THE JAM – "A Town Called Malice"/"Precious"

Was this the first time someone got to play both sides of their single on TOTP? Precious did just seem like showing off, though, and was never on equal ground with A Town Called Malice, which has some of Weller’s best monochrome suburban imagery. Housewives clutching milk bottles to their hearts, love letters hung out to dry… none of which makes an enormous amount of sense, but does sound like one of Shena Mackay’s early novellas set to Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You – clearly a rather good notion. Even Foxton’s famously funkless fingers didn’t let the side down.

Yaaaaaaay I am BORN! Where’s that stork icon…

(The song’s not bad either, but I decided that before I found out its personal relevance to me.)

Number 2 watch. More 1977 veterans, with two weeks of The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’.

Shit! Pink!

Unless I’m mistaken, this came straight in at the top, sending our Bosh friends flying in panic. For me, “Malice” was one of The Jam’s finest. I can’t agree with the point that Weller tries to do too much, but yes, Tom, “You Can’t Hurry Love”, I see that now. Ultimately, though, either one accepts that the track is in your face or you simply leave it alone. My own opinion is that you could not apply surgery to this without killing the patient. As Mozart was accused by his jealous critics of using too many notes, so the suggestion that Weller is cramming too many words into “Malice” is a curious stance to adopt. I personally think that it is great but would flinch at making the “geezer music” point again, as it is self-evident in the same way that “Catch 22” was always a geezer (well, guy) book. I can’t imagine girlies having much to do with either.

5 + 6 – “When thing’s are down, That Scottish clown’s, Never around, Gordon Brown…”

the Motown rhythm combined with a very English, hectoring drabness means I find myself tapping my foot while feeling slightly irritated.
there are hints here of what was to come with The Smiths – although Morrissey could usually be relied on for a more waspish wit than Weller’s kitchen sink grimness

Agreed. There’s a case to be argued that Precious is in fact the first baggy record. It certainly anticipates Fool’s Gold and that ’89-’91 era when white boys with guitars were trying to grapple with the funk.

Both sides of this record were played endlessly at the church youth club I frequented around 1982-3. Time hasn’t withered either in my eyes. 9 from me.

nice photo for the sleeve but the typeface is weirdly awful

i was in a brief phase of wanting to like the jam at this point and was baffled by this: weller’s passion probem is that (i) i have no doubt he feels it, and (ii) he is aware of work that has made him feel it in others, but (c) when he co-opts the techniques of that work he does it in a strangely blunt and feelingless way, like someone saying “happy valentine, take my buying you chocolates and flowers as read” — you know he knows what the thing is he’s meat to be doing, and you know he connects it with the intention, but he or some reason often skips a step or three in the execution

(interestingly i seem currently to be ina phase where i want to like him: possibly because he’s as old as me and we giffers must stick together)

Like this?

Although I’ve known the song since, er, my birthday, I now strongly associate it with Billy Elliot tap dancing down a street somewhere in the Grim North while his dad’s crossing the miners’ picket line. The whole scene doesn’t seem quite right somehow?

The combination of the Motown cheeriness and the bassline on the verse definitely bump it up to around the 7/10 mark for me.

Surely it was “Toast” by the Street Band … ?

I love that “too many words” thing more as the years go by. In his own way, Paul Weller between 79 and 81 reminds me of Bob Dylan in the mid-60s and Eminem on his first two albums. One day, you wake up and not only do you have something to say about everything, but you can word it effortlessly in pop lyrics that spew out at a greater velocity than even you can understand.

As you get older, I don’t think it’s viable to sustain that feeling that you’ve got it All Worked Out – certainty is more the domain of youth anyway – but A Town Called Malice sounds to me like the work of someone who could zoom in on any part of his worldview like the way you might zoom in when you’re using Google Maps or Google Earth and know that there would be something there that he could turn into a song.

At some point, of course, you realise that a worldview isn’t the same as having a view on the world based on prolonged exposure to it. It’s interesting that Paul Weller only got out of his post-Style Council slough by learning to express self-doubt as well as he once expressed absolute certainty.

Btw I think Precious probably sounded far better in Weller’s head than it did on the record. Rick Buckler seems to have no understanding of what’s expected of him on it. It would have been enough to make anyone want to form The Style Council.

Right, I think that Town Called Malice is a triumph. Let’s see if I can work out why!

Taken as a double A-side, this is like an illustration of how white rock bands should and should not attempt to work from largely black source musics. The funk of Precious is a lumpen thing that seems to serve no purpose – it certainly doesn’t sound nimble or tense or sexual as funk generally does, but there doesn’t seem to be any point to the gap between the source music and the playing. To take a couple of contemporaneous examples of acts working from soul sources, as cover versions neither Robert Wyatt’s version of ‘At Last I Am Free’ nor Orange Juice’s version of ‘LOVE’ work in the same honeyed way as their divine sources, but a similar rapture is achieved through their patent sincerity and acknowledgement that the singers come from a different world.

The relationship between ‘Town Called Malice’ and Northern Soul works in a similar way for me. God, that organ opens out the sound of The Jam. All of the musical virtues of the band are retained (the taughtness, concision and riffiness) but work when moved into a slightly different idiom, too. I find this as exciting as Northern Soul, but Weller’s customary Woking sound of the suburbs concerns added on top of it makes it feel compellingly disorientating, even though its a very familiar song. A hapless JoBoxers-style homage this mercifully isn’t.

Its easy to laugh at the young Weller’s autodidact lyrics and imagary – and probably the correct response in his lesser songs (sometime Popular contributer Taylor Parkes has written hilarious close readings) – but the pell-mell and muffled delivery of this jumble really works in its favour here. When you really have to work to pick up stray phrases this song does convey backstreet suburban disapointment, especially as experienced in your early twenties. Set down as verse its not such an impressive experience, but then few experienced the song like that in 1982 (Smash Hits songwords notwithstanding). Although this is as stirring a call-arms as ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’, something of the imageristic quality of this had got lost by that stage. Simon Reynolds’ dismissal of The Style Council as “soulcialism” doesn’t quite apply so well to the late Jam.

DJ Taylor has spoken quite interestingly about Weller’s debt to Orwell in these songs, not the allegorical model, but the Clergyman’s Daughter/ Aspidistra/ Coming Up for Air version, in presenting songs about a landscape of English constraint realised through stray details (That’s Entertainment), and searched for glimpses of the pastoral (particularly pertinant to coming from the home counties) and memories of lost childhood (Tales From the Riverbank). It’s an exciting approach to pop music, I think, and more distictive to The Jam alone than you might initially think.

Listening to this for the first time this week and I have no complaints! I guess if I was trying to notice it I’d admit it maybe goes on thirty seconds too long or so, but really, this is some basic ass-kicking rock and roll (arse-kicking to y’all), hitting on all four cylinders and always gearing up again for that rattling pile-on into the hook. Gives me the same kind of jolt as, I dunno, “Make Out Club” by Unrest although not as relentlessly. This must be great on the dancefloor!

Will at #11

A lot of white boys were grappling with funk in the late 70s/early 80s – Gang of Four, A Certain Ratio, Pigbag etc. – I always thought of ‘Precious’ as Weller trying to jump on that wagon but Rick and Bruce were a bit too heavy-handed to really do it right. I wonder if this was the first time Paul thought to himself that they were holding him back.

Also, have to say this makes a really interesting pair with “Ghost Town,” in which the good old days of the boom town are rotting on the vine in flashback – “Malice” sketches out a similar portrait of a run-down world, but much as Weller wallows in the details of misery he would “rather put some joy back” in the place. Presumably, they’ll dance and sing, and the music will play… and they’ll be no fighting on the dance floor.

Another reference point: “My Little Town,” the reunion single by Simon & Garfunkel.

TOTPWatch: The Jam performed ‘Town Called Malice’ on Top of the Pops twice (on the second occasion, they also performed ‘Precious’);

11 February 1982. Also in the studio that week were; The Fun Boy 3 & Bananarama, Bow Wow Wow, Adrian Gurvitz, Hall & Oates, Depeche Mode, Modern Romance, Elkie Brooks and Haircut 100. Tommy Vance was the host.

18 February 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Madness, George Benson, UB40, ABC, The Jets, Robert Palmer, Tight Fit and Toni Basil. Mike Read was the host.

I’ve always really loved this (without having to think much about it) – the uptempo rhythm and generally strong execution. Oh it’s about something? Yes, towns can be bad, sure… ‘Precious’ is also great but bladhy hell ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Precious Pigbag’ more like.

As no one else has I guess I should mention the title is a pun on the novel “A Town Called Alice” by Nevil Shute. Anyone ever read that? I read his “On The Beach” last year and wasn’t that impressed.

shute’s heyday was the late 50s, early 60s i think, but seems to have dated badly (not that i’ve read a page myself, i just mean no one talks about him these days) — my mum and dad had paperbacks of both the above (and something else, possibly with sky in the title), presumably because “everyone” was reading them at the time… “on the beach” is atomic-apocalypse-exploitation, isn’t it?

I can confirm Doc C’s guess at #23 that this is great on the dancefloor – unless, like me , you go to your school reunion a couple of years later, give it some welly when this comes on and fail to notice the pool of spilt lager in the vicinity of a table of drinks…

Strange to see people lukewarm about this, since it’s one of my very favourites. And I’m not alone. When I marked the 1000th number one by carrying out a poll amongst those of my colleagues who entered my Christmas music quizzes, “Town Called Malice” finished a surprising second behind “House of the Rising Sun” and ahead of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Granted, those polled were for the most part not unlike me – white, male, born in the 60s – but it was an impressive result. I love the energy, the pace, the fury with which the “too many words” are channelled.

And yes you can hear its influences – the first review I ever read of the single dubbed it “Motown Called, Alice” by Martha and the Vanwellas – but it wears them lightly and uses them effectively. (Can anyone else hear “Judy In Disguise” by John Fred in the organ riff?) For me it’s the best of their number ones and gave 1982 a real kickstart. I don’t mind “Precious” either…

I read “A Town Like Alice” at school – a fine romance between an English woman and an Australian soldier in Japanese PoW camps in Malaya. Worth a read, or look out for the Virginia McKenna/Peter Finch film.

(BTW Wichita at #32, you mean the 500th number one, not the 1000th.)

# 38 – I suppose, Lee, with no sex on the beach they were bloody thirsty too.

I see what Tom and others mean in seeing something slightly meretricious in this song but I have to say honestly that I found it about as exciting a #1 as I can remember from my childhood. There’s a number one coming up at the end of the year by a British act that tries to ‘do’ Motown with lamentable results. This is faithful but the fidelity is a labour of love.

I think Billy’s comparison of this with Orwell is very exact, and from there I think you can also trace a poetic fascination with ‘ordinary lives’ through Mass Observation, to the early cultural studies books like The Uses of Literacy and the amazing verite documentaries that Lindsay Anderson and others did in the 1960s with the BFI, on into the Angry Young Men novels and movies: Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and the unbelievably gloomy A Kind of Loving. (Billy Elliott was going for some of that). The housewives clutching the milk bottles to their hearts could have been in any of those books and films.

For me astonishing thing about this song is Paul Weller’s voice on it. It’s all antimonies: it’s both tightly focused, angry and driving, but also wildly free. Listen to that ‘and’ that takes us into ‘stop apologising for the things you never done’. It’s a moment of almost yelping celebration crammed in the tiny gap between words. The hundreds of words that he crams into the song is part of the appeal; it’s the articulacy of someone bursting out of their constraints (‘I could go on for hours and I probably will’). The middle eight – well in fact only half the middle eight – gives us a moment of decline, regret and defeat before the battle is joined again. I also love what his accent sounds like: both strong London accent and vaguely transatlantic – and again I think that’s about the play between constraint and freedom. For all these reasons the song is just a sensational performance: moving and exhilarating and recklessly joyfully articulate. It never fails to make me feel happy, despite the despair in the lyrics. It’s a profoundly generous record.

Re 41: Really good call on Weller’s performance. His uptight, Surrey terrier bark on most Jam records – think of Start – is what has always stopped me loving The Jam. Vocally, this is a perfect midpoint between his first two groups; it never spills into the creamy (“no matter what i do”) or growly (“WOWLS!!!”) pastiches of the Style Council, and sounds – for once – like he’s undone his top button. I’d like to think he came out of the studio and thought ‘I’ve done my best’.

In spite of their barren 1981, this sounded like a dead cert no.1 on first listen.

Re 37: 500th, yes, of course… I’m so very old.

Neville Shute’s “On The Beach” was filmed in Melbourne in 1959, and achieved some small notoriety when Ava Gardner was quoted as saying “If they’re going to make a film about the end of the world, Melbourne is the ideal place to do it.”

(and if anyone sees the film, please note that Australians never, to my knowledge, indulge in rousing singalongs of “Waltzing Matilda” at social functions)

Of course any song that includes the world “Malice” is going to appeal to me. I always thought Paul Weller was at his best in the Jam before he started nicking 70s novelty tunes for the Style Council. These 2 are clearly the same song !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI9Fin2NeNk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irgJPqkuakM