by David Lines
I didn’t know what to put it down to; the music, modernism, The Jam, me growing into me being me, whatever – but within a few months I had two new things. A girlfriend and a new best mate. One that didn’t live inside a piece of plastic.
3
The Eton Rifles
WHENEVER I HEAR this track now, whatever I’m doing, it always takes me there, carries me back to the first time that I heard it. It came crashing through my bedroom speakers like the three of them had just kicked the front door in, and made me feel like I could run right through a plate glass window at a hundred miles an hour. It felt like a call to arms, and even though I didn’t get the humour in it till maybe the fourth or fifth play, it awoke an interest in socialism, in kitchen-sink politics and class warfare – stuff that at school I wouldn’t have come close to till the sixth form, a good five years off.
‘The Eton Rifles’ was released in October 1979. I was twelve – just sixteen weeks away from my thirteenth birthday. Paul wrote it on holiday at his mum and dad’s caravan down in Selsey Bill. It’s like two-dozen cannons going off and thunders along with Paul screeching and feeding back the Rickenbacker, Rick spraying out drum fills and Bruce punctuating it with an intricate, thumping bass. Some songs make you want to get up and dance but this isn’t one of them. This is a song that makes you want to start a fire. Or a revolution. I’ve just played it whilst writing this and it’s left me breathless. Twenty-five years later and still it makes me want to turn the world upside down. I’ll have a go when I’ve finished my tax return.
Paul said in an interview with the Eton College Chronicle of Friday, 16 November, 1979 that he hoped he hadn’t upset anyone there, not intentionally. The interviewer said that no, on the contrary, students were buying it like mad and Paul said that that was great, and that maybe they’d get to number one with it. They didn’t, they got to number three, which was a shame, because for my money it was the best number one hit single which The Jam never had. The flip side, however, was a different matter entirely.
‘See-Saw’ is light and without direction and comes nowhere near close to the standard of other Jam B-sides. Maybe they wanted to keep new material fresh for the upcoming Setting Sons album, maybe the record company didn’t feel they needed a quality track as such to backup something as strong as ‘The Eton Rifles’. I’m not so sure about this theory, because Polydor clearly weren’t behind the record from the start. Unimaginable, I know. The truth of the matter is Polydor thought the single far too political to get any airplay on the BBC and essentially walked away from it. Typical Weller – he fired the record company’s promotional people and brought in another promoter, Clive Banks. Banks worked his magic, the record got played and the rest is history. Truth be told, whatever appeared on the B-side would never live up to the Aside. Even ‘Eleanor Rigby’ would have paled next to ‘The Eton Rifles’. If All Mod Cons was the defining album for them, this, then, was their defining single.
It was an evil year, 1979. Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister. I didn’t like her for two reasons: her voice and her hair. I could laugh, though. I laughed at Not The Nine O’Clock News and howled at one particular sketch. In it, Griff Rhys-Jones did a piece straight to camera, his face full-frame. He talked like a right old yob, with a sneering, curled top lip and a surly look that said, ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’ He went on about going down to Brighton at the weekend and looking forward to a proper scrap, and the camera pulled back a little and we saw his dark jacket, dark tie and short haircut and you thought, he’s a mod. Then he went on a bit more, about the pitched battles on the pebble beach and how him and his mates love a right ruck, and the camera finally pulled back to reveal that he’s a copper. I laughed out loud at home, but nobody else did.
A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday. Early afternoon on a bright, spring Saturday. I was getting ready to take Fiona McLelland out on a date and I could hardly believe my luck. Not too many of the other boys in my class had girlfriends, and it took me ages to muster up the courage to ask Fiona out. She sat next to me in maths and we playfully flirted for a while before I finally asked her out. She was tall and slender, with multicoloured hair and enormous feet which she crammed into flat winkle-pickers and she had a nice, big, warm, wobbly smile. We’d been going out with each other for two weeks and in that time we’d spoken four times on the phone and been to Youth Club together twice. Mum and Dad were a bit bemused by me having a real-life girlfriend, but it wasn’t anything to worry about, they were happy that I was finally settling in. They were also very eager to meet Fiona, although I got the feeling that they thought I’d actually invented her.
Youth Club (or ‘Youthy’) was on three nights a week in the sixth-form block – ‘The Link’. There was a disco in one room, table tennis in another, five-a-side outside and lots of snogging inside. Fiona and I hadn’t snogged yet, but we had held hands and pecked each other on the cheek quite a bit, and I was hoping that on that afternoon we’d get over that hurdle.
We met at the school gates and went for a romantic walk up Main Street. Fiona wore jeans, winkle-pickers and a big, baggy cream jumper. I wore my Levi’s jeans, white moccasins and a red Fred Perry tennis shirt with blue trim and a blue logo, and I spent nearly two hours getting my hair right before I left the house. We held hands and talked about school and music and clothes and we wandered into Wide-a-Wake records and had a look around. I bought Fiona a Jam button badge but she said that that was far too kind and generous of me and that, no, really, I should keep it for myself – she couldn’t possibly accept it.
We went to the baker’s and I treated us both to a chocolate eclair and a can of Coke to share. We ate the eclairs walking down the street. I liked Main Street on Saturday afternoons. Some of the shops shut for the day at lunchtime and this left the place half deserted. A paper bag blew towards us, the wind caught it and carried it up, high above our heads. Dust in the gutter swirled, and Fiona had cream from her eclair on the faint, golden moustache above her oh-so-kissable top lip. She was freckly, and that day the sun had caught her face and covered it with them. Mum had a freckly face, but not that freckly. Fiona looked even nicer than normal that Saturday. I felt nice, too, and fought the urge to lick the cream off her face like a cat.
There was something that I had to do, and I didn’t want to raise the subject for fear of upsetting Fiona and I knew that if I did, and I really did have to, then I’d go and spoil everything, and that was not a day that I wanted to ruin. But it couldn’t be avoided any longer …
A couple of days previously, Mum had been cleaning my room when she came down and asked me where the Madness album was that Granny and Grampa Sewter had bought me for my birthday.
‘I’ve given it to Fiona.’
‘You’ve given it away?’
‘That’s right. To my girlfriend.’
Mum looked far from pleased. ‘Oh. Why?’
‘Well, it wasn’t really my kind of thing. There were only a couple of songs on there that I really liked, and I didn’t even ask for it in the first place …’
Mum lit a cigarette and poured some lemon barley water into a glass tumbler. She took a drag and smoke came hurtling out of both nostrils like she’d turned into some sort of dragon. ‘Good God, David – that was a birthday present from your Granny. She went and bought that herself because she thought it was the sort of thing that you were into. And you go and give it away? Just like that? You ungrateful boy. I’m very cross with you – very, very cross.’
I was stunned. Mum very rarely spoke to any of us like that. The thought that I’d upset her upset me more than what I’d done and I wanted to cry like a little baby. My bottom lip went and she said, ‘It’s no good turning on the water works, I’m not going to forgive you for giving that record away. Your Granny went to a lot of time and trouble and effort in getting it for you, going into Nottingham on the bus and buying it. They came up especially, you know, to bring it for your birthday because they worri
ed that if they’d posted it, it’d get broken. You ungrateful, selfish boy …’
Mum hadn’t said very much to me at all since then. I wanted to make things better between us, so I came up with this great idea to try and calm the troubled waters. It was brilliant. What I was not going to do, was to ask Fiona for the Madness album back. That would be childish and rude and unfair on her. I’d also end up looking like a prize idiot. No, what I had decided to do, was to ask her for the money for it …
We’d walked to the top of Main Street and were now halfway back down the other side, heading towards school. The paper bag was following us. Sometimes it caught us up and got ahead of us, and then it’d float back down to the ground and pretend to look in a shop window or it would get caught up against a lamp post as if it thought we hadn’t noticed it.
‘Don’t look now, but it’s stopped for some chips.’
Fiona laughed and squeezed my hand. ‘Do you fancy going up onto the cricket pitch?’
‘Can do. Do you fancy opening the batting, or shall I?’
Fiona held my gaze and said, ‘You can open if you want to.’
God, this sounded promising.
Ten minutes later we were sitting on the cricket pitch, making a daisy chain. The sun grew brighter, but an even stronger breeze blew so I shuffled round in front of Fi so that my back acted as a windbreak for her. She reached out and took my face in her hands. She gently pulled me towards her and we kissed, softly, for maybe ten seconds or so. Her tongue was hot and stiff and it didn’t so much slip as drill into my mouth, and then she closed her lips around my tongue and sucked so hard that I was petrified she’d tear the thing out by the root. I think it was the tears of pain streaming down my face which finally gave the game away and Fiona quickly released me from her suction grasp. ‘Sorry, David. Did I hurt you? Are those real tears?’
‘No, that was just lovely, thanks. You’re a great kisser. It’s just my hay fever playing up. Um, shall we go, then?’
Fiona sounded surprised at this. ‘Go? We’ve only just got here. Come here, you …’
She slipped her arm around my neck and this time the kiss was much softer. The only problem was, it’d been going on for about four and a half minutes and we sort of ended up breathing through one another’s mouths. I didn’t even know that this was physically possible, and although it was far from unpleasant, it did take a bit of getting used to. Fiona was absolutely scarlet in the face by then, and when she did finally manage to disentangle me from her wet mouth, she fell back onto the grass, grabbing my hand and taking me with her.
I lay on top of her, and she kind of rubbed herself against my leg and breathed very fast. She took off her jumper. There was a thin white blouse underneath and she undid the top three buttons. Her chest was freckly, too. I could see her bra strap through it, white and lacy. I wanted to see her bra. I wanted to get into it and feel what was inside. Was it too early for us? ‘Is there something you want to ask me, Davey Boy?’ She undid the top button of her jeans and smiled the sweetest, dirtiest of smiles. I could see the top of her knickers. They were purple, and I wanted to know everything about what went on inside them. I could hardly believe that this was actually happening to me.
I lay next to her. There were butterflies on top of the daisies and deep inside my stomach. This was to be the moment. ‘Yeah,’ I panted, ‘can I have four quid for that Madness album?’
My clumsiness on the cricket pitch didn’t go unnoticed. On the way into school the following Monday morning, Michelle Parker, Fiona’s best friend, rushed up and pushed an envelope into my hand and then ran away. I opened the envelope and read the letter: Fiona had finished with me. Folded inside was a five pound note, and along the bottom of it, directly underneath the Duke of Wellington, Fiona had written, in blue biro, ‘To a Crap Kisser.’
At long last, I’d made a new, male friend. His name was Richard Bowerman and he’d got a haircut just like Bruce Foxton’s. He looked like he was wearing a busby on top of his head. Rik, as I renamed him, was almost as big a fan of The Jam as I was. He was in my class, but had only recently stopped wearing massive, rectangular spectacles. I couldn’t have possibly spoken to him whilst he had those things perched on the end of his hooter. He looked like Grampa’s greenhouse. And he had a side parting. Then, one Monday morning he came into class with his new fluffy head and no geeky glasses and he’d painted the most fabulous picture of The Jam onto his canvas haversack. Using a mixture of Humbrol model paints and heavy marker pens, Rik had recreated the front cover of the second single by The Jam, ‘The Modern World’. I was both impressed and wildly jealous, although when you got in close for a really good look, he’d managed to make Bruce Foxton look more like Bruce Forsyth. It was actually rather disturbing.
Whilst Margaret Thatcher settled into her new role as Prime Maniac, the charts were full of The Village People, ‘Bright Eyes’ by Simon and Garfunkel was everywhere and Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ seemed to say goodbye to disco whilst punk and new wave danced, or rather pogoed, on its grave. But we didn’t care, me and Rik. We were locked away in our little world, the world of The Jam and no one else was allowed to go there. We spent ages locked away in his bedroom making endless compilation tapes of our favourite songs by the best band in the world. We made different sorts of tapes for different styles of songs. There were punky, loud crashing tapes and then there were ballady, love song compilations. We made cassettes with songs on in order of how we rated them and we spent hours cutting out pictures of Paul, Bruce and Rick and designing our own special cover inserts for the tape boxes. We even made spine inserts with our own compilation titles on. We talked forever about The Jam, whole days were lost to them.
‘What do you think Paul was like at school?’
‘Um, I don’t think that he rated it, to be honest.’
‘Me neither. Do you think that he always knew he was going to be in a band?’
‘Probably. You couldn’t be that talented and not, you know, know.’
‘No, I know. Which is your fave song on Setting Sons?’
‘Tricky one, that. Probably … probably “Thick As Thieves”.’
‘Yeah, me too, Rik. Which is your fave bit in it?’
‘Oh, God. Um, I think maybe the quieter, slower bit in the middle where Paul sings about stealing lovely young girls from ivory towers, stealing autumn rain and summer showers.’
‘Yeah, it’s brilliant that bit, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, brilliant.’
‘And I like “Private Hell” too. I love it when that woman has that nervous breakdown. It’s great …’
‘Yeah, I love that song. Hey – I’ve just had a brilliant idea.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go and polish our shoes …’
I spent forever round at Rik’s. It was nice being in a different house, especially one which seemed so enormous compared to ours. I’m sure that Mum and Dad, Dad especially, were fed up with me wanting to spend time at someone else’s house instead of at home. ‘What’s so special round there, anyway? What have they got that we haven’t?’ The answer was space to ourselves. Rik had an elder sister, Susan, but she’d moved out and got married years ago and his mum and dad were often out and even if they weren’t, we hardly ever saw them because the place was so gigantic. It was like ASDA in there.
4
Going Underground
I TURNED THE page of the NME and came to a piece all about the next single from The Jam. It was called ‘Going Underground’ and I ate it up. This was recorded in January 1980 down at the Townhouse Studios, deep in Shepherd’s Bush, and was produced, again, by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven. It was to be released as the next single on 7 March – and I was going to be first in the queue for it. ‘Going Underground’, when it finally did see the light of day, was a double A-side. But more of that in a minute.
The Jam were touring the States when it crashed in at number one – and I helped put it there. With my own money. Just. There were advance order
s for 200,000 copies – this was, literally, unheard of. When the news came through they aborted the tour and immediately got on a plane to get back to Blighty to record a performance for Top Of The Pops.
There were a whole five more days to wait till it was released and the article also reported that Paul had set up a company – Riot Stories – which was going to publish Youth Poetry. It included details of where to send your submissions and before I’d even finished reading the piece I was out of our front door and en route, on foot, to the newsagents to buy new pens and a pad.
I was very proud of my first poem for Paul. It took me all of ten minutes to compose and three further days to write it up in my best handwriting. I ‘borrowed’ my father’s fountain pen from the bureau and wrote it out on Basildon Bond’s best, torn from my mother’s pad which she kept in the second drawer down in the Welsh dresser in the dining room.
You Know the Truth.
You think that you know us,
You think you can lead us,
But all that you do is,
Bleed and mislead us.
You were only a shopkeeper’s daughter,