Not everyone in 1980 wanted to break from the past, but “Start!” is more than just recycling – in fact it’s one of Weller’s more experimental hits. The “Taxman” riff holds the track together, taking the place of a chorus, lending beat and muscle to an otherwise piecemeal record. There’s not even an attempt to disguise the source – especially as one of the fragments the riff glues together is a solo lifted nakedly from the same place. Playing this unifying role the “Taxman” lift is working like sampled breaks will come to operate – and in fact the beatwork is the star of “Start!”, those urgent, clipped shakers and brushes upping the track’s momentum considerably.
The record “Taxman” kicks off was the Beatles’ farewell to life as a working band – they’d come as far as they could with the tightness and telepathy the small-group, live-oriented format offered and were getting ready to expand. “Start!” is Weller reclaiming “Taxman” for mod and for small-group pop, a song about the vital power of communication, the magnetism of the tiny gang, the way two minutes can make a lifetime of difference: by the two-minute standard, the track has 14 seconds of flab – probably the second “If I never ever see you” break. Communication, of course, leads to compromise, so lace it with opposition: unite through hate, split immediately, never let us speak of this again (only remember it always). This gives “Start!” a slightly austere, hectoring tone, its compressed fury directed at least a little bit at you for listening to it.
My impression of Paul Weller – at this point anyway – is that he was both deeply conflicted about having become some kind of youth leader but also entirely convinced that nobody else could do it. And he was probably right – all the other candidates would have wanted the job too much. You could imagine someone like Bob Geldof writing a song like “Going Underground” – and probably making a fearful bish of it – but not a song like “Start!”, a record that sounds so angrily uncomfortable in its own borrowed skin.
Score: 7
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The record that Taxman wasn’t only a farewell to the Beatles as a live band – they’d been winding that down for a while and arguably it was Rubber Soul that began that process. The same record ended with a hello to the already-legendary Beatles moving into ground previouly untrodden (except by some very esoteric creatures who were a long way from the mainstream). A move that would resonate for many years to come.
I first heard this on the jukebox of a pub in Anlaby (the name of which escapes me but the name Red Lion rings bells). My first thought was that this was an outtake of Taxman – was Weller appropriating a chunk of my youth deliberately or was is a My Sweet Lord moment? There’s another band to come, of course, that I thought were Beatles outtakes when I first heard them, and were also responsible for one track that it surprises me was never the subject of litigation by Mr Ray Davies.
Anyway, this never did much for me and when I try to recxollect it without actually playing it, I segue into Taxman itself. The real thing doesn’t hold up against that seminal track and that – stealing a bit of my youth without enhancing it – was one of two counts on which it irritated me at the time. The other, I seem to recall, is that it denied Stevie Wonder yet another number one. (with respect to the bunny, he’ll get one and a half in time, neither being fitting monuments to the great man, and we’ll see a couple of his songs mangled before the end.)
No more than 4 from me I’m afraid.
my hostility to the jam had by this time plateaued at world-historical levels of silly pathology — so i was cross he was jumping backwards, jumping backwards to the beatles, jumping backwards to the WRONG beatles (“taxman” is one of my least favourite beatles songs, content-wise and soundwise) and etc etc… i was also profoundly out of sympathy with the idea of small-group rock music at this date, it was the PAST and i was all about the FUTURE
as with bono, my main fascination with weller these days is why he rubs me up so badly the wrong way — i find it worryingly hard to give him the beneift of the doubt; tom’s is a nice and a smart and a generous reading of this song; i wonder if i would have countenanced it in 1980, if i;d read someone making this argument
Haha my reading of “Start!”* was a little bit of a tweak at you Mark in that I was trying to locate it in a Sinkerian punk tradition
I like “Taxman” a lot more than I should given the “I’ll tax your feet” lyrics. I like it more than this actually.
*title edited to make comment non-gibberish
As far as I was concerned, and regardless of Weller’s actual intentions, “Start!” was about an urgently snatched one-night stand. (By this stage, I was big on twisting lyrics to fit my personal emotional landscape.) Consequently, I loved it to pieces, and still do – not least for the “See you! see you!” in that far from flabby second break, where the backing vocals mockingly imitate a bright conversational tone.
Also, a big improvement on “Taxman”! If only all chart-topping British bands could have paid homage to the Beatles with similar skill…
I think it works fine as being about a one-night stand, too – albeit with slightly grim grudge-fuck overtones I guess.
This isn’t the only “Taxman” tribute of course – Cheap Trick’s “Taxman, Mr. Heath” qualifies, though not musically.
Not an ounce of fat on “Start!”
2 and a bit minutes of compressed, economical, tight playing and arranging. Sure, it’s a brazen steal from Harrison’s self-pitying drone, and an improvement.
If you’re going to nick from the Beatles do it with such self-confidence and swagger that you pull it off. I don’t think there was anything more complicated behind this then Weller having a mid-period Beatles phase, listening to “Revolver” endlessly and being inspired/enthused to create “Start”!
It’s a cracking tune, and brings its own twist to “Taxman” with the “Will I ever see you again” break, the sort of interlude Syd-era Floyd might have recorded.
The accompanying album, “Sound Affects” is terrific – the one Jam album I return to the most.
A 9 for me.
I first heard this before release at a gig at St George’s Hall in Blackburn and may have had the honour of giving the songs its first review – in a piece for the short lived ‘New Music News’ edited by Giovanni Dadomo (to my shame, this was a scab operation put out during the music papers strike). So I was probably the first person to make the obvious ‘Taxman’ link in print, a connection that has always prevented me from taking the song too seriously. Sadly, I misheard Weller’s introduction, so referred to the song in the review as ‘Stopped’!
Being perhaps a bit of a late developer in some respects, I’d only just that summer got around to getting a copy of “Revolver”, and although the majority of the tracks on the album were familiar I hadn’t heard “Taxman” previously. So hearing that for the first time in pretty much the week “Start” was released, there was a bit of an “Aha!” moment there. It wasn’t all that long since George Harrison had been taken to the cleaners re “He’s So Fine”/”My Sweet Lord”, so you wonder whether there was some temptation for George to recoup some of the money (he’d just ploughed a fair amount of wodge into “The Life of Brian” so he could presumably have done with it!)
The record itself is short, to the point, with plenty of aural highlights (the drum roll leading back into the riff; the snarl on “it will be e-NOUGH!”) though not in the same class as some of their earlier and later stuff, still a Good Thing to have at number one.
Re the lyrical theme, I think it was in the Kutner/Leigh book I saw the theory that “it’s not important for you to know my name… etc” was a principle of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, which would put this in a select and classy group of number ones based on said conflict.
Two records in this week’s Top 10 for the star of the Big Time – Sheena E!
I’d be fascinated to see that doc again. I’m sure the music business of 1980 would reveal itself as a quaint cottage industry in comparison to today’s internet-befuddled monoliths.
This is where we found out how many Jam fans had heard ‘Taxman’ before and round my way the answer was: none of us. At least not until our 60s-loving (but no Jam fan) mate Martin took us round his house after school one day and played us ‘Revolver’. Personally I was a little shocked but didn’t care too much (The Pistols had done the same thing to Weller after all) but some of my friends were outraged that their God Paul would do such a thing.
If you think of it conceptually, “Start!” is rather a Pop Art experience down to the exclamation mark in the title, so you could say that Weller was doing a bit of Warhol-esque appropriation.
My feelings toward this are a bit complicated, it’s never been one of my favourite Jam singles (I prefer the b-side ‘Lisa Radley’) and some of the lyrics are a bit clunky (“feels with a passion called hate” is very Sixth Form) but while I think ‘Taxman’ is a better song this is a better record and Bruce and Rick punch much harder as a rhythm section.
conrad @ 9: Funny you should say that – the two lasses from Human League were on Woman’s Hour this morning, talking about how life is for them now. They sounded like a couple of middle-aged Sheffield housewives, and that appears to be exactly what they are. It was quite refreshing really.
This is a song for which I feel more admiration than affection. The economy of the song works in it’s favour. I admire the way that Weller revisits a less popular version of the Beatles’ legacy and folds it back into the contemporary mix – perhaps reminding those spiky postpunk guitarists that there wes a precedent for their sound. On the other hand it seems typical of Weller at his worst that he is trying to revive a style rather than forge a ‘new’ one of his own. Shouldn’t Mods look forward not back?
Tom, I agree wholeheartedly with your interpretation of this one. It definitely was a pretty radical departure for Weller, especially coming after the traditional, overblown Setting Sons.
I think it would be a mistake to characterize this as merely a knock-off of “Taxman”. I’ve always viewed it mainly as an experiment in songwriting and song structure that fits in rather nicely with the Pop Art motif of the Sound Effects era. “Start!” is basically a sort of readymade object created from a mould of “Taxman”. As a cockeyed analogy, think of “Taxman” as a waffle iron and Weller’s initial song as the batter. We know what the resulting form will be, but a lot depends on how the batter was made to begin with. I’d give it a 9 in theory, but I think you’re right to score it a 7 in actuality.
Also, is this the first Jam single with a horn section?
From one con-artist to another.
As far as I know, My Sweet George never sued Weller over this. Had but he had. But the liberals’ favourite freedom fighter was, of course, out of reach of any justice even for nicking a riff. The kids had their pied piper, ralling over Thatcher and racists and cabbages and kings, and he was wise and all-seeing and most of the piper’s kids had never heard “Taxman” anyway and those who had or later did hear it hid in denial. So Weller’s a thief (“and what you give is what you get”). But also the ultimate hoodwinker. True, he once promised much and I too was a fan, if never one of the piper’s kids. Any noticeable voice for radical politics and opinion I will listen to and encourage. But then came the betrayal. The angry young man turned smartly on a sixpence and Weller’s legacy is now just as tarnished as the great actor Blair’s. As for “Start”, well let’s just say that it didn’t and part friends.
Not as good as “Going Underground” and I don’t really know what Paul Weller is trying to say. Just meeting some girl and saying two minutes is enough or at least a start. Hardly calling the youth of England to arms. But anything by the Jam is ace as far as Im concerned and so what if the riff is nicked from an old beatles record from the history books? George nicked my sweet lord from the yanks as the person at no 8 says so why persecute Weller? And I don’t understand Marshmallow H at no 14 saying Weller has betrayed. Does he really expect an old bloke to still be banging on about bollocks like revolution nearly 30 years later when he’s old and shrivelled up and only interested in putting the cat out before going to bed in pyjamas?
Does anybody remember an advert for a Six Minute version of this?
I sent off for it, and got
Side 1: Start (6 mins), basically, the single take, twice over, edited together.
Side 2: “My Generation” (5.30) the Who single, similarly edited together.
Rip-off? Some years later, I sold it on e-bay with an accurate description and it sold for a few bob.
Still….
Great work Tom. Thank you.
I remember compiling a list of the best Jam songs and I think ‘Start’ came out at No 30.
As with so much, it was about the TIME as much as anything else. I was 17, it was late summer, the weather was warm, the Fred Perry v-shaped and my Easy jeans tight – with even a few pound notes in the pocket. My chips were hot and the wine was sweet. Girls were finally, finally, a part of my life. (Most of them like the b-side’s Liza Radley).
Like Lee (at 10) and his mates, for all my supposedly shrewd young music know-how, in 1980 I didn’t know ‘Taxman’. Nor did I know most of the large ‘nods’ which Weller had Artfully Dodgeringly appropriated. Rosie (at 1) alludes to Ray Davies. There are a dozen examples Rosie, but perhaps you’re thinking of The Kinks ‘Shangri-La’ alongside Weller’s ‘slippers’ contribution at the end of Smithers-Jones?
‘Start’ was always going to be a Number One; as would any track from the golden trio riding the crest of a wave.
For all that, I’d agree with 7/10 for the track … but 10/10 for simply being there with it.
There was a piece by Steve Sutherland in, I think, Vox at the time of the release of the Jam box set in 1997, when he argued that this was the precise moment when popular music became retrograde and insular, recyling the past rather than attempting to convey the present and invent the future. A tendancy that surely reaches its apogee in Oasis’ vast Knebworth shows of 1996 when they were supported by The Bootleg Beatles, covered ‘I Am The Walrus’ and then played the original recording of ‘Hey Jude’.
I do really like this, but he did have a point. Weller’s perpetual surliness here works as a barrier for this listener. In the great Jam singles up to this point its been very clear what he’s been angry about, and his targets have been spot on. In this song it just feels like a habitual bad mood vented onto a bystander, and diminishes the clipped and modernist thrill of the music. (As a song, it works rather better in the context of ‘All Mod Cons’ than it does as a single)
7 is probably about right. The soul-deadening sensation of listening to proper geezer music, with all that implies, makes it a sour experience.
Seven-year old Billy enjoyed the mod stylings of this, but found it to be small beer after ‘Ashes To Ashes’
Billy, ‘Start!’ was on ‘Sound Affects’ not ‘All Mod Cons’ – unless you were making some really clever point that eludes me.
Ooops, sorry! (Its always the obvious facts that I get wrong – not the stuff that has to be looked up…)
The thing that always put me off this was a feeling that Weller timed the word ‘start’ really awkwardly, as if he was nervously thinking “must nail this, hit it at just the right moment…”
I didn’t recognise its source – I hated the Beatles then even more than I do now, so knew almost nothing beyond what you can’t help knowing.
I like this song, heard it for the first time not too long ago. A direct statement to the listener, from the singer. A wall (ahem) knocked down.
And it’s better than the song it was obv. inspired by.
This is a complete blank. I’m sure I can recall pretty much every track on this list from here on in, regardless of like/dislike, but I have absolutely no idea what this sounds like. I must have completely tuned out, and have never been confronted with it since.
In a way not completely surprising, given a dislike of Weller in all of his incarnations, and a failure ever to really bother engaging with The Beatles as pop canon. But still, to have completely missed this makes me feel something of a failure in terms of this exercise.
Hopefully back on track for the next one….
Has anyone mentioned the significance of the Mod revival in the Jam’s chart performance suddenly going through the roof from 1979.Obviously that was the year when the Mod revival first went overground and suddenly Eton Rifles had put the Jam in the top 5. But it was from about 1980 to 1982 when it got really big and surely no significance that then their singles were often Number Ones. I’d say that their retention of a general rock fanbase plus the addition of thousands of Mods made the difference from them going from mid league in sales to suddenly becoming as massive as they were by this time.
DE-LURKING WITH DRUNKEN, RAMBLING POST: BEWARE
I don’t much like The Jam, but I find them fascinating, since they fail – aesthetically – in almost every respect, but there’s a sense in which that doesn’t seem to matter. For example: in some ways Weller is the worst lyricist in history, pretentious in the truest (pejorative) sense, fired up with some self-righteous urge to communicate his useless, commonplace confusion, making a fool of himself technically with that mangled poesy, all those malapropisms. The music is hilarious, too, if you’re feeling cruel enough – a genuine (if minor) talent, rowing with one oar. Bursting with real Surrey passion, unable to say or do or feel anything new; a victim of the English class system in ways he would never fully comprehend. The desperation in Weller’s face and voice and songs is never less than laughable, because it’s so hamfisted (that pugilistic huff-and-puff = a raging inarticulacy). But there’s a vulnerability about him, too (not least because he’s aware that his pedestal is preposterous), which adds a certain poignancy to all this heat and lack of light. It makes it possible to enjoy these records… in a way that is perhaps patronising, in as much as you’re viewing The Jam from above, but is still genuine. They make me think of Aylesbury, Stevenage, Bedford; teenage wasteland and all that. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I kind-of like The Jam in the same I way I really, really like Marine Girls, but I have to scale a wall to get there. I quite enjoy scaling walls, sometimes; I suppose a few people here do too. At least it gives me a way in to songs like “Burning Sky”, which I enjoy greatly.
“Start!” is possibly their best single, anyway. The “Taxman” riff does work more like a looped sample than a lift, and while he may not have realised it, this is the most radical thing the un-radical Weller ever did on record. There was once a great post on Popular re. “Satisfaction”, about how one tiny touch – the syncopation between Richard and Wyman’s almost-identical riffs – created the groove and made the record move. “Start!” removes the groove from the “Taxman” riff – the original has a pregnant pause just before the last note, which disappears in Bruce Foxton’s funkless fingers – and the result sounds more like a two-step than psychedelic Wilson Pickett. With those lurid, drawling Revolver guitars draped across this oompah rhythm, “Start!” sounds slightly alien, a fogged/disturbed memory of The Beatles, and is in a strange way less like pastiche than anything else Weller ever recorded. He’s suddenly doing something interesting with his influences, albeit by accident.
It’s still a shame he had to clog it up with more of this vague POW! / do-you-know-what-I-mean-brother / sub-pop-art “commitment” to some vague “vision” of… something-or-other. This non-specific call-to-ACTION! business was always a con (although it took me years to notice), another way for people to reject or despise the genuine possibilities of life in favour of endless hanging-on for something they can’t even define (cf Dexys: “Music, I dunno… films… something special perhaps”), a way for people to end up lonely and bitter and uncomprehending. The only place for this hungry, hysterical vagueness is in POP, where gaping holes in “the message” become sockets for your own neuroses and lusts and obsessions and rearranged priorities – The Jam were never really POP. Not really. Only in the sense of selling a connection. But while the Rollers / Osmonds girls can look back and smile, because their mad love taught them something (strengthened and augmented them), I suspect Jam fans’ nostalgia is always painful, in a way. All those possibilities left unfulfilled! Whatever they were.
Why am I “FT’s Taylor”, by the way? I logged in as instructed – you never said it meant being swallowed by the corporation.
HELP!
I’ve lost my RSS FT-wide comments feed. The main entries feed is still here but I can’t find the comments. Anybody seen it lying about?
Taylor. We all belong to Alastair Darling now, mate!
Top Marks to Taylor, btw!
I’m guessing this is the same Taylor who wrote about The Jam’s Carnaby Street with similar eloquence and almost made me wet myself laughing. Hats off, and thanks for de-lurking.
I’m more inclined to look at Start as proto-looping than from the Steve Sutherland ‘beginning of the end’ angle. You can look at the 70s rock’n’roll shows at Wembley where Jerry Lee et al were playing alongside the likes of Wizzard (who, granted, were considerably more forward looking than Oasis). Or go back to the Doo Wop revival of 1959-61 and see The Marcels’ Blue Moon as the beginning of the end.
Recycling has just become more prevalent since the mid 90s.
Rosie, the comments feed is still working for me through Google Reader: https://popular-number1s.com/comments/feed/
I’d be lost without it!
#26 – Taylor, I think that some people did take Weller’s and Strummer’s retrospectively questionable calls to arms at face value, and acted accordingly upon them. And you can still identify them: they’re the ones flogging copies of Socialist Worker outside Marks and Sparks on Saturday afternoons….
A PORTRAIT OF MAD LOVE: did you ever feel this strongly and how — this is the key bit i guess — do you use the memory of that feeling now?
Mike – thanks chuck!
Ah, the siren wail of suburban teenage angst! Once again, there is nothing new under the sun. Growing up in Welwyn Garden City in the 60s the cry constantly went up “There’s nothing to dooooooo!” In fact we envied the fleshposts of Stevenage, which had a bowling alley and a Mecca dancehall, although Stevenage was a modest bus ride away (and Kings Cross was half an hour by train.) Mind you, I was a solitary sort of child who was always happy to shut myself in my bedroom with the radio or record-player and a good book. It’s probably a failing in me that I have never been able to understand why everybody else can’t do that.
But then, I’m now a middle-aged old fart, my attitudes tempered to some degree by six years experience as a local councillor. A chair of a planning committee, to boot, who knows that if you give young people a skate park, say, they won’t use it because they’d rather appropriate the busy public space in front of the town hall (which tends to have interesting and challenging steps, slopes, benches and concrete planters) than be ghettoised in some forgotten corner of the local park. And who can blame them? If a teenager came up to me now and complained about “nothing to dooooo!” I’d probably say, “Well then, what are you going to do about it?” And do what I could to point to ways of getting support for it, but not set about providing anything directly because that would defeat the object completely.
I always found it a bit hard to get my head round the idea of “new mod”. It wasn’t really a revival movement, was it? Not like the rock-and-roll revival of the late 60s, there wasn’t much nostalgia for Vespas and parkas and the Small Faces. It was something new which appropriated some of the culture of an earlier generation and keeping it for themselves. That’s what Weller is doing here isn’t it – not paying homage to the Beatles but appropriating them for himself (there’s something of Drive My Car about Start! isn’t there? As well as the more obvious Taxman
Well, “New Mod” was more a continuation, not a revival.
But then again, it got bogged down in the “authentication” of vespas, parkas, etc…
Why am I “FT’s Taylor”, by the way?
it’s to indicate yr logged-in-ness (as you may have guessed). it seemed short and to the point at the time. we could just use an asterisk or something instead? something less possessive
the site-wide comments feed is linked on the front page — the little RSS feed icon next to the ‘recent comments’ box in the sidebar.
Tom keeps asking me for a popular-only feed, but so far i have failed. individual post comment feeds – easy, site-wide comment feeds – easy. but ‘all comments in all posts in this category’ feeds – no easy.
any WP magicians out there who can solve this, let me know.
Lots to chew on today. For a start (ha!) it’s possible to agree with everything Taylor said and still love The Jam — but genuinely, not patronising Weller with a pat on the head and a “full marks for trying Paul, bless your angry little heart” and I’d disagree about Jam fans painful nostalgia and unfulfilled dreams. For one, nostalgia is always painful — you’re missing something lost — and my dreams have turned out pretty well. You don’t think Jam fans were strengthened by them? Maybe there are thousands of 40-something men out there frustrated deep down that they never achieved something they heard in the music back then but they did a lot for me.
I suspect Jam fans’ nostalgia is always painful, in a way. All those possibilities left unfulfilled!
Well, “fan” would be pushing it (I enjoyed the singles but never bought the albums), but seeing Foxton and Buckler perform as “From The Jam” a couple of times last year brought back some unexpectedly and disarmingly intense feelings. I’m not sure I’d call them “nostalgia”, though. Rather, it felt – particularly at the first, more intimate show – as if much of the crowd were collectively re-connecting with their teenaged selves, in a way that was empowering and positive. I think that partly stemmed from a collective realisation that the core of our teenaged selves had never entirely dissolved away. But it’s difficult to articulate, because it was a complex and in some ways contradictory response.
#39 – Mike, I think that stuff is common to all pop nostalgia, perhaps all nostalgia of any kind. I’ve just read “Phonogram”, that weird graphic novel about Britpop, and it made me feel rather strange – I have no emotional investment in Britpop whatsoever (I hated most of it at the time) but it coincides with the period when I was young and Truly Alive and all that, and while there’s no direct link between any of that music and me, there are certainly mixed-up feelings hanging on from that time period, which are woven into the music whether I like it or not. I found some mp3s of old BP rubbish, and found to my horror I was feeling slightly emotional even as my logical/critical mind stomped all over them. Quite different to your “From The Jam” discomfort, but related in a way, I’d say.
The difference between Strummer and Weller was that Strummer’s schtick was explicitly political, albeit in the most cartoonish way, and only those who genuinely expected a revolution can now feel short-changed. Weller’s angst and “passion” was more generalised, and barely even knew what it was raging against. That made it work better as pop music, perhaps, but if you took it seriously (tempting at the time, I’d have thought, especially for teenagers with a similarly non-specific beef), there’s no possible way you couldn’t have been disappointed. Surely the hardcore Jam fan had their brain stamped – at an impressionable age – with an imperative that was too vague to mean much, but clear enough to make people feel they failed, whatever they did with the rest of their lives.
#34 – It’s different for boys, isn’t it? Pop told me to feel that way about real-life girls, and when they didn’t feel that way about me, I moved on to rock and roll for a while, which told me I could feel that way about myself. Both dead ends (for me at least). What I learned: be careful. What a rotten lesson.
Well it wasn’t that vague, there was a nice big juicy target in Margaret Thatcher all that rage was directed against. That might not be so easy to see in this post-Blair age where the battle lines have been muddied and cynically moved but back then we did know what the problem was. Or thought we did, we were young after all.
Young people are always disappointed by life aren’t they?
re 41: didn’t Weller make some pro-Conservative noises early on in the Jam days? He was quickly ‘reeducated’ by the music press intelligentsia but never seemed entirely comfortable toeing the party line.
I enjoyed the Jam as pop at the time but never had any great sense of personal or political investment in them so don’t feel any great sense of nostalgia or disappointment with them. I much prefer ‘Stand down Margaret’ by the Beat as a bit of agitpop – mainly because the band sound like they’re having some fun
my memory is that in 77, he said something unguarded about planning to vote tory in an interview, was instantly hit by a wave of criticism for it, and rowed back — googling around a bit now, i see that the way it gets told, he claims he was in fact teasing the journalist, and got taken out of context
as far as i ever knew his commitment to red wedge — fully ten years later — was never less than heartfelt, whatever you think about it as a project, political or artistic
And they say “please” in ‘Stand Down Margaret’ – it never hurts to be polite.
the way it gets told, he claims he was in fact teasing the journalist, and got taken out of context
I’m sure that’s what he’d like us to believe now. Still, it’s not the case. Listen to “Time For Truth” from the first Jam LP (yes of course it’s awful), an attack on the Callaghan government which most certainly is not an attack from the left. “Whatever happened to the Great Empire? / You bastards have turned it into manure.”
He did, of course, swing leftward pretty wildly at some point in the next few years, but – #41 – I don’t see that The Jam’s anger was ever really aimed at Thatcher directly, apart from the odd song here and there. That wasn’t what I was referring to, at least. I was thinking more of the meaningless motivational “brightness” of The Jam, a muddle of Mod-derived affectations and buzzwords (what was their boxed set called? “Direction! Reaction! Creation!” or something), a half-baked aesthetic of sharpness and “resistance” that was in truth terribly vague, a celebration of empty amphetamine energy, or activity for its own sake (amusing, considering how sullen and uncharismatic, how half-asleep The Jam always seemed). It was kind of appealing, and yes, the same trick once worked fine for the likes of The Creation, busting out of muddy monochrome, sizzling in the white heat of the technological revolution. But there was something self-righteous about The Jam, all clenched buttocks and grumbling gruffness, which brought out the Serious Young Man in their base of bright 14-year-old working class boys – but didn’t, to my mind, provide them with much nourishment. I think they short-changed their fans without even realising it.
“Absolute Beginners”, which won’t be troubling us here, represents the peak of this “POW! ZAP!” tendency: it’s all very uplifting, and wears a very straight face, but on closer inspection it’s complete gibberish. And I could forgive them this, like I forgive a million other pop records, if they hadn’t been so bloody joyless. I like The Jam when they’re bittersweet (“Life From A Window”, “Ghosts”, “To Be Someone”) or when they’re all-out pop (“Start!”), because I can take Weller seriously as a teen angst merchant, and I find him amusing as a pop star. These songs are still full of meaningless crap about how you have to “keep on movin’ your feet”, but they don’t have that irritating pomposity, half Sergeant Major, half pre-shock of early-90s “go for it!” positivity.
“which brought out the Serious Young Man in their base of bright 14-year-old working class boys”
Do you mind, I’ll have you know I turned 18 the week this came out. Smoking and drinking and everything I was.
Though, I must admit, when I saw them on their farewell tour I did look around the crowd at Wembley and feel like an old man – they were all so young.
I don’t think the horn line on “Absolute Beginners” is gibberish. And it seems pretty joyful to me.
I agree that neither PW or the Jam are 100% coherent – who is? – but I do know that the whole reaction-creation-direction thing was pretty powerful to the small me and remains so. I’m glad Weller was all “DO SOMETHING!” and not “DO THIS!”
And as far as “nourishment” goes, I was reading something the other day which talked about the inspiration of the inner sleeve of “All Mod Cons”, how that gave a huge pile of clues and signs to be followed up by the curious and I’m prepared to bet that countless adventures in and out of rock ‘n’ roll started there.
Taylor’s comment in No26 about The Jam and their Surrey roots is spot on. To me (although by my mid-teens pretty indifferent to most rock music) I always thought the Jam were plugged directly into the experience of growing up working-class (or on the blurry line where it merges with the the bottom of the lower middle class) in the outer London suburbs/Home Counties.
This is especially true out in the lyrics of ‘That’s Entertainment’ or that line about “milk floats dying in the dairy yard” or something in ‘A Town Called Malice’.
There’s something to be said that about the working class from Outer London and the Home Counties being England’s most forgotten/ignored people. Falling prey to the idea that everyone in that area rides around in Range Rovers and goes to tea with the Queen.
When in reality you’re probably looking at least 10 million people who inhabit the world that Paul Weller (for all his faults)came from and knew about.And who many of those middle/upper middle class who believe they ARE the south-east treat as little more than serfs.
I suppose I could go completely over the top here with my analogy and say that this situation what with the vast majority of the working-people in the area being the original natives of London’s satellite towns and now (through property prices and the influx of “successful” people from the other parts of the region and the rest of the country) being largely marginalised to the council estates of their districts is akin to the North American Indians being confined to their reservations. Yes I know slightly over the top and a long way from ‘Start’ by The Jam but you get the picture…
Re #47: The sleeve of ‘Our Favourite Shop’ may or may not have a similar effect on the viewer. Simon Reynolds excoriated this image as presenting the viewer with a checklist of signifiers of Weller-approved good taste.
Re #48: See all hilariously slighting mentions of chavs in the last five years or so.
List of things I can remember from the cover of “Our Favourite Shop”:
– a copy of “Another Country”
– a copy of one of those Kenneth Williams books (“Acid Drops”?)
– PW’s goofy haircut
The sleeve of OFS was not the massive source of inspiration for me that the inner sleeve of AMC was, which is probably a shame, in retrospect.
It seems to me that Reynolds’s dislike of mod and mod-inspired business is the not-so-secret key to his position on just about everything.