compilation albums. These were collections of hit songs recorded by cover bands. There was a sexy young woman on the cover wearing hot pants or another fashion item of the day. I’m prepared to admit that I might have bought the albums because of that.
Mainstream shows like Top of the Pops (and we only ever watched mainstream shows in my house) churned out a mixture of classic soul tunes and all sorts of terrible rubbish. Brass bands, girls’ school choirs, someone called Lieutenant Pigeon. ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ by Brotherhood of Man had been number one for what felt like my entire childhood. The radio stations were not much better. Radio 2 played easy listening tunes. I didn’t find them easy to listen to at all. Radio 1 played chart hits. That meant a constant diet of anodyne, saccharine rubbish interspersed with the odd decent tune. Plus you had to put up with the DJs who were for the most part wankers, or in some cases, much much worse. Simon Bates, who I later met at a gig and turned out to be a very nice bloke, had Our Tune. He told incredibly sad stories about people with terminal illness (it’s possible that there aren’t many happy stories about people with terminal illness), some of whom would no doubt have been happier to die rather than listen to any more stories about other people with terminal illness. And the tunes they’d request would be maudlin and sentimental nonsense like ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ by Charlene (‘I’ve been undressed by Kings and I’ve seen some things that a woman aint s’posed to see’ might be my favourite ridiculous lyric of all time), or ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks. Personally, if I’d suffered a bereavement, I’d want something a bit more upbeat. Noel Edmonds presented the Breakfast show and he thought he was much funnier than he actually was. So did Dave Lee Travis. He had a jingle that went ‘Quack Quack Oops’. No wonder there was social unrest.
The only show that was really worth listening to was at ten in the evening. John Peel was different from the other Radio 1 DJs. He didn’t seem to feel the need to sound enthusiastic. If he liked something, he said so but he didn’t make a big deal about it. He didn’t have any of the ‘please like me’ neediness of the other DJs. We could like him or not like him, it was entirely up to us. I liked him enormously.
With the eight pounds I was earning from a Saturday morning job stacking shelves in the local Co-op, and fired up by Steve Jones’s sweary appearance on telly, I’d go into Our Price Records in Camden and hoover up music by all sorts of bands that John Peel introduced me to. Some of the songs he played were a bit out there but every so often you’d hear a gem and think, ‘I MUST get that’. He played ‘New Rose’ by The Damned. I loved the ‘huh’ shout at the beginning. He played The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Stranglers. He played X-Ray Spex. DLT was not playing X-Ray Spex. Basically, I was into anyone who sounded as pissed off as I felt. And none of it was nice.
When I first heard The Jam on his show, I vividly remember thinking 1) This is the band that my friend Simon has been talking about and 2) I had to go and see them. I suggested this to my mother. She was having none of it.
‘You’re too young. It’s dangerous in town in the evening.’
‘How do you know? You never go into town.’
It was ridiculous. I was travelling up and down the country watching Arsenal away games. That was actually dangerous. I’d once been chased down a dual carriageway in Stoke, and come very close to being killed on a number of other occasions. But whereas my mother deemed this acceptable, possibly because she didn’t know how bad it actually was, she put her foot down when it came to going to The Marquee in the centre of London to see The Jam. I think it was purely because it was in the evening. I was livid. I don’t think I said more than two words to her for about six months. I was a very teenagey teenager.
My mother was reading snippets about the new punk scene. It was all a bit hysterical. So was she. I tried to tell her that The Jam were mods, not punks, but it fell on deaf ears. She wasn’t interested in the fact that the press, in an effort to pigeonhole them, lumped The Jam in with the punk movement. It was all the same to her. I could see that Paul Weller was not a punk and he was never nihilistic in the way The Sex Pistols said they were. ‘Get pissed, destroy!’ was not a lyric that Paul would ever have written. The things that Paul sang about were much more relatable. More authentic. There was none of the Kings Road art school poser type thing with him. He was the real deal.
Paul got The Jam to wear suits. Unless he was appearing in court, one couldn’t imagine Johnny Rotten in a suit. The clothes were a big part of it. The look was as important to Paul as the music. This meant a lot to working-class kids like me. I used to see the punks with their ripped clothes and their safety pins and while I liked the ‘fuck off’ nature of that look, I could never do that myself. It might be fine for middle class kids who wanted to dress down, to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the establishment of which they would one day become a respected part, but it was different for us. We tried to dress up, not down.
There was no doubt that Paul’s voice was rough around the edges and he definitely shouted a bit too much on the first album. As my dad said, ‘He’s no Matt Monro’. I couldn’t disagree. He wouldn’t be singing a James Bond theme anytime soon. But I didn’t want Matt Monro and nor did any of the fans I talked to. Paul might be shouting a bit but it was what he was shouting about that got us going. It was angry, it was focused. It crystallised exactly what we all felt.
The first chords of ‘In The City’ thrill me every time I hear them. And when Paul said that he’s got a thousand things to say to us, I believed that he did. It took me a few listens to realise that the song was about police brutality, a theme that Paul would return to on more than one occasion. I was aware that it happened. Even the tabloid rags my father read occasionally had stories about young men dying in police custody. My mother thought that a song about police brutality was also not nice. She was right, but I tended to think that actual police brutality was worse. She didn’t appreciate it when I pointed that out.
I knew that the relationship between the police and the general public was at a low point. There was very little respect on either side. There were deaths in custody. There was stop and search and arrest without trial and internment in Northern Ireland. The Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose and the police seemed to be unable to find him. There were also rumours of the police regularly making up evidence to convict people for things they hadn’t done. These rumours turned out to be true.
The public probably didn’t help. Quite a large minority regularly called them filth or pigs or suchlike. I briefly had a poster on my wall of a pig wearing a police helmet. My mother hated it and asked me to take it down.
‘Who’s going to see it?’ I asked her.
‘I will when I go in your room.’
‘Well, don’t go in my room.’
‘What if a policeman comes round?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. When’s a policeman ever going to come round here?’*1
Aside from the energy of the song, what got me more than anything were the references to youth and young ideas. This felt like music and lyrics written specifically for us. For me. This was what I’d been looking for. The fact that up to that point, I didn’t know I was looking for it was neither here nor there. Paul Weller knew, and I was an instant disciple. When he said that the kids know where it’s at, it was the most empowering thing I’d ever heard.
‘Yes’, I thought to myself, ‘the kids do know where it’s at.’ Not me though, or anyone I knew; I didn’t have a clue what it was let alone where to find it. But I figured Paul Weller knew what was what. That was enough for me. I was hooked.
