie Piller. Born
London, England, 1963.
When I came across The Jam,
they kind of made me realise that
you didn't have to be a punk rocker
to like this kind of music.
I think up to then I was
thinking, "Am I a punk?
"I like that I'm wearing a
mohair jumper and a school tie."
That was rubbish,
I was 15 years old.
And it was only
when I saw The Jam
that I thought, "You don't have to
be all that crap, you could be this."
Weller made you feel that it was
about you and your generation,
not some kind of
poncey art school generation
that took heroin
and walked down the King's Road.
It wasn't like that.
It was almost like working-class kids
with something to believe in the future.
All Around The World, to me, was the
first Mod record for my generation.
Not My Generation, The Who, my
generation, the postpunk generation.
And I was at school when that came
out, and it had a massive effect on me.
This was the first of the records that said,
actually, "We're not punks, we're Mods."
And I still regret that
wasn't on the album.
In 77, Polydor
was still operating on a model
pretty much as
it was in the '60s,
where The Beatles, and the Stones,
they put out two albums a year.
And sure enough in 1977
The Jam released two albums.
Momentum was
very important to me.
I thought that if we're
going to have this success,
we need to really
take it quickly, take it through.
We took it on board and said, "Yeah,
yeah, we'll do another album,"
and just sort of leapt
in quite confidently,
not really realising, maybe,
what was demanded of us.
I'd had a couple of songs,
which I'd been writing,
but I didn't really
have too many.
There was a lot of pressure on Paul,
a lot of pressure on all three of us,
with playing and then recording,
but Paul being a
main songwriter...
I wouldn't say I'd help him out.
I wanted to get some songs of
my own, I suppose, on the album.
I think Modern World
is not a great record.
It's got a few good songs on it, but
it's not a great album, I don't think.
It wasn't a disappointment to me,
because I'd gone to see them
at the Royal College of Art.
I did a review of it.
And I kind of eluded
to the colours of the Union Jack,
taking you through the three moods
that you get at a Jam concert,
like, red hot, expanding into white
heat, contracting into teenage blue.
And Paul really liked that line,
and he took "teenage blue" and used
it as a lyric in Life From A Window
from This Is The Modern World.
"This is great.
"I've got a lyric that's in a Jam song
of something that I came up with."
And he put my name on the back.
It was like winning an Oscar.
So, I always thought This Is The
Modern World was a great album.
It wasn't great by any standards, and
got bit of a pasting in the press.
Kind of got written
off, really, after that.
It was kind of like there was this big
sort of flash at first with In The City
and then it just sort of seemed
to be fizzling out, really.
The Jam was a three-piece band.
And in terms of songwriting,
my confidence was growing a bit,
and I was getting my feet
under the table a bit more.
I felt a little bit
more comfortable,
and wanted to contribute, try and
contribute, a bit more to the songwriting.
Bruce's writing isn't
like Paul's writing.
And I sensed that
there was a sense of,
"Okay, well, Bruce, you can
put some songs towards this."
I'm not a great believer in that.
I don't think I was that
arsed about it, really,
because I fell in love
with a girl around that time,
and I was kind of happy
just doing that, to be honest
I was a bit like, "I
don't give a fuck, really."
I wasn't right. I didn't write.
I wasn't motivated.
I think also the failing of the second
album was a bit like, "Well, fuck it."
I don't know why I was like that,
but anyway...
But we started to make some other
demos for a possible third record.
I just said, "There's
nothing there.
"I don't know what you're doing, Paul."
But, okay, that may be what it was.
I mean, I knew he had a girlfriend
and they were kind of in love
and quite tight and all of that.
But I don't know, Bruce was coming
forward with tunes and ideas
and even Rick had
a couple of ideas.
But they weren't...
They weren't going to be...
They weren't going to cut it.
I guess that's when
you felt pressurised
'cause you're almost
trying to write to order then,
"Well, what is going to satisfy
you then, Chris, what do you want?
"And we'll try and
write a song for you."
It's like, hang about,
we got this far with writing for
ourselves and what we believe in.
And, yeah, that was a knock and it
obviously spurred Paul on, particularly,
to have a re-think.
So, I had to get my head
out of the girlfriend's blouse
and get back into working again,
and start writing.
Like any record, once you have one or
two songs that you're really happy with
and you feel are
the real bones of the record,
it just encourages you
to go further it, really.
I mean, Down In The Tube Station,
I kind of had all words
and I had some chords and stuff
for it, but I was a bit like,
"I don't know, I'm
not sure if its right."
Vic Smith, bless him,
he was the one who said to me,
"No, this could be great, you've got
to work on this and we could do this."
He actually chucked
the lyrics in the bin.
And I pulled them out.
I looked at them and just said, "This
looks really good, can't we work on this?"
And the guys came in and bassline
happened, and the drum rhythm happened,
and the track
evolved out of that.
And next thing is, I was down
at St John's Wood Tube Station,
with a little mobile recorder,
recording the Tube trains.
And rest is history, really.
Everyone was
talking about this song.
There hadn't been
a song like it before.
It wasn't punk. It wasn't
anything. It was The Jam.
There was obviously a big part of,
well, "Fuck you. We'll show you."
But also you just knew
these were good songs,
that's what we aimed to achieve,
was that they're good songs
and we knew they were special.
Let's hope everybody else does.
All Mod Cons, of course is... My guess is that
it is most people's archetypal Jam record.
For good reason,
'cause I guess it's where they
really, really set their sound,
although the sound developed.
But no one else
sounded like that.
It's got some of the best songs about
youth ever written by a British songwriter,
on that record.
Somehow, they got it right.
They were conveying a different
message to working-class kids,
and that is basically
how Mod happened.
Mod is an aphorism for clean living
under difficult circumstances.
This didn't happen around The Clash,
it didn't happen around The Damned
or the Sex Pistols,
where you had an
entire way of life created,
or in this particular case,
re-created by one band.
Weller was either very, very lucky
or very, very astute and clever
because The Jam made it happen.
Mod for me is just about being well-dressed,
about having good taste and style.
So, in that sense I'm greedy,
I call anything that I like Mod,
do you know what I mean?
I call everything from The Jam to
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Mod."
'Cause I think, "No, it's good, its
quality and there's detail in it."
And so, that for me is my
definition of modernism in a way.
You cannot be a 50-year-old punk.
But there's plenty of 50-year-old Mods,
there's plenty of 70-year-old Mods.
It's just a classic,
timeless thing.
So, it's funny, really, because sort
of from my daydream, fantasy things
when I was back
in Woking, thinking,
"Yeah, we're gonna
get this thing going again."
And it did happen.
Paul Abbott. I was born
in Burnley, England, 1960.
In 1977, I became
intensively aware of The Jam,
I was working in a shoe factory
called Lambert Howarth in Burnley.
I was only there short term,
but I remember Paul Weller kind
of screaming out at that time,
and I was just a naughty little
kid who walked around frowning,
and I think when his music turned
up and it sounded like I looked,
I think that's when
we were onto a winner.
Punk was defined by
make a loud noise and back it up.
But the melodic nature
of Paul Weller's overcoat
just, I think, threw everybody off the
scent of it being called punk, quite punk.
It was bigger than that,
and it was better than that.
The Jam were a pop band.
In the same way that the
Small Faces were a pop band,
The Who were a pop band, The Beatles
were a pop band, The Jam were.
And whereas a lot of the punk bands
from that era fell by the wayside,
The Jam kept their heads down
and continued to produce a
whole stream of classic singles.
At that time, all of those great
heroes of the punk movement,
you know, Strummer
was Rocking The Casbah,
Johnny Rotten had given up,
or Public Image,
but Paul Weller was writing songs
that meant something
to me and my generation.
I was mindful of the audience. I
wanted to get across to my generation.
But it wasn't too difficult
'cause I was just writing about
how I felt as a 19- or 20-year-old,
going through the same experiences
as a lot of other kids as well.
So, I didn't have to
put myself into their shoes,
I was already in their
fucking shoes. You know?
The clarity with which he writes
about youth, it's not patronising,
it's not bubble-gum, but it's
full of a real joy and angst,
and it's very present
about living now.
I'm a young... I'm a 20-,
21-year-old and I'm writing this now."
When You're Young,
I used to love this song so much.
I used to put a high volume
on my Walkman and listen to it.
"But you find out life isn't like
that, it's so hard to comprehend."
That line, I used to love.
I thought everyone was old by the
time they were 21, when I was a kid.
I can remember my 21st birthday
when I thought, "It's fucking over.
"It really is all over."
And, yeah, our music
was really about youth, I think.
I think The Jam music really
kind of caught that time, really.
He spoke so, so specifically
to a group of people,
or maybe to an age of people,
that if you missed that boat, I
think it's hard to get actually.
You can appreciate writing if it's
not immediately part of your world,
if it's got a universal hook to it, and
The Jam were not universal, they weren't.
There was a lot of testing of the
water with lots of territories,
and America predominantly so.
Because America was beginning to
sit up and take notice
of what was going on in the UK.
So, we did go out there
and we did do some shows.
Right, this is our
bid for US success.
This one is called
Strange Zip Code.
The States, generally, I suppose,
was a bit of a disaster for us.
It was a bit like The Who in their early
days, deemed too British to crack the States.
They didn't work America
like a lot of other bands,
so they didn't go there and stay for
six months and tour all over America.
They were more of a
British band, actually.
I know very few American
Jam fans, not many.
A lot of people have never heard of The
Jam. It's very specific, that style.
I think it explains why we in this country,
if you like The Jam, you love them.
"Cause it really
does feel like yours.
Maria McHugh. Born
London, England, 1965.
Gosh, I would have been 14 or so,
I was living at home in Wembley.
So, a real suburb.
Me and my mates were going to
an Irish Catholic convent school.
And I think for us,
music was a way of escaping
from the sort of constraints
of that suburban life.
I remember when Setting Sons came
out, one of us had a ghetto blaster,
so we'd play Setting Sons walking to
school and singing to all the tracks.
We must have looked so stupid, but
we were just completely obsessed.
On Setting Sons I had this idea
of making a concept record,
something had a
kind of thing to it.
It was going to be about three
friends who were tight and close-knit.
There were quite a few songs
that kind of link up.
Thick As Thieves was on that.
That's a great song, I think.
But I kind of lost my
way. I just thought,
"I can't be fucking doing this
any more, just make a record."
That was the first record that I really
tried my hardest with the lyrics on,
I really thought I could try
and elevate the lyrics,
just a bit more kind of literary,
I suppose, really.
I always felt that Paul Weller
was wise beyond his years.
There was something
about the way he wrote his lyrics
that just set him apart.
And you would pore over them and you were
trying to sort of understand what they meant.
There was a Right to Work march,
which started in Liverpool.
It wasn't at the height of Thatcherism,
but it was the early doors.
When did she get in? '797?
And it was marching all the way down to
the country to the Houses of Parliament.
And on their route,
they passed by Eton College,
where some of the pupils of Eton
were jeering and taking the piss.
I thought it was a great opportunity
to write a song about class, really,
in a different sort of way.
And The Eton Rifles
is the kind of army cadet wing,
where they go out and do war games
on the fields and all that shite.
I mean, ultimately it says,
the revolution won't work
because these people have
got too much power behind them.
The odds are well
stacked against us.
And the, "Sup up your beer and
collect your fags," I suppose,
I was thinking, kind of, the
English revolution was sort of,
"What time's the
revolution starting?
"For God's sake, fuck it,
have a quick drink first."
It's a bit like that, isn't it?
David Cameron said The Eton Rifles
was one of his favourite songs
when he was at school.
So, you obviously
don't... They don't...
Not everyone reads the words.
Not everyone reads the lyrics.
Sometimes it's just a nice sound in the
background and the catchphrase people like.
I wasn't aware of The Eton Rifles'
political message, not really,
because as with a lot of Paul Weller's
songs you had to go and look stuff up.
But it made you look stuff up.
If nothing else,
it activated you in that sense.
Because you loved the music, it
will make you want to understand it.
Den Davis. Born in
Manchester, England, 1967.
The first time I saw them was at
Manchester Apollo, November '79,
the Setting Sons
tour. I'd be 11, 12.
I did feel really
vulnerable and young,
because looking around me, there
wasn't that many kids of my age
that were there at that point.
But if you think about
being squashed here.
I remember my ribs just bursting,
so I've probably not even
grown that much, really,
because I was quite
tall for my age then,
so I've not probably grown that
much because it's still on my ribs.
Yeah, it was great.
That was the first time I felt like a Jam fan,
being there with all these other Jam fans,
and it was great to be part of this
gang, all of a sudden, that was there.
Everyone sang every word,
and that was what
was special about it.
It wasn't just that they were there to
watch, they were there to take part.
And I always think
the energy worked both ways.
The Jam meant
everything to me at the time,
and the only way to see live
was to come over to England.
So, me and my friends, we were always
talking about we'd love to go to England,
to see the real thing.
And I wanted to
learn English anyway.
So, I was talking to my parents,
if I could go over to England just
to study English for three months.
And my parents agreed, "It's definitely
only for three months, that's fine."
So, they paid for it for me.
What I was thinking
was to see The Jam!
I've seen many
other bands before.
But when I first saw
The Jam at Rainbow,
I just thought the whole
atmosphere was so different.
I just wanted to see
them more and more.
But three months
went really quick.
And my study wasn't
completed anyway.
This is true.
So, I extended visa for six months,
and then another six months.
So, I'm still in London.
After 30 years.
To live in England
because of The Jam,
it sounds very crazy,
but I don't regret it at all.
And I do love this
country and people.
And I'm still here.
I'm always going to be here,
and this is my home.
Ian Snowball. Born in
Maidstone, Kent, England, 1970.
I first became aware
of The Jam in 1980.
In amongst the tension, and the creativity,
and the energy, sometimes the aggression.
It's almost like The Jam gave you
permission to be angry about things.
I got interested in politics
taking the lead
from what Paul was supporting,
or what he was
campaigning for at the time.
It didn't necessarily stay
like that as the years went by.
I was impressionable at that
time, but I'm happy with that.
It was an education
which I probably
wouldn't have got
from listening to a
Duran Duran record.
We were in the States when
Going Underground was released.
Because we really thought that,
"It'll maybe chart somewhere
"and then we'll finish
the American tour.
"We'll come home, and then maybe
it'll go up the charts a bit further.
"And then maybe by the third week
it'll go to number one."
We were in deepest south of the States
and going down like a lead balloon still.
And John had been on the phone to the
label and said, "Well, where is it?"
And they said it's gone
straight in to number one,
and it was just
obviously amazing.
And we thought,
"Well, what are we doing here?"
So, we just got on
Concorde and went home.
Cancelled the last, I don't know,
two or three, four shows,
whatever it was, in the States
and literally just booked ourselves
on a flight and came straight back
to do Top of the Pops.
I was in two minds
when it went to number one.
Obviously, we were all pleased,
but it also scared me.
Because I thought, "Fuck,
where do you go after that?
"Where's beyond number one?"
And I guess it's just you've got to have
another number one, and another one,
and all that stuff.
And I wasn't keen on
that sort of pressure.
But of course, who would turn
that down, that sort of success.
At least it was a song
that was saying something.
Nine-year-olds like me were jumping
around to very, very political music.
The music itself was political.
Who was making it,
by its nature, was political.
And the lyrics were
overtly political.
The greatest lines in it,
"You'll see kidney machines
replaced by rockets and guns."
And it's just, it's the same
thing going on now, really.
I've read that every time they fire a missile
in the Middle East it costs us 850,000.
There was a lot of concern
over a lot of these issues.
It was always that dark
mood of nuclear war,
and the Cold War, and all
that sort of thing going on.
And Paul picked up on that fact.
CND for me, at the beginning,
was just a cool badge.
You'd sort of seen it on these
Volkswagens and things like that.
And you weren't necessarily
interested in the news about it.
But the fact that he was talking about it
and going on rallies and things like that.
The Cold War was just as neurotic
as it could get.
It put more people in
institutions just for that threat.
And I think everybody
was fighting their way through,
and Paul Weller just had
a governance of the way.
It was like, he always reminded
me of a Resistance worker,
and it gave you the sense
that you weren't on your own.
Paul Weller was labelled, and
was, a spokesman for a generation.
He never really liked
that title, but he was.
We'd rather listen to him than Maggie
Thatcher or something, simple as that.
It was like, if he said
something, you'd take it on board.
Yeah, I wasn't really comfortable
with any of that.
I mean, I was a bit probably flattered,
ego-wise. Probably flattered at first,
but I didn't really like it.
I don't think I was the right person
cut out for that sort of thing.
I wasn't intelligent enough
or articulate enough
to be any spokesman for anyone,
I don't think, really.
I was just writing these songs,
which said more
really, anyway, I think.
When you saw The Jam
or you listened to The Jam,
you were aware that
they were a three-piece.
I mean, you couldn't divorce Bruce
Foxton's bass playing from their songs.
It was brilliant.
And Rick's drumming.
But I think it's fair to say that the focus,
certainly for me, for my friends, was on Paul.
In terms of the band,
The Jam being a three-piece,
and how important
each of those members were,
I don't know anybody that's ever
thought it was Paul Weller's band.
Bruce and Rick were
just as important to us.
Each of them played such
an important part in making it.
Yeah, Paul was the brains
behind that, if you like.
But I think, in all of our hearts, we
always felt equally about all of them.
Sound Affects, I love. It sounds
to me like their most indie record.
It sounds like their most student record,
for a band who weren't very student-y at all.
But the sounds that
were coming in on that
didn't seem to be dictated by,
"Does this sound '60s enough?"
Sounds Affects was very close
to how we saw ourselves.
We'd stripped everything back to
a fairly minimum sort of sound.
I preferred the sound on it because
it wasn't multi-tracked guitars
and basses and stuff.
It was a bit more
sparse sounding.
I think if they'd just
carried on playing In The City,
and another version of In
The City, and so on, and so on,
it wouldn't have been the same.
I liked the new stuff
and I didn't want them just to play
the same thing over and over again,
which so many bands do.
Mark Baxter. Born
London, England, 1962.
We were a footballer
community, really.
So, music was around, but you didn't
really actually follow it religiously.
I think The Jam were basically the
first band to really do that for me.
Hearing Paul, the way he sounded, the
influence he had was massive on me.
He almost gave me an education
I didn't get at school.
I sort of thought, "Maybe there's other
things you can be doing because he's done it."
He's obviously a working... Or he
sounded like, a working class guy.
And he looked a bit
chippy, and a bit edgy.
And I thought how I'm like that,
we're all like that where I'm from.
So, if he can do
it, why can't we do,
not necessarily music, but
something else you'd be doing?
But I honestly didn't have a clue
where to start.
When you look deeper, the lyrics
that Paul would come out with
were definitely an influence
on what I'm doing,
the writing I'm doing now,
and the book, The Mumper,
which did really well.
Without Paul's influence as a young
man, I wouldn't have done that book.
There's no way
I would have even attempted it.
Because just the work they put out,
and the songs they wrote about,
and the situations they were
describing in those songs,
I identify very
strongly with that.
And when the opportunity come along to
do writing, to be a writer, I took it.
And without a doubt, without that
band, without Paul's influences,
I wouldn't have been doing
what I'm doing now.
Paul Weller electrified
people's vocations.
And I think there are people who
are generous with intelligence,
and people who use it as a weapon,
and he just seemed to share it.
And that made me
trust him as a role model.
What Paul was singing
about was, really,
"You don't have to be born with
a silver spoon in your mouth.
"You can have big ideas."
So, for a humble
girl from Wembley
to end up in New York for 12
years, working in advertising,
I guess, yeah. I mean, I guess I had some
kind of belief in myself from a young age.
And maybe I got
some of that from them.
I'd always been
interested in photography.
My father bought my first camera
when I was 18,
and then my love of music, it
seemed natural to combine the two.
At the time, music videos
were just sort of starting out,
so I wanted to try taking a picture
from the TV, just to see if it worked.
And this was during the
Start! video, during Paul's solo.
I think this is before
we had a video even,
so you'd have to just take the
shots while it was live on TV,
so it wasn't a case of playing
it back and trying again.
It was just you'd set up to watch the TV
and have your camera on the tripod as well
at the same time, which is crazy.
And so, I actually
wrote in to Paul to the fan club,
just for them to see
what I'd taken, really.
And I couldn't believe it.
And Paul wrote back and said
he really liked the pictures,
and he especially liked the ones
taken off the TV.
"Dear Derek, hopefully you will have
received your photos back signed.
"Sorry about the delay.
"Anyway, I just wanted to add
that I thought they were great,
"I especially like the
ones taken off the TV.
"Fantastic colour. All
the best, Paul Weller."
The band, at the time,
were recording the next single,
which was going to
be Absolute Beginners,
and the B side, Tales From The Riverbank,
so I was invited to go along to meet them.
And we were talking about what Paul
wanted to do for shots for the new single,
and he had the idea
of shooting in Chiswick House.
And what I didn't know at the time
was that The Beatles had shot,
I think it was Paperback
Writer and Rain,
they'd shot two of their videos
in Chiswick Park.
And knowing that Paul,
being a massive Beatles fan,
it was always one of my questions
to ask Paul,
did he know at the time
that The Beatles had shot there.
Any opportunity or excuse to go
anywhere they've been, I would do so.
So, The Fabs done their promo
films down there.
So, yeah, I just wanted
to... Yeah, why not?
This was taken right at the
end of the day of the session.
We put the camera on a tripod,
and put it on self-timer.
And that was a lovely, lovely
memento at the end of the day for me,
from my first-ever
professional photo session.
I can't imagine another band
doing what they did,
to pick some guy out of the
fan club, a novice in every way,
and it did change my life.
One, two.
The Jam was like a family.
I saw The Jam well over 50 times.
The band had come down and signed things.
They recognised faces and they went,
"Yeah, I haven't seen you since
Utrecht." Or something like that.
You don't know what that means to a
16-year-old kid who's looking for an identity.
It was great, because they looked
after you. That was the difference.
They weren't standoffish.
They'd let the kids in, they'd sign
the autographs, they'd talk to them.
They just treated them
like they wanted to be treated.
It worked really well.
It was always a two-way thing.
Letting us in to sound checks, I mean,
their Jam sound checks were legendary.
Sometimes there'd be more people
at Jam sound checks
than there would
be other bands' gigs.
Stuff like sound checks, we didn't
want to have that barrier there,
because a lot of those
were unable to get a ticket,
and/or were too young to
actually come and see the show,
but they've hung around outside.
And you just think, "Well, why not come
in? Come in out of the cold," for a start.
And also, "We
appreciate your support."
Was that enough?
It was just great
to sort of get to know people.
And we didn't really see
that there was any real barrier
between us and our fans, really.
Well, I don't think we really
liked that "us and them" mentality,
where rock gods are up here,
and the audience are down there,
and they never
meet. And it's just...
That didn't really
fit in with us at all.
I always thought, "I wonder if that ever made
any difference at all, doing all that stuff."
But it did, I think, because I meet
people, and I've met people over the years,
and still meet people who said,
"Yeah, we spoke to you guys,
"you let us back in the dressing
room and we spoke to you."
Or, "We went to the sound check,
your old man let us in."
So, I think it did make a
difference in a small way.
I think people liked it
and appreciated it as well.
David Pottinger. Born
Middlesborough, England, 1994.
I first became aware of The Jam
when I was around 11.
I was bought an
iPod for Christmas
and my dad had pre-loaded
Absolute Beginners onto it.
That track, that Christmas Day, 2006, I
mean, it sort of changed everything, really.
I went and bought
all the studio albums.
I mean, my dad had them,
but they were all on vinyl.
I needed access to them quickly,
and that iPod, for about the
first four months of its life,
there was nothing
but The Jam on it.
It was just like a Jam Pod
or whatever you want to call it.
I decided to start a blog
around September 2013.
It was sort of just done on a
whim to see what happened.
And I put my love of writing
and modernism together.
Graham, who's like 50% of the blog,
he put his love of sort of photography
and web design together, and we just
wanted to see where it would go,
who we could meet,
what we could do.
We spread our own
sort of modernist gospel
and just see what
happens with it, really.
Number One Mod at the moment,
it's got to be Weller, hasn't it?
To speak to someone like Weller
would be huge.
I mean, it'd give you
that sense of achievement,
I suppose, that you've reached
the top with your blog.
- Yeah. Not too formal.
- Yeah, just whatever you wanna do.
All right, well, yeah.
- How are you doing, Paul? I'm Dave.
- Yes, mate, all right.
- Good to see you, man.
- It's proper.
Yeah, I run Move On Up blog, it's
an online modernist-inspired blog,
- so, yeah.
- I know.
It's a pleasure to be doing this
interview, looking forward to it.
- Nice one, mate.
- Sweet.
Start off, obviously,
The Jam had massive influence
to myself, my favourite
band of all time.
So, obviously, The Jam,
how did the name come about?
It was something about
you always jamming, weren't you,
you and the lads, and that,
- and it was sort of...
- Yeah, I don't know
if it came from
that or not. I mean,
it was there right from
early days anyway,
- like from '72, '73 or something like that.
- Yeah.
So, it was kind of, we always
had that name. But I don't know.
I think my sister, I think.
It's sort of well documented, isn't it,
that you're quite into poetry and stuff?
You used a Shelley poem,
didn't you, on Sound Affects?
- Yeah.
- So, why that one then?
It's called the Mask
of Anarchy, right?
And we just sort of used, like, two
or three verses from it, anyway.
But basically, the poem is a
revolutionary poem and it's saying,
"We are many, they are few."
And basically, we're sort of
trying to get people to rise up
against the ruling
classes, really.
But I thought it was, yeah,
definitely relevant for the time.
This was kind of early
days of Thatcherism,
and an austerity for the working
classes anyway in England, I think.
I went and bought
a book on poetry that Shelley...
Because of that quote
on the back of the album cover.
And that is crazy
when you think now.
I didn't know who he was or what he
was even... I didn't understand it.
But I still went and
bought the book,
because I thought I've got to
find out what it is about.
Why is he using that
on an album? Why?
Because I think, in a way, he
was just tipping everybody off.
I mean, I went to an all-boys
comprehensive in the early to mid '80s.
Boys didn't go
around reading poetry.
And they certainly didn't
go around writing poetry.
But then you had someone
like Paul Weller, who was saying,
"I do. And I read
this, and I write that."
And I like that.
Steve Cradock. Born
Solihull, England, 1969.
I remember seeing them on Top of
the Pops doing Town Called Malice.
I'd have been 11 years old, and
then hooked from then on, really.
That was the first sort of
serious single I bought.
I think it was that tune
that really got me into it.
Just the power of the sound of it was
just a really fast, exciting tune.
Dancing to it at the
youth club. You know?
It was kind of the best song
of that year, I think.
It was just of that time, really.
You could see the economic
effects of Thatcherism.
We'd go up north and
it was worse up there,
you'd see all these fucking
places that had shut down.
And you talked to kids
and there were just no prospects.
It was a very desolate
time, I thought, really.
But I suppose I tried to
turn it 'round to be positive.
Everybody was stuck.
But everybody needed a key
or a kick to get out,
and stop dreaming
of a quiet life.
I think it was just a clarion call
for everybody, just it was carpe diem.
Yeah, and I love that song
because it threw me into a massive
fit of really good writing.
And actually, that
period shaped my career.
That's not a lyric that you find
very often in number one records.
Just the way it scans,
and just the way a lot of it
unapologetically doesn't scan or rhyme
particularly, like an easy pop song.
And yet it's set to the most
commercial beat of the 20th century.
Like, like if you're talking about
Motown, there's nothing poppier than that.
It was also probably
our most commercial song.
We sort of stepped outside of
just Jam fans at that point.
I think that song
transcended all of that,
and I think it got through
to a lot more people.
By the time The Gift came out,
every song was going to number
one or top three or whatever.
It was almost like
everyone had discovered The Jam,
and they were part of mainstream,
versus earlier,
when I felt that
they were still...
A small group of people had discovered
them, they were still our secret.
So, I have bittersweet
memories of The Gift,
and that time around '82.
I went for another big, heavy
rebirth around that time, really,
of listening to soul music.
I suppose that influence is in
a lot of the songs on The Gift.
And Precious, yeah,
kind of came out of that, really,
and just getting immersed
again into black music, really.
Some fans liked it,
but at the time there was a bit of a
division. There was a bit of like...
Because I remember us
meeting some fans in the street
who were saying they thought
it sounded a bit jazz funk.
Paul Weller was always trying
to move them forward creatively,
which is a very Mod thing to do.
I think 13-, 14-year-old
kids wearing parkas,
walking down the street in 1982,
didn't want The Gift probably, because it's
a little bit difficult, didn't want the soul.
They wanted In The City
and When You're Young.
And the fact that he'd
moved on, you know,
I think his original fans
kind of moved on with him.
The Gift is their
sort of last gasp.
I love it,
because sound-wise, you get a
clue as to where he is going next,
with the more sort
of overt soul thing.
This one is called Ghosts.
By that time, right, by '82, I'd
been in the band for 10 years,
from the time me and Brookesy
first started, right, in '72.
And as great as it was,
it was full on, it was
just tour, record tour.
It was very much like that.
I just sensed, I suppose,
that Paul wanted a break,
or maybe we should
all take a break.
But I didn't see
that the end of the band is nigh.
No, I don't think there
was ever any feeling
that we were reaching
the end of the line at all,
not by any stretch
of the imagination.
I was only 24.
I wanted to see what other
kind of music I could make.
I wanted to see who
I was, who I could be.
Paul sat us all
around the studio table,
and John said to us,
"Paul's got something to say."
"What's this?" And it was...
So, it was a bit of a shock when he
said that he wanted to leave the band.
It was a bit like
jaw dropping down to the ground.
You could have heard a pin drop.
It was like, "Okay."
So, almost immediately go
into sort of shock mode, really.
There was no talking Paul 'round.
It was a big decision
for him to make, obviously.
When you got The Gift and Malice, and
they are riding high in the charts,
and it's all gone
so swimmingly well,
and it is everything you've
aimed for, and you're there,
you're at the pinnacle. You know?
It was hard, it was hard.
Like anything, like if
you leave your missus.
Like, "This ain't working any
more, I've gotta fuck off, babe."
And it's tough, isn't it?
We tried very much to keep
it a secret, until the last tour.
But it became a secret
that was impossible to keep.
The news had gone out already.
And there were some very tearful
eyes during those last shows.
I was crying and crying for
three days, I still remember.
It was almost like you'd
lost a member of your family.
It was, like, just disbelief.
We were destroyed. I mean,
it's like such a big part of
your life is coming to an end.
You don't believe it at first.
The same as anything, isn't it?
You don't think that way.
Just simply the bitterest pill
I ever had to swallow.
It was devastating.
We'd come out after the show and
anybody wanted anything signed
or photo or whatever.
And of course, you've got
the whole of the audience,
saying, "Why are you splitting up?
What a show tonight," et cetera.
And I just kind of said,
"Well, I don't know, really,
"I don't know why we are,
but we are, and that's it."
I think we've done all we can do
as the three of us.
And I think it's a
good time to finish it.
I don't want to drag it on and go on
for, like, the next 20 years doing it.
Become nothing, mean nothing.
End up like all the
rest of the groups.
I want this to
count for something.
I want everything I've done over the last
five or six years to count for something.
As far as I was concerned,
I had thrown my all into this.
Do you know what I mean?
I didn't have a backup career.
I couldn't go back to being a brain
surgeon or anything like that.
And, you know...
I don't know what to
say, really, about it.
I mean, you just
have to accept it
because that's the way
that he wanted to do it.
After the last show, I think we
probably just got splendidly drunk,
and even worse then because
you wake up in the morning after
with a cracking
hangover, and no band.
It was just, yeah,
it was horrible.
Horrible.
I don't know, maybe Paul had The
Style Council in mind at that stage,
I am honestly not sure.
I wanted to play with other musicians,
and to see what I was capable of,
and learn other things, and it wouldn't have
happened if we'd stayed together anyway.
I am very happy with
what I am doing. You know?
From The Jam, it's got bigger and
bigger over the last few years.
It's a testament to
those great songs.
There's just no getting
away from it. They're great.
They are memorable,
people still want to hear them.
My brother took me
to my first Jam gig in 1977,
Portsmouth, Locarno,
and I was blown away
from the word "go."
And it's ironic, but he was also
our last gig as well, in '82.
- In Brighton.
- Yeah, I was.
And from there, he's now
headlining, front-lining the band.
You know, I think we're all kind
of pretty happy with our lives now.
Rick's doing his thing,
he's got a book coming out.
The book came about, really, I
started writing odd things down.
Little stories, anecdotal things.
And when I bumped into Snowy, he helped
me really pull it together, properly.
I've not done
ghostwriting before.
That is so The Jam.
You know, it's almost like letting
the people into sound checks,
that kind of, know them and ask
SO you can be part of this.
Loads of fans of The Jam ended
up playing in bands, didn't they?
Because you could learn
how to play the songs,
I've just played on Paul's,
I think it's his 12th solo album,
which I think I have
played on 11 of them 12,
And still in his
band after 21 years.
And I think, more than
ever, the older I get,
the more I just want to see where
else I can go with it all, really,
try and push it as
far as I possibly can.
And I don't know where it will end
up or what will happen with it.
But I think it's
my job to do that.
I came up with the idea of
a proper exhibition about 2010.
So, it's taken five years to get to
the stage of doing that exhibition.
Thirty-three years on, the legacy
still means so much to people.
And everything they ever said,
every word they spoke, sang,
just made sense
to all of us, it clicked.
So, that's why it stayed with us
because it's a lifelong thing.
It wasn't just a "wham, bang,
thank you, ma'am" and gone.
It's something that I would
never have ever thought of doing
if Den hadn't come
up with that idea.
We would never have
got our archive out, ever.
The Jam did speak for a generation,
and I think that it does live on.
They have assumed a legendary
position in British culture,
because they split at their peak.
The band I'm most likely to
see in the world now, tomorrow,
is The Jam, still, you know,
and I am 51 years old now.
Absolutely,
categorically, fucking no.
I don't know whether it would be the
wisest thing to do, in actual fact.
To me, it would be against
everything we ever stood for.
There's too much time,
and too much water, you know,
under the bridge,
and it's best
probably left there.
We stopped at the right time.
The music's gone on. The music
has legs and it's got longevity
and the young kids get into it.
And hopefully, in years to come, after
we're all fucking brown bread, mate,
people will still
be discovering it.
And good enough. That's a
good place to leave it, isn't it?
Who was your favourite in
the band? Come on, be honest.
- John.
- Right. There you go.
That's just fucking
awesome, mate.
Put your hands together for the best
band in the fucking world, The Jam!
When I first saw The Jam, it was almost
like a hit my soul kind of thing,
almost like a spiritual thing.
If it hadn't been for The Jam, I'd have
probably still been a window cleaner,
or probably serving
time, a ne'er-do-gooder.
So, they kind of elevated and
changed my life for the better.
I remember often playing those songs when
I had to climb into a different mood.
Songs like that were a beautiful
solace. Better than the meds.
The Jam definitely inspired me
to look beyond the burbs.
I know every lick
of those records.
I know every lyric of those
records. I know every beat.
It's definitely a huge
part of who I am.
Paul Weller. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1958.
Coming from Woking,
which is a little suburban town,
I think it just gave us
a different perspective.
We were never sort of looked to
as being sort of trendy,
and I guess we were kind of
outsiders from that point of view,
because we were from this little
hip town from outside London.
This is what used to be
Woking Working Men's Club.
Obviously derelict now.
This is where I did my first gig when I
was 14. Me and Steve Brookes, my mate.
It was me and him
that started the band off.
We got a little gig on
a Wednesday evening,
which my dad managed to blag off
the fellow who run the club.
So, there was about maybe six
people in there. Eight with us.
Steve Brookes. Born
London, England, 1958.
- We were better than that, weren't we?
- I don't know if we were.
Well, we first hooked up
in school, at Sheerwater.
And I'd just moved into the area
down from London.
He was definitely cooler
than most of the other kids.
Thought you were going to say,
"He was a twat."
He was a bit of a twat as well,
but I found that out subsequently.
But, no, he was
definitely cooler.
And I think it's that sort of,
you know, when you're that age
there's a sexuality thing
that's waking up in you,
and you're sort of
like, you don't know,
is this the boy you wanna be
or the boy you wanna have?
What is it? But it's an attraction,
whatever it is. I don't know what it is.
- You didn't tell me that before.
- No, I kept it to myself.
Yeah, so, we started knocking up sort
of a few little, old '50s songs mostly,
wasn't it, Elvis
and stuff like that?
- Yeah, rock 'n' roll tunes, R&B, weren't it?
- Yeah.
- We didn't play them particularly well.
- Yeah, three chords.
But there were only three chords and we felt
like we were doing a reasonable job on them.
Some may differ.
We never considered being a duo.
We wanted to be a band.
Yeah, so, it was really hard to
find other musicians in Woking.
There was maybe two drummers in the
whole of Woking that were our age group.
One of them we tried out, which
didn't work, a big lad called Nell,
who was more into
brass band music, really.
And then we found Rick.
Rick Buckler. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1955.
They were looking for a drummer,
I sort of pretended
to be a drummer at the time.
The first thing that I was
struck by was the fact that,
"Hey, there's somebody who can
actually play guitar properly."
Then you start to realise
that you can form songs.
And there is the possibility,
then, of playing proper gigs.
One of the first shows
was at the Sheerwater Youth Club.
And Paul said to me, "Well,
look. There's a stack of albums.
"Listen to all of these,
learn as many as you can."
And so, we came up with a set.
Fuck, it's been a long time
since I was in here last.
Must be over 40 years.
I remember there wasn't a huge
crowd of people in here, really,
just the usual youth club lot,
with everybody
just going bananas,
and probably too much drink
for our age at that time.
But weird being back in here because I
haven't been back in here since then.
Probably that was what set the seed
of, "I think we wanna do more of this."
We wanted to be bigger
than The Beatles, definitely.
That's true. I mean, that's
what we wanted to be.
The next Beatles.
That was the scheme.
And we weren't.
My dad started managing
us, right. He just loved it.
No one said, "You're the
manager." That just came about.
Obviously, everybody knows
he's my son, Paul.
And you have to know
his talent for music.
So, I said, "Well,
I'll push you."
I can't give him an education.
I can't give him money.
So, I give him what I can give him.
Inspiration. Shall we say that?
Or a push, whatever a
father can do in that cause.
He was just always
encouraging, weren't he?
And he was always hustling,
trying to get a gig, or get a van,
or a bit of equipment.
John was always out sort of hustling
for something on our behalf.
I think he was great.
John took on the role of chatting to the
right people at the Working Men's Clubs
and the CIUs, and what have you, and
putting us forward to play there.
It was just three-piece
for a long time, weren't it?
Yeah, two guitars and drums for
quite a long time, with no bass.
The original plan was that
Paul was gonna move onto bass
because Macca was his big hero.
And that was the sort of lineup we
envisaged, with another guitar player.
Me on guitar, another guitar
player, Paul on bass, and drums.
Bruce Foxton. Born Woking,
Surrey, England, 1955.
I think I saw some sort of ad about The
Jam were looking for a rhythm guitarist.
So, I went along for that, and met
Paul, and Rick, and Steve Brookes.
And it just clicked,
and we got on well.
And they were gigging, which was
right at the top of my shopping list.
You know? I wanted to
get out there and play.
Originally, I was playing bass
when Bruce came around
and he was gonna
play rhythm guitar.
But Bruce wasn't a powerful enough rhythm
guitarist, really, for what we wanted.
Paul, I think, suggested to me, he said,
"Well, look, why don't you have that,"
gave me his bass, "and I'll
take over on rhythm/lead guitar?"
And it just worked. You know?
We disparaged everything that
was current during that period.
'Cause we had Gary Glitter
and the Bay City Rollers.
And we were really, really, totally
against all that sort of stuff.
So, we didn't model ourselves at
all on anything that was current.
The only band that made any sense
was Dr Feelgood
because they had that kind of brash,
aggressive R&B for a start as well,
but violence to it, and it was
everything you want as a kid.
When we saw them we just went,
"God, this is just something totally
different." Nothing like we'd...
And it was just hard-edged R&B.
Real sort of distinctive.
Paul and Steve were very close,
they were really good mates.
So, it was a bit of a blow when Steve decided
that he'd had enough and he wanted to leave.
I mean, we weren't earning a great deal
of money, but we were working quite hard.
So, it was sort of understandable
that he had enough of that, really.
With Steve leaving, it kind of
allowed me to become
the leader of the band.
- I guess is right.
- Yeah.
I think that's another
reason we parted,
was because we were
sort of struggling for dominance.
- Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
- Do we do this one, do we do...
Whereas we'd always agreed
on what we were doing.
I just think it's that thing,
unless you are totally united,
every band needs a leader in it
or someone who can focus
and have a vision for the band.
I came late to The Who, right.
I have no idea why, but I don't
remember them from the '60s.
And then I managed to get a copy of
their first album, My Generation,
which is still my
favourite Who record.
And by far, the
sound was amazing.
Again, it had that kind of real edge
to it and sort of violence to it,
or aggression, however
you wanna look at it.
But anyway, it caught
my imagination for sure,
and so much so
that I tried to rewrite the
record, really, on our first album.
Sorry, Pete.
I'd had this vision from God saying, "You
shall be a Mod from this day onwards."
And that was it for me, mate.
I was fucking off. I was away.
So, I said to the others, "Look,
this is where we're gonna go,
"this is the direction, we need to have
a look. I mean, this is gonna be it."
And luckily they
went along with it.
It was a good image
and it felt sharp.
The look was very important. It
reflected a lot about us. It worked.
During the '70s, I was kind
of waiting for our time, really.
Not just me as a person,
but I mean our generation.
And I found that when
I saw the Sex Pistols.
And just to be in the audience,
seeing those bands
and seeing all people my age, which you
just didn't have that scene in Woking.
I tried so hard to be nice.
Then I saw the Pistols and Clash
and all those bands.
I felt there was a
connection there, really.
I thought there was a connection between
what I was into and the whole Mod thing,
but it was also a contemporary
connection as well.
Not that I thought we should
go off and be a punk band,
but I just thought,
"This is such a great scene.
"This is people our age,
we can play to these people."
Once we discovered that
there was a good scene in London,
and it was only an hour drive, it
was definitely the place to head for.
So, our aim was to get into London,
hopefully get a bit of press,
get the name about a bit more.
Possibly get record
companies down.
They weren't really that prepared to
come out to what they saw as the sticks.
Adrian Thrills. Born
London, England, 1958.
First time I saw
the band I was 16.
It must have been around September '76.
And I went along with a couple of friends.
We'd heard about them
through the grapevine.
So, we went along expecting
another down-the-line punk band,
so it was quite a surprise
when you saw this group.
One of them had pretty long hair, which
just wasn't the done thing at the time,
wearing sharp black suits and
having strong '60s influences,
and being slightly more melodic,
maybe slightly more musicianly
than most of the punk bands.
After the gig, my friend, Shane MacGowan,
and I, we started chatting to Paul.
He just seemed very much like the
kind of kid I was at school with.
We're doing this film.
And I was living in the new town
of Stevenage at that time.
And Paul was from
Woking, almost...
We were kind of kids from the satellite
towns coming up to the Big Smoke.
And there was
definitely a bond there.
We had a four-week residency
at the Red Cow, right,
which was a pub in Hammersmith.
The first week there
was 50 people, maybe.
And the next week
there was 100 people.
And then by week three and four, there
was fucking queues around the block,
and I thought that
was sort of amazing.
You could just feel this thing
growing, organically growing.
In 1976, The Jam wouldn't really get
much of a look-in in the music press.
And so, it was left to the likes
of myself and Shane MacGowan,
who were doing
some of the early punk fanzines.
This one's mine, 48 Thrills,
in which you have, possibly, the
first-ever Jam interview, perhaps.
It wasn't really until the publicity
that the punk thing was getting
that I think the
record companies,
their attention was turned to
what the hell's going on here.
It almost became a bit of a fight
that the record companies
had to sign somebody.
Chris Parry. Born Warrington,
New Zealand, 1949.
In '76, I was an A&R man
for Polydor Records.
I was on the hunt for punk bands at the
time, trying to bring them into the label.
So, I was at a show, Shane MacGowan
came up to me and says, "Here, Chris."
He says, "Look, there's a
band playing this Saturday night.
"First on, check 'em out, they're
great, they're called The Jam."
The whole approach
was very, very exciting.
And I thought Paul particularly
was outstanding as a frontman.
They just seemed like
a group that was gonna deliver.
Paul was obviously
the special one.
He was pretty determined,
he was pretty sure about himself.
He said, "Chris, I'm telling you,
"I am gonna be quite something
in this country.
And I said, "Good on you.
"Well, you're 19, go for it."
Chris saw something in us.
We signed for 6 grand, which
was more money in those days,
but it still weren't
that much money.
We would've been signed for 600
fucking quid, to be honest with you.
Do you know what I
mean? We were skint.
When they gave us the cheque,
my old man was like,
"Well, we ain't got a bank account,
how are we gonna fucking change it?"
Vic Coppersmith-Heaven.
Born London, England, 1945.
I'd been working at Olympic Studios
at that time for about five years.
I worked with the Stones,
I worked with George Harrison,
who was producing Billy Preston.
And I was asked to engineer The Clash,
Billy Idol with Generation X, and The Jam.
And it was almost like, "Choose one of these
bands to work with, what do you think?"
And I just really wanted to see
The Jam, and went to see them,
and was just
completely blown away.
There was no question about who I
should direct my energies towards.
They had a very interesting set. It was
very vital. It was highly energetic.
It was sharp,
really enthusiastic.
And it was just... I mean, it just captured
every imagination you wanted to have
as a producer as well.
To want to be able
to capture that sound.
And In The City did stand out as a
pretty strong single at the time as well.
It was such a great song, we'd
play it three times some nights.
We start with it, end with it,
and if we got an encore,
we'd fucking encore it as well.
That was a great
song, I loved it.
And I thought that would
always be the first single.
There was never
any doubt in my mind.
Making their debut on this week's
Top of the Pops, here's The Jam
and an effervescent new 45
called In The City.
That was fabulous to get on Top
of the Pops for the first time.
That was really one of those
milestones that you tick off,
because it was
the major music show in the UK.
Amazing. Because I used to
just watch bands on the Pops
and think, "God, I'd
like to be doing that."
And there I am doing it.
It was amazing, because I'd been
watching Top of the Pops
since I was a little kid, right,
religiously, every Thursday, without fail.
Once we got on there and actually
done it, it was less amazing.
You know, it's like,
"Really, is that all it is?"
Barry Cain. Born
London, England, 1952,
That was the start of my
love affair with The Jam.
I was about 22,
quite old, really,
working on a local newspaper
in South East London,
doing the music
entertainment side.
I was a working-class
kid in the council flats.
That's why it meant so
much to me, this music.
It was modern music,
with the emphasis on "Mod."
It was The Who kissed by Motown,
with a dash of Clash.
And it really was a new kind soul,
I found. It was just wonderful.
Right at the forefront of a new
phenomenon known as the New Wave,
they're called The
Jam and In The City.
They had that imagination to know that,
if you appeared on Top of the Pops,
you got to a generation of kids
that bought records.
They tapped into that
and they got to those kids.
We were gigging so hard as well.
It was like five, six
shows at least a week.
And travelling up and down the length
and breadth of the country, really.
It was a huge swell. You'd sense that
there was a big change happening.
For me, they were probably
my favourite times,
because there was this sort of
sense of innocence about it still,
and yet there was this excitement because
we'd feel we're getting somewhere,
we're getting an
audience together.
Derek D'Souza. Born
Bombay, India, 1959.
I first heard The Jam in 1977.
There was a lot of new stuff around
that came out at that time that I liked.
The Police, The Stranglers,
Sex Pistols, The Clash.
But The Jam stood out
because they're probably younger than
a lot of the bands, I think, anyway.
It felt like they're one of us.
And I liked them because, you
know, much as I love the punk idea,
and I loved a lot of the bands,
I was never into ripped-up
clothes and safety pins.
That was just never
gonna be my thing.
A lot of the punk bands
treated 1976 as a year zero.
Anything that existed before that
was history.
Whereas Paul, he wasn't
afraid of reaching back.
I remember going to his house in
Woking after one of those early gigs,
and it was at the height of punk,
and he had a bedroom festooned with
Beatles magazines, '60s memorabilia.
He had an obsession
and a real love of that era.
Their early sets were, a good 30 or 40%
of the songs were covers from the '60s.
We were seen as being, yeah, a bit
of an anachronism, I suppose, really.
Showing all our '60s influences,
and that's, you know, openly.
I remember seeing Joe Strummer
come to one of our gigs,
when we played in Ronnie Scotts,
and he had a shirt on that said,
"Chuck Berry is dead."
I was like, "You don't
mean that, mate, do you?
"Because we fucking love
Chuck Berry, you know?"
And I'm sure Joe
didn't mean that either.
So, there was a lot of posturing
and a lot of bullshit as well.
Even from the first album, you
could tell that the skill was there
and there was the
melody and the lyrics.
They weren't just like
a three-chord band.
That album, the songs
were pretty much our live set.
It was a big deal, of course,
to make an album.
But we were kind of at the
mercy of the producer, really,
because what the
fuck did we know?
There wasn't very
much over-dubbing
as essentially we wanted
to just capture the live set
and make that as
powerful as possible.
I did have some...
I think I tried to get Paul
to do some double-tracking,
but I used a harmonising thing, which
he didn't like very much at the time.
I remember being disappointed with
it. I didn't feel it was our sound.
Because Vic would always
get us to track stuff up,
which I guess in some ways did become
what people think of as Jam sounds.
Keiko Egawa. Born
in Tokyo, Japan, 1960.
I think it was around '77
that the New Wave
started coming into Japan.
The record company arranged
this so-called film concert,
to show people a
promo video at the time.
And it was quite good because,
obviously, we didn't have any Internet,
or they weren't
showing it on television.
And that's when I saw The Jam,
and it was on at school.
I still remember seeing it there.
I couldn't speak English at the time, but
I did understand a little bit of words.
But it wasn't enough to be able
to understand the whole lyrics.
So, basically, I didn't know
what they were singing about,
but music was
really, really good.
Martin Freeman.
Born Aldershot, England, 1971.
I first became aware of The Jam
when my brother Tim,
who's 10 years older than me,
brought home In The
City, the album, 1977.
And I remember hearing swearing
on it, and that was exciting.
It was scary for me, because
I didn't want our dad to hear it.
It wasn't until a
couple of years later,
where I thought, "Hang on, now I'm
gonna discover this now for myself."
And that's when
I really went to town on them.
It wasn't just about
smash it up kind of punk stuff.
But they were as much as a punk band,
or anything, they were a pop band.
And a really, really good one.
The Jam had quite
an uneasy relationship with punk.
The punk influences were obvious.
And yet they were never quite as kind
of hip with the London punk crowd
as maybe the
Pistols and The Clash.
There was a bit of a kind of
fashionista, art school element.
For a supposedly non-elitist
scene it could be quite exclusive.
And The Jam, I think, coming from Woking,
they almost seemed slightly as outsiders.
We did this interview with NME,
our first cover story with NME.
And we were saying
we're probably going to vote Tory
in the next election and
all that, which is bollocks.
It was to be contrary
and to set us up as opposites
of Pistols or The Clash.
The Pistols were kind of anarchy and
The Clash were kind of left wing,
and we were like, "Yeah, we don't
mind the Royal Family, really."
But it did us no favours.
Eddie Piller. Born
London, England, 1963.
When I came across The Jam,
they kind of made me realise that
you didn't have to be a punk rocker
to like this kind of music.
I think up to then I was
thinking, "Am I a punk?
"I like that I'm wearing a
mohair jumper and a school tie."
That was rubbish,
I was 15 years old.
And it was only
when I saw The Jam
that I thought, "You don't have to
be all that crap, you could be this."
Weller made you feel that it was
about you and your generation,
not some kind of
poncey art school generation
that took heroin
and walked down the King's Road.
It wasn't like that.
It was almost like working-class kids
with something to believe in the future.
All Around The World, to me, was the
first Mod record for my generation.
Not My Generation, The Who, my
generation, the postpunk generation.
And I was at school when that came
out, and it had a massive effect on me.
This was the first of the records that said,
actually, "We're not punks, we're Mods."
And I still regret that
wasn't on the album.
In 77, Polydor
was still operating on a model
pretty much as
it was in the '60s,
where The Beatles, and the Stones,
they put out two albums a year.
And sure enough in 1977
The Jam released two albums.
Momentum was
very important to me.
I thought that if we're
going to have this success,
we need to really
take it quickly, take it through.
We took it on board and said, "Yeah,
yeah, we'll do another album,"
and just sort of leapt
in quite confidently,
not really realising, maybe,
what was demanded of us.
I'd had a couple of songs,
which I'd been writing,
but I didn't really
have too many.
There was a lot of pressure on Paul,
a lot of pressure on all three of us,
with playing and then recording,
but Paul being a
main songwriter...
I wouldn't say I'd help him out.
I wanted to get some songs of
my own, I suppose, on the album.
I think Modern World
is not a great record.
It's got a few good songs on it, but
it's not a great album, I don't think.
It wasn't a disappointment to me,
because I'd gone to see them
at the Royal College of Art.
I did a review of it.
And I kind of eluded
to the colours of the Union Jack,
taking you through the three moods
that you get at a Jam concert,
like, red hot, expanding into white
heat, contracting into teenage blue.
And Paul really liked that line,
and he took "teenage blue" and used
it as a lyric in Life From A Window
from This Is The Modern World.
"This is great.
"I've got a lyric that's in a Jam song
of something that I came up with."
And he put my name on the back.
It was like winning an Oscar.
So, I always thought This Is The
Modern World was a great album.
It wasn't great by any standards, and
got bit of a pasting in the press.
Kind of got written
off, really, after that.
It was kind of like there was this big
sort of flash at first with In The City
and then it just sort of seemed
to be fizzling out, really.
The Jam was a three-piece band.
And in terms of songwriting,
my confidence was growing a bit,
and I was getting my feet
under the table a bit more.
I felt a little bit
more comfortable,
and wanted to contribute, try and
contribute, a bit more to the songwriting.
Bruce's writing isn't
like Paul's writing.
And I sensed that
there was a sense of,
"Okay, well, Bruce, you can
put some songs towards this."
I'm not a great believer in that.
I don't think I was that
arsed about it, really,
because I fell in love
with a girl around that time,
and I was kind of happy
just doing that, to be honest
I was a bit like, "I
don't give a fuck, really."
I wasn't right. I didn't write.
I wasn't motivated.
I think also the failing of the second
album was a bit like, "Well, fuck it."
I don't know why I was like that,
but anyway...
But we started to make some other
demos for a possible third record.
I just said, "There's
nothing there.
"I don't know what you're doing, Paul."
But, okay, that may be what it was.
I mean, I knew he had a girlfriend
and they were kind of in love
and quite tight and all of that.
But I don't know, Bruce was coming
forward with tunes and ideas
and even Rick had
a couple of ideas.
But they weren't...
They weren't going to be...
They weren't going to cut it.
I guess that's when
you felt pressurised
'cause you're almost
trying to write to order then,
"Well, what is going to satisfy
you then, Chris, what do you want?
"And we'll try and
write a song for you."
It's like, hang about,
we got this far with writing for
ourselves and what we believe in.
And, yeah, that was a knock and it
obviously spurred Paul on, particularly,
to have a re-think.
So, I had to get my head
out of the girlfriend's blouse
and get back into working again,
and start writing.
Like any record, once you have one or
two songs that you're really happy with
and you feel are
the real bones of the record,
it just encourages you
to go further it, really.
I mean, Down In The Tube Station,
I kind of had all words
and I had some chords and stuff
for it, but I was a bit like,
"I don't know, I'm
not sure if its right."
Vic Smith, bless him,
he was the one who said to me,
"No, this could be great, you've got
to work on this and we could do this."
He actually chucked
the lyrics in the bin.
And I pulled them out.
I looked at them and just said, "This
looks really good, can't we work on this?"
And the guys came in and bassline
happened, and the drum rhythm happened,
and the track
evolved out of that.
And next thing is, I was down
at St John's Wood Tube Station,
with a little mobile recorder,
recording the Tube trains.
And rest is history, really.
Everyone was
talking about this song.
There hadn't been
a song like it before.
It wasn't punk. It wasn't
anything. It was The Jam.
There was obviously a big part of,
well, "Fuck you. We'll show you."
But also you just knew
these were good songs,
that's what we aimed to achieve,
was that they're good songs
and we knew they were special.
Let's hope everybody else does.
All Mod Cons, of course is... My guess is that
it is most people's archetypal Jam record.
For good reason,
'cause I guess it's where they
really, really set their sound,
although the sound developed.
But no one else
sounded like that.
It's got some of the best songs about
youth ever written by a British songwriter,
on that record.
Somehow, they got it right.
They were conveying a different
message to working-class kids,
and that is basically
how Mod happened.
Mod is an aphorism for clean living
under difficult circumstances.
This didn't happen around The Clash,
it didn't happen around The Damned
or the Sex Pistols,
where you had an
entire way of life created,
or in this particular case,
re-created by one band.
Weller was either very, very lucky
or very, very astute and clever
because The Jam made it happen.
Mod for me is just about being well-dressed,
about having good taste and style.
So, in that sense I'm greedy,
I call anything that I like Mod,
do you know what I mean?
I call everything from The Jam to
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Mod."
'Cause I think, "No, it's good, its
quality and there's detail in it."
And so, that for me is my
definition of modernism in a way.
You cannot be a 50-year-old punk.
But there's plenty of 50-year-old Mods,
there's plenty of 70-year-old Mods.
It's just a classic,
timeless thing.
So, it's funny, really, because sort
of from my daydream, fantasy things
when I was back
in Woking, thinking,
"Yeah, we're gonna
get this thing going again."
And it did happen.
Paul Abbott. I was born
in Burnley, England, 1960.
In 1977, I became
intensively aware of The Jam,
I was working in a shoe factory
called Lambert Howarth in Burnley.
I was only there short term,
but I remember Paul Weller kind
of screaming out at that time,
and I was just a naughty little
kid who walked around frowning,
and I think when his music turned
up and it sounded like I looked,
I think that's when
we were onto a winner.
Punk was defined by
make a loud noise and back it up.
But the melodic nature
of Paul Weller's overcoat
just, I think, threw everybody off the
scent of it being called punk, quite punk.
It was bigger than that,
and it was better than that.
The Jam were a pop band.
In the same way that the
Small Faces were a pop band,
The Who were a pop band, The Beatles
were a pop band, The Jam were.
And whereas a lot of the punk bands
from that era fell by the wayside,
The Jam kept their heads down
and continued to produce a
whole stream of classic singles.
At that time, all of those great
heroes of the punk movement,
you know, Strummer
was Rocking The Casbah,
Johnny Rotten had given up,
or Public Image,
but Paul Weller was writing songs
that meant something
to me and my generation.
I was mindful of the audience. I
wanted to get across to my generation.
But it wasn't too difficult
'cause I was just writing about
how I felt as a 19- or 20-year-old,
going through the same experiences
as a lot of other kids as well.
So, I didn't have to
put myself into their shoes,
I was already in their
fucking shoes. You know?
The clarity with which he writes
about youth, it's not patronising,
it's not bubble-gum, but it's
full of a real joy and angst,
and it's very present
about living now.
I'm a young... I'm a 20-,
21-year-old and I'm writing this now."
When You're Young,
I used to love this song so much.
I used to put a high volume
on my Walkman and listen to it.
"But you find out life isn't like
that, it's so hard to comprehend."
That line, I used to love.
I thought everyone was old by the
time they were 21, when I was a kid.
I can remember my 21st birthday
when I thought, "It's fucking over.
"It really is all over."
And, yeah, our music
was really about youth, I think.
I think The Jam music really
kind of caught that time, really.
He spoke so, so specifically
to a group of people,
or maybe to an age of people,
that if you missed that boat, I
think it's hard to get actually.
You can appreciate writing if it's
not immediately part of your world,
if it's got a universal hook to it, and
The Jam were not universal, they weren't.
There was a lot of testing of the
water with lots of territories,
and America predominantly so.
Because America was beginning to
sit up and take notice
of what was going on in the UK.
So, we did go out there
and we did do some shows.
Right, this is our
bid for US success.
This one is called
Strange Zip Code.
The States, generally, I suppose,
was a bit of a disaster for us.
It was a bit like The Who in their early
days, deemed too British to crack the States.
They didn't work America
like a lot of other bands,
so they didn't go there and stay for
six months and tour all over America.
They were more of a
British band, actually.
I know very few American
Jam fans, not many.
A lot of people have never heard of The
Jam. It's very specific, that style.
I think it explains why we in this country,
if you like The Jam, you love them.
"Cause it really
does feel like yours.
Maria McHugh. Born
London, England, 1965.
Gosh, I would have been 14 or so,
I was living at home in Wembley.
So, a real suburb.
Me and my mates were going to
an Irish Catholic convent school.
And I think for us,
music was a way of escaping
from the sort of constraints
of that suburban life.
I remember when Setting Sons came
out, one of us had a ghetto blaster,
so we'd play Setting Sons walking to
school and singing to all the tracks.
We must have looked so stupid, but
we were just completely obsessed.
On Setting Sons I had this idea
of making a concept record,
something had a
kind of thing to it.
It was going to be about three
friends who were tight and close-knit.
There were quite a few songs
that kind of link up.
Thick As Thieves was on that.
That's a great song, I think.
But I kind of lost my
way. I just thought,
"I can't be fucking doing this
any more, just make a record."
That was the first record that I really
tried my hardest with the lyrics on,
I really thought I could try
and elevate the lyrics,
just a bit more kind of literary,
I suppose, really.
I always felt that Paul Weller
was wise beyond his years.
There was something
about the way he wrote his lyrics
that just set him apart.
And you would pore over them and you were
trying to sort of understand what they meant.
There was a Right to Work march,
which started in Liverpool.
It wasn't at the height of Thatcherism,
but it was the early doors.
When did she get in? '797?
And it was marching all the way down to
the country to the Houses of Parliament.
And on their route,
they passed by Eton College,
where some of the pupils of Eton
were jeering and taking the piss.
I thought it was a great opportunity
to write a song about class, really,
in a different sort of way.
And The Eton Rifles
is the kind of army cadet wing,
where they go out and do war games
on the fields and all that shite.
I mean, ultimately it says,
the revolution won't work
because these people have
got too much power behind them.
The odds are well
stacked against us.
And the, "Sup up your beer and
collect your fags," I suppose,
I was thinking, kind of, the
English revolution was sort of,
"What time's the
revolution starting?
"For God's sake, fuck it,
have a quick drink first."
It's a bit like that, isn't it?
David Cameron said The Eton Rifles
was one of his favourite songs
when he was at school.
So, you obviously
don't... They don't...
Not everyone reads the words.
Not everyone reads the lyrics.
Sometimes it's just a nice sound in the
background and the catchphrase people like.
I wasn't aware of The Eton Rifles'
political message, not really,
because as with a lot of Paul Weller's
songs you had to go and look stuff up.
But it made you look stuff up.
If nothing else,
it activated you in that sense.
Because you loved the music, it
will make you want to understand it.
Den Davis. Born in
Manchester, England, 1967.
The first time I saw them was at
Manchester Apollo, November '79,
the Setting Sons
tour. I'd be 11, 12.
I did feel really
vulnerable and young,
because looking around me, there
wasn't that many kids of my age
that were there at that point.
But if you think about
being squashed here.
I remember my ribs just bursting,
so I've probably not even
grown that much, really,
because I was quite
tall for my age then,
so I've not probably grown that
much because it's still on my ribs.
Yeah, it was great.
That was the first time I felt like a Jam fan,
being there with all these other Jam fans,
and it was great to be part of this
gang, all of a sudden, that was there.
Everyone sang every word,
and that was what
was special about it.
It wasn't just that they were there to
watch, they were there to take part.
And I always think
the energy worked both ways.
The Jam meant
everything to me at the time,
and the only way to see live
was to come over to England.
So, me and my friends, we were always
talking about we'd love to go to England,
to see the real thing.
And I wanted to
learn English anyway.
So, I was talking to my parents,
if I could go over to England just
to study English for three months.
And my parents agreed, "It's definitely
only for three months, that's fine."
So, they paid for it for me.
What I was thinking
was to see The Jam!
I've seen many
other bands before.
But when I first saw
The Jam at Rainbow,
I just thought the whole
atmosphere was so different.
I just wanted to see
them more and more.
But three months
went really quick.
And my study wasn't
completed anyway.
This is true.
So, I extended visa for six months,
and then another six months.
So, I'm still in London.
After 30 years.
To live in England
because of The Jam,
it sounds very crazy,
but I don't regret it at all.
And I do love this
country and people.
And I'm still here.
I'm always going to be here,
and this is my home.
Ian Snowball. Born in
Maidstone, Kent, England, 1970.
I first became aware
of The Jam in 1980.
In amongst the tension, and the creativity,
and the energy, sometimes the aggression.
It's almost like The Jam gave you
permission to be angry about things.
I got interested in politics
taking the lead
from what Paul was supporting,
or what he was
campaigning for at the time.
It didn't necessarily stay
like that as the years went by.
I was impressionable at that
time, but I'm happy with that.
It was an education
which I probably
wouldn't have got
from listening to a
Duran Duran record.
We were in the States when
Going Underground was released.
Because we really thought that,
"It'll maybe chart somewhere
"and then we'll finish
the American tour.
"We'll come home, and then maybe
it'll go up the charts a bit further.
"And then maybe by the third week
it'll go to number one."
We were in deepest south of the States
and going down like a lead balloon still.
And John had been on the phone to the
label and said, "Well, where is it?"
And they said it's gone
straight in to number one,
and it was just
obviously amazing.
And we thought,
"Well, what are we doing here?"
So, we just got on
Concorde and went home.
Cancelled the last, I don't know,
two or three, four shows,
whatever it was, in the States
and literally just booked ourselves
on a flight and came straight back
to do Top of the Pops.
I was in two minds
when it went to number one.
Obviously, we were all pleased,
but it also scared me.
Because I thought, "Fuck,
where do you go after that?
"Where's beyond number one?"
And I guess it's just you've got to have
another number one, and another one,
and all that stuff.
And I wasn't keen on
that sort of pressure.
But of course, who would turn
that down, that sort of success.
At least it was a song
that was saying something.
Nine-year-olds like me were jumping
around to very, very political music.
The music itself was political.
Who was making it,
by its nature, was political.
And the lyrics were
overtly political.
The greatest lines in it,
"You'll see kidney machines
replaced by rockets and guns."
And it's just, it's the same
thing going on now, really.
I've read that every time they fire a missile
in the Middle East it costs us 850,000.
There was a lot of concern
over a lot of these issues.
It was always that dark
mood of nuclear war,
and the Cold War, and all
that sort of thing going on.
And Paul picked up on that fact.
CND for me, at the beginning,
was just a cool badge.
You'd sort of seen it on these
Volkswagens and things like that.
And you weren't necessarily
interested in the news about it.
But the fact that he was talking about it
and going on rallies and things like that.
The Cold War was just as neurotic
as it could get.
It put more people in
institutions just for that threat.
And I think everybody
was fighting their way through,
and Paul Weller just had
a governance of the way.
It was like, he always reminded
me of a Resistance worker,
and it gave you the sense
that you weren't on your own.
Paul Weller was labelled, and
was, a spokesman for a generation.
He never really liked
that title, but he was.
We'd rather listen to him than Maggie
Thatcher or something, simple as that.
It was like, if he said
something, you'd take it on board.
Yeah, I wasn't really comfortable
with any of that.
I mean, I was a bit probably flattered,
ego-wise. Probably flattered at first,
but I didn't really like it.
I don't think I was the right person
cut out for that sort of thing.
I wasn't intelligent enough
or articulate enough
to be any spokesman for anyone,
I don't think, really.
I was just writing these songs,
which said more
really, anyway, I think.
When you saw The Jam
or you listened to The Jam,
you were aware that
they were a three-piece.
I mean, you couldn't divorce Bruce
Foxton's bass playing from their songs.
It was brilliant.
And Rick's drumming.
But I think it's fair to say that the focus,
certainly for me, for my friends, was on Paul.
In terms of the band,
The Jam being a three-piece,
and how important
each of those members were,
I don't know anybody that's ever
thought it was Paul Weller's band.
Bruce and Rick were
just as important to us.
Each of them played such
an important part in making it.
Yeah, Paul was the brains
behind that, if you like.
But I think, in all of our hearts, we
always felt equally about all of them.
Sound Affects, I love. It sounds
to me like their most indie record.
It sounds like their most student record,
for a band who weren't very student-y at all.
But the sounds that
were coming in on that
didn't seem to be dictated by,
"Does this sound '60s enough?"
Sounds Affects was very close
to how we saw ourselves.
We'd stripped everything back to
a fairly minimum sort of sound.
I preferred the sound on it because
it wasn't multi-tracked guitars
and basses and stuff.
It was a bit more
sparse sounding.
I think if they'd just
carried on playing In The City,
and another version of In
The City, and so on, and so on,
it wouldn't have been the same.
I liked the new stuff
and I didn't want them just to play
the same thing over and over again,
which so many bands do.
Mark Baxter. Born
London, England, 1962.
We were a footballer
community, really.
So, music was around, but you didn't
really actually follow it religiously.
I think The Jam were basically the
first band to really do that for me.
Hearing Paul, the way he sounded, the
influence he had was massive on me.
He almost gave me an education
I didn't get at school.
I sort of thought, "Maybe there's other
things you can be doing because he's done it."
He's obviously a working... Or he
sounded like, a working class guy.
And he looked a bit
chippy, and a bit edgy.
And I thought how I'm like that,
we're all like that where I'm from.
So, if he can do
it, why can't we do,
not necessarily music, but
something else you'd be doing?
But I honestly didn't have a clue
where to start.
When you look deeper, the lyrics
that Paul would come out with
were definitely an influence
on what I'm doing,
the writing I'm doing now,
and the book, The Mumper,
which did really well.
Without Paul's influence as a young
man, I wouldn't have done that book.
There's no way
I would have even attempted it.
Because just the work they put out,
and the songs they wrote about,
and the situations they were
describing in those songs,
I identify very
strongly with that.
And when the opportunity come along to
do writing, to be a writer, I took it.
And without a doubt, without that
band, without Paul's influences,
I wouldn't have been doing
what I'm doing now.
Paul Weller electrified
people's vocations.
And I think there are people who
are generous with intelligence,
and people who use it as a weapon,
and he just seemed to share it.
And that made me
trust him as a role model.
What Paul was singing
about was, really,
"You don't have to be born with
a silver spoon in your mouth.
"You can have big ideas."
So, for a humble
girl from Wembley
to end up in New York for 12
years, working in advertising,
I guess, yeah. I mean, I guess I had some
kind of belief in myself from a young age.
And maybe I got
some of that from them.
I'd always been
interested in photography.
My father bought my first camera
when I was 18,
and then my love of music, it
seemed natural to combine the two.
At the time, music videos
were just sort of starting out,
so I wanted to try taking a picture
from the TV, just to see if it worked.
And this was during the
Start! video, during Paul's solo.
I think this is before
we had a video even,
so you'd have to just take the
shots while it was live on TV,
so it wasn't a case of playing
it back and trying again.
It was just you'd set up to watch the TV
and have your camera on the tripod as well
at the same time, which is crazy.
And so, I actually
wrote in to Paul to the fan club,
just for them to see
what I'd taken, really.
And I couldn't believe it.
And Paul wrote back and said
he really liked the pictures,
and he especially liked the ones
taken off the TV.
"Dear Derek, hopefully you will have
received your photos back signed.
"Sorry about the delay.
"Anyway, I just wanted to add
that I thought they were great,
"I especially like the
ones taken off the TV.
"Fantastic colour. All
the best, Paul Weller."
The band, at the time,
were recording the next single,
which was going to
be Absolute Beginners,
and the B side, Tales From The Riverbank,
so I was invited to go along to meet them.
And we were talking about what Paul
wanted to do for shots for the new single,
and he had the idea
of shooting in Chiswick House.
And what I didn't know at the time
was that The Beatles had shot,
I think it was Paperback
Writer and Rain,
they'd shot two of their videos
in Chiswick Park.
And knowing that Paul,
being a massive Beatles fan,
it was always one of my questions
to ask Paul,
did he know at the time
that The Beatles had shot there.
Any opportunity or excuse to go
anywhere they've been, I would do so.
So, The Fabs done their promo
films down there.
So, yeah, I just wanted
to... Yeah, why not?
This was taken right at the
end of the day of the session.
We put the camera on a tripod,
and put it on self-timer.
And that was a lovely, lovely
memento at the end of the day for me,
from my first-ever
professional photo session.
I can't imagine another band
doing what they did,
to pick some guy out of the
fan club, a novice in every way,
and it did change my life.
One, two.
The Jam was like a family.
I saw The Jam well over 50 times.
The band had come down and signed things.
They recognised faces and they went,
"Yeah, I haven't seen you since
Utrecht." Or something like that.
You don't know what that means to a
16-year-old kid who's looking for an identity.
It was great, because they looked
after you. That was the difference.
They weren't standoffish.
They'd let the kids in, they'd sign
the autographs, they'd talk to them.
They just treated them
like they wanted to be treated.
It worked really well.
It was always a two-way thing.
Letting us in to sound checks, I mean,
their Jam sound checks were legendary.
Sometimes there'd be more people
at Jam sound checks
than there would
be other bands' gigs.
Stuff like sound checks, we didn't
want to have that barrier there,
because a lot of those
were unable to get a ticket,
and/or were too young to
actually come and see the show,
but they've hung around outside.
And you just think, "Well, why not come
in? Come in out of the cold," for a start.
And also, "We
appreciate your support."
Was that enough?
It was just great
to sort of get to know people.
And we didn't really see
that there was any real barrier
between us and our fans, really.
Well, I don't think we really
liked that "us and them" mentality,
where rock gods are up here,
and the audience are down there,
and they never
meet. And it's just...
That didn't really
fit in with us at all.
I always thought, "I wonder if that ever made
any difference at all, doing all that stuff."
But it did, I think, because I meet
people, and I've met people over the years,
and still meet people who said,
"Yeah, we spoke to you guys,
"you let us back in the dressing
room and we spoke to you."
Or, "We went to the sound check,
your old man let us in."
So, I think it did make a
difference in a small way.
I think people liked it
and appreciated it as well.
David Pottinger. Born
Middlesborough, England, 1994.
I first became aware of The Jam
when I was around 11.
I was bought an
iPod for Christmas
and my dad had pre-loaded
Absolute Beginners onto it.
That track, that Christmas Day, 2006, I
mean, it sort of changed everything, really.
I went and bought
all the studio albums.
I mean, my dad had them,
but they were all on vinyl.
I needed access to them quickly,
and that iPod, for about the
first four months of its life,
there was nothing
but The Jam on it.
It was just like a Jam Pod
or whatever you want to call it.
I decided to start a blog
around September 2013.
It was sort of just done on a
whim to see what happened.
And I put my love of writing
and modernism together.
Graham, who's like 50% of the blog,
he put his love of sort of photography
and web design together, and we just
wanted to see where it would go,
who we could meet,
what we could do.
We spread our own
sort of modernist gospel
and just see what
happens with it, really.
Number One Mod at the moment,
it's got to be Weller, hasn't it?
To speak to someone like Weller
would be huge.
I mean, it'd give you
that sense of achievement,
I suppose, that you've reached
the top with your blog.
- Yeah. Not too formal.
- Yeah, just whatever you wanna do.
All right, well, yeah.
- How are you doing, Paul? I'm Dave.
- Yes, mate, all right.
- Good to see you, man.
- It's proper.
Yeah, I run Move On Up blog, it's
an online modernist-inspired blog,
- so, yeah.
- I know.
It's a pleasure to be doing this
interview, looking forward to it.
- Nice one, mate.
- Sweet.
Start off, obviously,
The Jam had massive influence
to myself, my favourite
band of all time.
So, obviously, The Jam,
how did the name come about?
It was something about
you always jamming, weren't you,
you and the lads, and that,
- and it was sort of...
- Yeah, I don't know
if it came from
that or not. I mean,
it was there right from
early days anyway,
- like from '72, '73 or something like that.
- Yeah.
So, it was kind of, we always
had that name. But I don't know.
I think my sister, I think.
It's sort of well documented, isn't it,
that you're quite into poetry and stuff?
You used a Shelley poem,
didn't you, on Sound Affects?
- Yeah.
- So, why that one then?
It's called the Mask
of Anarchy, right?
And we just sort of used, like, two
or three verses from it, anyway.
But basically, the poem is a
revolutionary poem and it's saying,
"We are many, they are few."
And basically, we're sort of
trying to get people to rise up
against the ruling
classes, really.
But I thought it was, yeah,
definitely relevant for the time.
This was kind of early
days of Thatcherism,
and an austerity for the working
classes anyway in England, I think.
I went and bought
a book on poetry that Shelley...
Because of that quote
on the back of the album cover.
And that is crazy
when you think now.
I didn't know who he was or what he
was even... I didn't understand it.
But I still went and
bought the book,
because I thought I've got to
find out what it is about.
Why is he using that
on an album? Why?
Because I think, in a way, he
was just tipping everybody off.
I mean, I went to an all-boys
comprehensive in the early to mid '80s.
Boys didn't go
around reading poetry.
And they certainly didn't
go around writing poetry.
But then you had someone
like Paul Weller, who was saying,
"I do. And I read
this, and I write that."
And I like that.
Steve Cradock. Born
Solihull, England, 1969.
I remember seeing them on Top of
the Pops doing Town Called Malice.
I'd have been 11 years old, and
then hooked from then on, really.
That was the first sort of
serious single I bought.
I think it was that tune
that really got me into it.
Just the power of the sound of it was
just a really fast, exciting tune.
Dancing to it at the
youth club. You know?
It was kind of the best song
of that year, I think.
It was just of that time, really.
You could see the economic
effects of Thatcherism.
We'd go up north and
it was worse up there,
you'd see all these fucking
places that had shut down.
And you talked to kids
and there were just no prospects.
It was a very desolate
time, I thought, really.
But I suppose I tried to
turn it 'round to be positive.
Everybody was stuck.
But everybody needed a key
or a kick to get out,
and stop dreaming
of a quiet life.
I think it was just a clarion call
for everybody, just it was carpe diem.
Yeah, and I love that song
because it threw me into a massive
fit of really good writing.
And actually, that
period shaped my career.
That's not a lyric that you find
very often in number one records.
Just the way it scans,
and just the way a lot of it
unapologetically doesn't scan or rhyme
particularly, like an easy pop song.
And yet it's set to the most
commercial beat of the 20th century.
Like, like if you're talking about
Motown, there's nothing poppier than that.
It was also probably
our most commercial song.
We sort of stepped outside of
just Jam fans at that point.
I think that song
transcended all of that,
and I think it got through
to a lot more people.
By the time The Gift came out,
every song was going to number
one or top three or whatever.
It was almost like
everyone had discovered The Jam,
and they were part of mainstream,
versus earlier,
when I felt that
they were still...
A small group of people had discovered
them, they were still our secret.
So, I have bittersweet
memories of The Gift,
and that time around '82.
I went for another big, heavy
rebirth around that time, really,
of listening to soul music.
I suppose that influence is in
a lot of the songs on The Gift.
And Precious, yeah,
kind of came out of that, really,
and just getting immersed
again into black music, really.
Some fans liked it,
but at the time there was a bit of a
division. There was a bit of like...
Because I remember us
meeting some fans in the street
who were saying they thought
it sounded a bit jazz funk.
Paul Weller was always trying
to move them forward creatively,
which is a very Mod thing to do.
I think 13-, 14-year-old
kids wearing parkas,
walking down the street in 1982,
didn't want The Gift probably, because it's
a little bit difficult, didn't want the soul.
They wanted In The City
and When You're Young.
And the fact that he'd
moved on, you know,
I think his original fans
kind of moved on with him.
The Gift is their
sort of last gasp.
I love it,
because sound-wise, you get a
clue as to where he is going next,
with the more sort
of overt soul thing.
This one is called Ghosts.
By that time, right, by '82, I'd
been in the band for 10 years,
from the time me and Brookesy
first started, right, in '72.
And as great as it was,
it was full on, it was
just tour, record tour.
It was very much like that.
I just sensed, I suppose,
that Paul wanted a break,
or maybe we should
all take a break.
But I didn't see
that the end of the band is nigh.
No, I don't think there
was ever any feeling
that we were reaching
the end of the line at all,
not by any stretch
of the imagination.
I was only 24.
I wanted to see what other
kind of music I could make.
I wanted to see who
I was, who I could be.
Paul sat us all
around the studio table,
and John said to us,
"Paul's got something to say."
"What's this?" And it was...
So, it was a bit of a shock when he
said that he wanted to leave the band.
It was a bit like
jaw dropping down to the ground.
You could have heard a pin drop.
It was like, "Okay."
So, almost immediately go
into sort of shock mode, really.
There was no talking Paul 'round.
It was a big decision
for him to make, obviously.
When you got The Gift and Malice, and
they are riding high in the charts,
and it's all gone
so swimmingly well,
and it is everything you've
aimed for, and you're there,
you're at the pinnacle. You know?
It was hard, it was hard.
Like anything, like if
you leave your missus.
Like, "This ain't working any
more, I've gotta fuck off, babe."
And it's tough, isn't it?
We tried very much to keep
it a secret, until the last tour.
But it became a secret
that was impossible to keep.
The news had gone out already.
And there were some very tearful
eyes during those last shows.
I was crying and crying for
three days, I still remember.
It was almost like you'd
lost a member of your family.
It was, like, just disbelief.
We were destroyed. I mean,
it's like such a big part of
your life is coming to an end.
You don't believe it at first.
The same as anything, isn't it?
You don't think that way.
Just simply the bitterest pill
I ever had to swallow.
It was devastating.
We'd come out after the show and
anybody wanted anything signed
or photo or whatever.
And of course, you've got
the whole of the audience,
saying, "Why are you splitting up?
What a show tonight," et cetera.
And I just kind of said,
"Well, I don't know, really,
"I don't know why we are,
but we are, and that's it."
I think we've done all we can do
as the three of us.
And I think it's a
good time to finish it.
I don't want to drag it on and go on
for, like, the next 20 years doing it.
Become nothing, mean nothing.
End up like all the
rest of the groups.
I want this to
count for something.
I want everything I've done over the last
five or six years to count for something.
As far as I was concerned,
I had thrown my all into this.
Do you know what I mean?
I didn't have a backup career.
I couldn't go back to being a brain
surgeon or anything like that.
And, you know...
I don't know what to
say, really, about it.
I mean, you just
have to accept it
because that's the way
that he wanted to do it.
After the last show, I think we
probably just got splendidly drunk,
and even worse then because
you wake up in the morning after
with a cracking
hangover, and no band.
It was just, yeah,
it was horrible.
Horrible.
I don't know, maybe Paul had The
Style Council in mind at that stage,
I am honestly not sure.
I wanted to play with other musicians,
and to see what I was capable of,
and learn other things, and it wouldn't have
happened if we'd stayed together anyway.
I am very happy with
what I am doing. You know?
From The Jam, it's got bigger and
bigger over the last few years.
It's a testament to
those great songs.
There's just no getting
away from it. They're great.
They are memorable,
people still want to hear them.
My brother took me
to my first Jam gig in 1977,
Portsmouth, Locarno,
and I was blown away
from the word "go."
And it's ironic, but he was also
our last gig as well, in '82.
- In Brighton.
- Yeah, I was.
And from there, he's now
headlining, front-lining the band.
You know, I think we're all kind
of pretty happy with our lives now.
Rick's doing his thing,
he's got a book coming out.
The book came about, really, I
started writing odd things down.
Little stories, anecdotal things.
And when I bumped into Snowy, he helped
me really pull it together, properly.
I've not done
ghostwriting before.
That is so The Jam.
You know, it's almost like letting
the people into sound checks,
that kind of, know them and ask
SO you can be part of this.
Loads of fans of The Jam ended
up playing in bands, didn't they?
Because you could learn
how to play the songs,
I've just played on Paul's,
I think it's his 12th solo album,
which I think I have
played on 11 of them 12,
And still in his
band after 21 years.
And I think, more than
ever, the older I get,
the more I just want to see where
else I can go with it all, really,
try and push it as
far as I possibly can.
And I don't know where it will end
up or what will happen with it.
But I think it's
my job to do that.
I came up with the idea of
a proper exhibition about 2010.
So, it's taken five years to get to
the stage of doing that exhibition.
Thirty-three years on, the legacy
still means so much to people.
And everything they ever said,
every word they spoke, sang,
just made sense
to all of us, it clicked.
So, that's why it stayed with us
because it's a lifelong thing.
It wasn't just a "wham, bang,
thank you, ma'am" and gone.
It's something that I would
never have ever thought of doing
if Den hadn't come
up with that idea.
We would never have
got our archive out, ever.
The Jam did speak for a generation,
and I think that it does live on.
They have assumed a legendary
position in British culture,
because they split at their peak.
The band I'm most likely to
see in the world now, tomorrow,
is The Jam, still, you know,
and I am 51 years old now.
Absolutely,
categorically, fucking no.
I don't know whether it would be the
wisest thing to do, in actual fact.
To me, it would be against
everything we ever stood for.
There's too much time,
and too much water, you know,
under the bridge,
and it's best
probably left there.
We stopped at the right time.
The music's gone on. The music
has legs and it's got longevity
and the young kids get into it.
And hopefully, in years to come, after
we're all fucking brown bread, mate,
people will still
be discovering it.
And good enough. That's a
good place to leave it, isn't it?
Who was your favourite in
the band? Come on, be honest.
- John.
- Right. There you go.
That's just fucking
awesome, mate.