The Jam | Subway Survivors

Article published in Sounds, 3rd May, 1980

The Jam | Subway Survivors | ON TUESDAY afternoon I fell out of this world and landed on my feet somewhere else where TV cameras hang, watching, from the roof, radios play, deejays mumble and grunt, Wilfred Pickles plays Paul Weller‘s dad and the sound of the Jam pop-group is an ever-present soundtrack in the back of your head.

I didn’t mind my new world. I thought it was really exciting. It’s just that it happened so suddenly. Whoosh! I’d come out of Finsbury Park tube station into the shiny glare of the afternoon sun. It was half past three.

The usual afternoon nothings were going on in the background. People at business, people at counters and tills, old ladies at the greengrocers, lorries rolling by, articulated threats, Mods and rockers and skinheads and old dossers with whiskery chins lolling about in the bright, gleaming afternoon.

Rainbow Theatre

A normal day; alias Smithers-Jones for another empty day. This is when it happened. Across the road was the Rainbow Theatre, and down the side of this gaunt, absurd building I noticed a small crowd of kids packed tightly together in a group against the wall.

I crossed over and, sidestepping fat blokes with their hands in their pockets making furtive passes of “Ticket for ‘night’s concert?”, I saw that these kids were standing against a sign that said ‘Stage Door’.

A car or van pulled up, the kids surged towards it and I was carried with them, sucked into this new world, pulled into a scene of ball-pens poking at the air, toes trampled on, shoulders raised and final disbelieving cries of “IT’S THEM, IT’S THEM!”

Here everything goes hazy. The world turned to monochrome, black and white and slightly surreal like an old Beatles film, or war movietone. I thought I’d been here before, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe we’re all dreaming.

The Jam | Subway Survivors

Whoosh! I panned in like the camera from A Hard Day’s Night. First Bruce Foxton, the wee girl’s favourite, appeared, looking regal in a red leather coat. Then Buckler, like an electrician come to do a job. Then Paul Weller.

“He’s so small, so skinny,” somebody said. They signed autographs, exchanged comments and jibes and walked through the big red Stage Door. We waited. A big hand opened a talking slot in the red door and a gruff voice told us we could all come in and see the sound-check in fifteen minutes.

The kids went quietly ecstatic. I HAD been here before! They swopped stories about the previous two minutes of bliss, swanking it with their heroes. “I said, ‘hello Paul’, and he said ‘How you doin’?’ . . . just like that, no kiddin’ . . .”

“Did you notice how nobody went to Rick? S’pity Gary isn’t here, he’s an old mate of Paul’s. One, vaguely Mod-ish looking kid was near to fainting and, frozen solid with awe, he stared wondrously in his mate’s eyes: “S’funny, you know, having some of your dreams come true . . . like, I touched him, I touched Paul!”

Sound-check

I kept myself to myself, maybe trying to work out when I’d been in this black and white world before, maybe feeling guilty about something. Like an imposter. It’s an old fascination, this monochrome private . . . hell? It takes some adjustment.

FIFTEEN MINUTES on, and the Jam are cruising through a kind of pocket-size Greatest Hits for the faithful, who sit in the first three rows of the Rainbow looking stunned and overwhelmed. Some ‘sound-check’!

They started off with an old Tamla tune, which they duly gave the youth-club treatment. Then the hits. ‘Going Underground‘ came, Paul couldn’t help smiling, the live version was awesome, restrained and irrepressible. ‘Saturday’s Kids‘, their anthem, not in the least patronising even in the immediate communicable circumstances, I felt the imposter again, his hand was tugging at my coat-sleeve.

The Jam | Subway Survivors

Over, and out. They leave, after a few words and patchy autographs with Paul Weller, peacefully and harmoniously.

I bet their mates won’t hear the end of this! Saturday’s kids are all right, all mixed-up, all muddled, all gentle, all usefully refreshed and pricelessly surprised by the unclamoured, unpretentious ‘gesture’ that smacks of an olde worlde of Punk (tee hee, remember?) where small details like that mattered and counted for everything.

It’s got nothing to do with ‘small is beautiful’, either. That’s bullshit; it’s more like, small is everything. The Jam were No. 1 in the charts: The Jam care, still care.

And it isn’t a marketing slogan, it isn’t a tee-shirt, it’s an individualism that characterises the Jam and characterises what many, many others lack most of all. This new world isn’t that surreal after all.

I GO UP a flight of metal steps behind John Weller. This man’s fit! He leaves me gasping behind, groping for the dressing-room door, where Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler have entered and now pace uneasily around the obligatory trays of dressing-room plastic food.

The interview

Bruce Foxton says he’s drunk and I half believe him as he groans on about how awful America was. Paul Weller looks happy these days, happier than I’ve seen him. He takes a certain amount of care about interviews, and goes out of his way with the other two to understand and aid the broken English of the Japanese gentleman who ‘seets hin’ on my interview.

Paul Weller tells me later with total disgust how somebody from another paper turned up drunk to interview him. “Drunk, he was.” He was mortally offended.

In the interview all three talk. Paul the most. Rick Buckler is articulate and intelligent. I don’t think Bruce Foxton likes me. He walks away from time to time. Maybe he doesn’t like my concentration on Paul Weller (or does he suspect that I suspect he’s the most business-minded of the band?)

What was that apron-thing you were-wearing on T.O.T.P.?

Paul: “It’s a pop-art, isn’t it man! No, I just got it the same day and I felt like wearing it. It was a tomato soup thing. You know, you save the labels from the cans and you send off for it.”

The Jam | Subway Survivors

I tell him about the kids’ reactions outside, particularly the one who said ‘he touched me!’

“I’ve never felt that way about a band.”

Not even with, say, Townshend?

“Not to that extent . . . not a real physical need in it. It’s strange: you can’t knock it, but it’s something you shouldn’t encourage, is it? It’s not good, it’s not that healthy. Also, if you ever let them down, they’d get really disillusioned.”

Did you mind Polydor’s marketing move with ‘Going Underground?

Paul: “That’s a load of bollocks. Everybody’s saying now ‘it was just a marketing move’ and that, but it had sold 100,000 copies before the titles had even – been announced.”

Bruce: “We knew it was going to do well because of advanced orders, but the company was saying ‘yeah, it’s going to go straight in at No. 1’, but we’d been told similar things before, not necessarily No. 1, but straight in the Top Thirty.

Yeah, we knew it’d probably go in the Top Five at least. It didn’t really sink in at first. We were in Los Angeles or somewhere, and set so far away from it all, you don’t get the sort of atmosphere or anything. So it was good to come back.”

Dreams of children

Will it change things?

Paul: “As long as people don’t expect too much now. I mean, I’ve seen bands get to No. 1 and the next record is No. 3 and they feel they’re down the pan. I don’t think it’s affected me in any way.”

How did ‘Underground’ and ‘The Dreams Of Children‘ come together?

Paul: “Both songs came together in the studio, the lyrics as well. It was a double A-side, that was a cock up as well. It was printed in France, you see, and they put an A and B-side on it. Cos we felt ‘Underground’ was cutting familiar ground, it’s got the archetypal Jam sound, whereas ‘Dreams’ is a good counter-balance. It’s a double A.”

Dreams’ sounds very different, a bit like Joy Division even.

Paul: “I’ve never thought about that. I think it’s just a one-off. We recorded it in a strange way. It had a rhythm box on it all the way through, then Bruce put a bass pattern down and we sort of built it up. Rick did the other drums on top of it, so it’s got that kind of pulse-beat to it the whole way through. I think it’s quite bleak. It starts off optimistic, but ends up bleak.”

Have you much new stuff?

The Jam | Subway Survivors

Paul: “We’ve got a couple of songs we’re going to demo next week. We’re going to try and stockpile stuff for the new album.”

(All three laugh at their un-prolific approach. It transpires they want to change their way of recording, to slow things down more and be less rushed.) How do you look back on ‘Setting Sons‘?

Paul: “I think the songs are better on stage now than they are on the album . . . it’s a shame we couldn’t have played them in more.”

Was the album rushed?

Paul: “It was, really, I suppose. It was, like, going away, rehearsing songs, coming back and putting them down . . . over and over again. We’d nothing before we went into the studio. Every song was done like that.”

Is it always that tight a schedule?

Paul: “It has been for the last couple of years. The singles are always like that. It’s mainly we don’t get actual songs together before we go into the studio. We store ideas up and work them out in the studio. That’s why, now, we’re trying to get some stuff done early, to get time to listen to it.”

Going underground

Do you think the change in approach will effect the music?

Paul: “I don’t know. I think the more you play a song the harder it gets, up to a point. You reach a peak. Like, ‘Going Underground’ sounds a lot better now.”

Did I notice keyboards on stage?

Paul: “Only for a few songs, yeah, to see if it sounds different, just testing really. (He looks at the burly Merton Parkas‘ keyboards-player) I forgot to announce you last night, Mick!”

What was America like?

Bruce: “It was a good rehearsal for these shows!”

That bad?

Bruce: “Oh God it was worse!”

Paul: “There was only one or two good shows.”

Rick: “It makes you think what goes through their heads when, nearly every time they came backstage after a show they say ‘Great show!’, and they just stand there and don’t say anything else! I don’t know if it’s because they’re a bit stand-offish or what. You just can’t tell which way they think. It’s daft.”

Paul: “That’s an automatic thing they say. It’s like that film The Stepford Wives. It’s just what it’s like.”

The Jam | Subway Survivors

Did you get through to any people at all?

Paul: “A few yeah, mostly people who’d seen us before. I don’t know what it is. I reckon it’s the whole presentation of the music they don’t like.”

Does it bother you?

Paul: “It’s not a question of being bothered. It’s more, what else can you do? You can’t change your sound. You can only write about what you know. Like the radio over there, it’s even worse than here.”

The radio’s not that bad here.

Paul: “It’s getting better, but it’s still the compromising stuff, like the Boomtown Rats.”

But you’re ‘up there’ with the Rats too.

Paul: “Yeah, but I never hear ‘Going Underground’ that much.”

Bruce: “They don’t play it as much as they’ve done other No. l’s.”

Paul: “Like, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was on every show.”

Bruce: “They play it because they have to play it because it’s No. 1.”

Paul: “Blackburn on a Sunday must be gritting his teeth when he does the Top Forty and finally gets to us!”

Any reaction to the Finsbury Park trouble? No reaction. None at all?

Paul: “I just think it’s the way things are going.”

Is ‘Going Underground’ based around nuclear fears?

Paul: “It’s partly that. It’s like ‘Strange Town’, it starts off with that as an original idea but then it starts going all over the place. It was mainly about the nuclear thing, but it’s an ambiguous title. It’s about going underground from the whole of this poxy society.”

The Jam | Subway Survivors

But you’re very much ‘overground’ too. You’re a celebrity.

Paul: “But I feel very underground. You know, you’ve got to go to the supermarket and buy baked beans and things . . .”

He switches back to something else suddenly.

“What does make me laugh though, it’s like the whole punk thing, the whole ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’ coming true in Bristol, Birmingham and the other places. You know, if they wanted ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’ they’re going to get it. You know, a lot of them don’t like it.

“It’s like the Clash trying to break up fights and then singing ‘White Riot’ as an encore, what’s the point of that? If you want a riot, you can’t say what sort of riot you want, what sort of revolution you want.”

The Jam were very orderly from the beginning, even down to the clothes you wore.

Paul: “Only because of the ridiculous bollocks doctrines about. We’re still here, that’s how I see it, who else is here from the old school of ’76?”

The Clash?

Paul: “I didn’t like that last album with all its Americanisms. ‘Brand New Cadillac’!

You do ‘Heatwave’!

Paul: “Ah, but THAT’S different! (laughter)”

Why did you end ‘Setting Sons’ with ‘Heatwave’? Was it because you thought the rest of the album was over-serious?

Paul: “No, it wasn’t that. That’s what everybody thinks, but it wasn’t intentional. That’s the way it looks, like ‘Modern World’ too, but that’s not what it’s meant to be. We did ‘Heatwave’ because a lot of people asked for it and because we were short of material . . .”

2-Tone

What do you think of 2-Tone?

Paul: “I think the actual label’s good, the actual set-up’s good.”

Bruce: More to the point, where’s it going to go now?”

Paul: “That’s how I see it . . . the thing is, if we just drop all our cover versions just so as not to be associated with Mod or Ska, why would we be pushed out of doing the stuff we like doing? We started off doing these songs so why should we stop now?”

Have you been happy with the Mod associations with the Jam, though?

Paul: “I don’t know. At least we haven’t gone out and exploited it, we could have made a lot more of it than we did. In ’77 there was a lot more Mod-isms in our attitudes in interviews than there are now . . . the clothes, the titles, the songs.

All mod cons

I think ‘All Mod Cons’ was the last of that. We’ve just tried to keep a low profile and I think it’s worked, because Mod was only a fashion, it was only purely superficial.

“Fashions don’t affect people’s lives, or only for a matter of months anyway. I think you can make too much of fashions. It’s only kids dressing-up in the style of the moment, you can’t socialise too much over it.”

Are trends a good thing?

Paul: “I think you’ve got to accept that that’s the way of Western culture, it’s not particularly good, it’s not perhaps as good as Eastern culture.”

Have you delved into Eastern culture much (fascinated, thinking of the fine “You pray on your mat” in ‘Eton Rifles’)?

Paul: “That’s what annoys me. You get a lot of radical writers in the press. It’s okay slagging a band if they deserve it, but what the fuck are they doing, what are these writers changing?”

Sex Pistols

Do you think you’ve achieved more than the Sex Pistols did in even their short space of time?

Paul: “I think so. I think we’ve affected just as many people, probably not in the same time as them, but as we’ve kept going I think we have. It annoys me when people say we don’t change anything. If you’d read some of the letters we get (not that they should or would be read cos some of them are quite personal) saying how much the songs affect people.

It shows that we do get through to people without that poxy crusading bit. No-one should judge people’s public morals. We’ve succeeded in gaining control and that’s a much better way of beating the system.”

Mod riots

Would you like the Jam to be hailed (sic) as ‘The Super-band Of The Eighties?

Paul: “No, I’d turn down the shit. Did you hear about Nationwide wanting us to go on and talk about the Mod riots? ‘Spokesman of the generation’ and all that crap!”

Rick: “What do we know about the kids of Southend or wherever?”

Paul, is it shyness on your part?

Paul: “I think it’s all so crass. It’s like Capital Radio as well wanting us to go on and talk about the ‘Mod explosion’, they should go and get some kids from the East End. I mean, they don’t play your records for two years and then they ask you to do that!”

Have you thought about setting your own label up?

Paul: “We’re going to do it, yeah. From now till September every day’s almost mapped out, touring, recording and that. So we don’t get much time to do anything. But we’ve the contacts and the finance and the ability to do it.”

You still seem very working-class conscious. ‘Setting Sons’ had a very clear idea of a class system in it.

Setting Sons

Paul: “It does exist though. It’s not as if I’m writing about things that aren’t there. But I probably won’t do anymore songs about the class thing. I think ‘Setting Sons’ saw the last of that. It gets a bit like ranting after a while, it looks as if you’re playing it up or exploiting it.

It’s just like . . . when you’re a kid and all your friends would be living up in the posher parts of Woking, and I used to go to tea with them and not know which knife and fork to use to cut the chicken. You were used to picking it up with your fingers at home, but now you’re trying to cut it up with a knife.”

Whose fault is that, though?

Paul: “It’s the foundations of England, isn’t it? The horrible fucking restrictions that are imposed when you’re born. You still find it. You go into hotels and they treat you like shit.

That’s one good thing about America, they treat you with the same sort of respect as anyone else. There’s no real prominent class system over there, it just runs at extremes, very rich and peasants, like Harlem, it’s medieval.

It’s far worse than somewhere like Glasgow, totally disillusioned people. I think the class system in Britain is as bad as it was 50 years ago, only you don’t see it as much, except for somewhere like Glasgow.

I remember the first time we went to Glasgow on tour, I couldn’t believe it, the poverty and that. I was glad to get back to London.”

Nervous

Do you still get very shy and nervous?

Paul: “Oh, yeah. I still start sweating if I’m in the middle of a big crowd or anything. Do you get like that too? I still stutter sometimes when I’m talking to somebody.”

Do you see it as a weakness, something you try and defeat?

“Not really, I just accept it now. You can’t change what you are.”

Do you feel outside the music business?

“I suppose it’s double think but I do feel outside it, and that way you do keep control. It’s more of a wish, that. That I could go underground. It stems from an idea I had, that if you destroy everything, the history of your birth, every detail of your life, and totally disappear and be outside society.

Because, I don’t like this society at all, even though I help towards it. We all help towards it. We’re all constantly perpetuating it, aren’t we? But that doesn’t mean to say you like it.

Selsey

“Like it says in George Orwell’s Down And Out In London And Paris, when you’re totally on the breadline, in total poverty, then you’re outside of society, then you’re outside of the law.

You never get time to do anything. Sometimes I just want to take off and hire a coach and take a trip around the Pennines, just totally disappear.

“It’s like last year I went to Selsey, I went in a caravan down there and that was really good, staying in a caravan site and going underground. It’s not escapism, it’s just giving yourself a different view on things. It’s good for writing.” He laughs: “Another idea I had was to do a tour of seaside resorts.

Get a massive great coach, get all the band and the girlfriends on it, and sell any extra seats there was on it, give to old grannies and old men and stuff! It’d be like an excursion, you’d get all sorts of people. But, like most of my ideas, it’d probably be impractical.”

Ordinary jobs

From a ‘Hard Day’s Night’ to ‘Magical Mystery Tour’! Paul Weller talks about his friends.

“My best friends . . . I’ve two really, one of them is an estate agent, the other works in the Post Office, just ordinary jobs. Cos they’re the real people.”

THE JAPANESE gentleman pushes a tiny cassette recorder at Paul Weller’s face.

“Please say some sing for the Japanese people.”

Pretending to be nonchalant and jokily at ease, Paul Weller splutters a few words down the machine, obviously getting better and more relaxed at playing the minor roles of ‘the star’.

I stumble back through the red door into the sunlight. The world again. Back to colour! My eyes squint. The Jam world; a nice place to visit, I thought, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Too severe, like a monastery. I glide past the sun-basked, reptilian fan faces, lazy and wearily inquisitive for a star from the other planet. And, Paul Weller sticks at it; a wonderful schizophrenia.

Dumbly poetic. Ordinary and extraordinary. Inside society, outside society. Inside the music business and outside the music business.

“We all help towards it, don’t we?” Paul Weller the Steppenwolf; the lonely, growling wolf. It’s when Paul Weller steps outside the wolf in him and thinks of old grannies and grandads, the caravan in Selsey, his girlfriend Jill, that’s when he finds the balance, the clear sighted vision in him that builds this world for the Saturday Kids.

The detachment is everything. Even misleading. “Ticket for the show?” Lowering my head, I walk on, feeling happy and replete. (Dave McCullough)