The Modfather: My Life with Paul Weller

by David Lines

  Bastard. Complete and utter total bastard.

  Thirty minutes later I was sitting on Rik’s sofa in front of the telly. I say in front of the telly, it seemed like roughly a mile and a half away. Their living room was massive, just like the rest of the house. The sofa was so far away from the television the remote control didn’t function properly and Rik had to stand on one leg and lean forwards with his arm outstretched like some sort of mad ballerina to try and make it work. I could have done with a pair of binoculars to see the screen and he was wearing his mum’s apron. Bastard.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  Rik smoothed the plastic apron down, took a swig from his can of Fanta and turned the video recorder on. He sat back down and started fiddling with the remote.

  ‘Where did your Mum get it from, then?’

  ‘Radio Rentals, in Main Street. We’ve got it on a month’s trial. Dad says that if we like it, we’ll buy it, because by the time we’ve had it for a year we may as well have just paid for it, given what it costs to rent the thing. It’s a Betamax. They’re the best. I might ask for one of these for my bedroom for Christmas …’

  ‘No, man, the apron. Where did she get the apron from?’

  ‘Dunno. But I’ll ask her if you want.’

  ‘Cheers.’ I sat back and sucked on the straw in my carton of Five Alive, getting myself ready to watch Paul again. I hated Rik for having that apron, but I hated myself more for feeling so petty and jealous. How could I be jealous of Rik having an apron? Easy – because it was just like Paul’s.

  ‘Right. I’ll rewind the tape. They shouldn’t be too far back seeing that they were on last. Then we can work out which pictures we want to cut out and stick on the front of the video cassette box. Have you thought about what you might want on there?’

  The video began winding back and Rik did his pointy ballet thing and then the machine juddered to a halt. ‘Kind of. I thought that the “Going Underground” sleeve would be a good pic, because they’re, you know, on the television screen on the front of the single sleeve and this compilation tape’s all about them being on television. So, whatcha think?’

  ‘Good idea. Hold onto you hat – here we go …’

  Rik pressed nine on the remote and the screen went blue. Then he pressed the play button on the handset and here came The Jam. Only, it wasn’t The Jam at all. It was Seth fucking Armstrong complaining about losing his ferret down Annie Sugden’s back warren. ‘You’ve taped the wrong side, you utter ponce.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who set the tape, it was my dad.’

  ‘Well, he’s a ponce as well as you.’

  ‘Why does that make me a ponce?’

  ‘Because you should have checked it, you ponce. You can’t go leaving serious, responsible matters such as this to unreliable people like parents. They can’t be trusted with tasks levelled at this high a priority, you should know that. What happens if they’re not number one this time next week? We’ll have lost this classic clip forever, you great ponce.’

  ‘Stop calling me a ponce.’

  ‘No. This is one almighty cock-up, Rik.’

  ‘Sorry. Really sorry. How can I make it up to you?’

  Beat.

  ‘Give us your apron, you ponce.’

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the reason behind Paul’s apron was to illustrate his growing interest in pop art. This certainly pissed off the people at the BBC, who shat themselves at any hint of an artiste endorsing a product of any description.

  Paul Weller wasn’t setting out to endorse a product. What he was doing was using the apron as a reference to The Who’s album, The Who Sell Out. It featured Roger Daltrey grasping a huge tin of Heinz baked beans, and PW was taking the piss, having a laugh, because he anticipated the reaction from the likes of the NME to his band’s new-found success; that The Jam, by being number one, had finally sold out for good.

  It transpired that the suits at the Beeb decided that Paul should not be granted free rein to don the Heinz apron. No way. Paul, typically, dug his Italian heels in and agreed to play only if he could wear it reversed. They relented, and the camera lights lit it up like a Christmas tree, the logo as clear as day for all to clock. Paul won. Despite this, he felt used and abused by those in power at Television Centre and deliberately cocked his lines up. The end result was seriously amateurish.

  ‘Going Underground’ wasn’t about taking a tube ride. It was about Russia invading Afghanistan in December 1979. It’s the story of a working man, told by the government to play along, pay for the war and not to complain whilst doing so. The next week at Youthy there were squaddies from the local barracks jumping up and down, singing away to the lyrics. It was obvious to me that they had no idea what they were singing along to. I pitied them as I watched them dance around in their combat green and polished boots.

  What many don’t know, is that ‘Going Underground’ became a double A-side with ‘The Dreams Of Children’ on the flip as the result of a basic mistake.

  Paul, Bruce and Rick had slated ‘The Dreams Of Children’ as a future A-side. The record was printed in France, and a typo resulted in an A replacing the B; the result – a double A-side. ‘Going Underground’ was more in keeping with the regular ‘Jam sound’, so the radio programmers concentrated on playing that. The crucial point here, is that at last, Polydor were now one hundred per cent into The Jam and purposefully delayed the record’s release by seven days – which meant that they gave themselves seven more days of big sales in the form of advance orders from fans.

  The way that Polydor distributed meant that The Jam were kept at the top slot for three weeks on the trot. So far that year, no band had stayed there longer. It was a record only bettered by The Police, in October, with ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Which was bollocks. Polydor threw their corporate hat into the ring. They released every Jam single all at once. The demand was enormous, with sales resulting in six of their singles all making the charts at once – ‘In The City’ went in at forty, ‘All Around The World’ at forty-three, ‘Strange Town’ at forty-four, ‘The Modern World’ at fifty-two, ‘News of the World’ at fifty-three and ‘David Watts’ at fifty-four. This was the single most successful assault on the charts any group had had since The Beatles. And I’d helped put them back there. I bought two ‘Undergrounds’ and one of each single to get the picture sleeves. Long live The Jam!

  5

  Start!

  WITH THE SUMMER came this absolute scorcher from the mighty pen of Paul. I’d spent the last twenty weeks waiting by the front door for a reply from Riot Stories about my poem, but I could see why it would take Paul so long to find the time to write – it must have taken him forever to come up with something as good as ‘Start!’. ‘Start!’ is just the most amazingly original sound for a song to have. It sounds … like a merry-go-round descending down a hill into madness having just spun off its axis. The frustration and anger in PW’s voice leaps off the record, it infected and enthused me, although I’d no idea what on earth he was singing about. It’s got horns on it, and they screeched out like the swifts which nested under our eaves. I’d just seen the video on Top Of The Pops and in it Paul wore a pair of dark sunglasses shaped just like John Lennon’s spectacles. I mentioned this to Mum.

  ‘That’s exactly why he’s wearing them.’

  I put down my bottle of orange Soda Stream and gave her a look which said ‘What do you know about it? You’re a parent. Now please stop trying to meddle in matters which don’t concern you and get back to your world, thank you very much …’

  ‘That’s why he’s wearing those Lennon glasses – because this record sounds just like a Beatles song. It’s his way of saying thanks to The Beatles.’

  What on earth was she talking about? ‘Hmm … I’ll take your word for it.’ I got back to my Soda Stream. I’d give Rik a ring in a bit to make sure he hadn’t made a bummer on the Jam tape again. Beatles song? I ask you!

  During t
hat summer I’d written some more brilliant poems for Paul and Mum had been kind enough to photocopy them at the hospital where she’d got a new job as a secretary. It was good of her to do it, but it was painful handing over my personal, private poetry to my mum. They were vivid, clear insights into my own little secret world and I wondered who was most embarrassed – me, knowing that Mum had read them, or Mum actually reading them?

  By then, Mum had been at the hospital for three weeks. She said that she took the job to help her meet new people and hopefully make some new friends and generally just to get out and about a bit more. She liked it, I could tell. It certainly suited her. She whistled to herself in the morning on the way to catch the bus and she’d started doing her hair differently. She had professional hair.

  Mum said that the poetry photocopying wasn’t a problem, but that I shouldn’t bother asking her to type any of it up, because she hadn’t got a typewriter – she’d got something ‘truly evil’ called a word processor. She said that she despaired of it, and that using it was ‘like learning how to fly a bloody passenger jet. Where’s the ruddy ribbon go? If someone would show me where the ribbon goes, the rest’d fall into place …’ Apparently, they were sending her on a course.

  Dad wasn’t around much at the time. He’d been up and down the country seeing clients, attending seminars, sales conferences, that sort of thing. We all missed him, and Chris and Phil seemed to more than me; they didn’t have Paul to fall back on, and despite having settled in quicker and more easily than me at first, having new mates to the house for tea and stuff like that, they still needed their dad – just like me, but they seemed to need him a little bit more. And he knew it. It could have been worse, much worse, Dad could have been stuck out in the middle of the North Sea or abroad or banged up in prison or just not around at all. Mum was happier now that she’d got her job to distract her, and all in all the machinery of the house seemed to have oiled itself well enough to operate smoothly.

  Apart from writing my poetry I’d also spent much of my time incredibly busy trying very hard not to grow a moustache. It was seriously hard work. All of the filthy bikers and heavies loved their hair on their lips. Me, I really hated it. Some of them in the upper sixth even had beards. Imagine that – being at school with a bloody beard! What was next – patches on the elbows and a pipe on the go? The moustache wasn’t for me … certainly not; I was a mod – not a maths teacher. So, I’d been keeping the thing at bay with Dad’s trusty old cut-throat razor. After my first, hideous attempt at using it on my head, I’d learned my lesson. Dad said he’d teach me to shave properly when there was enough hair on my lip and chin to have a good go at. I hoped I’d make a better go of it than I’d done with the hair on my head.

  As well as writing poetry and not growing a moustache, I’d been hanging around with Rik after school, getting royally thrashed by him at snooker (our one concession to the sunshine was to move his table out onto his parents’ lawn: not ideal when a rain cloud would surprise us – probably one of the few times when rain stopped play in a snooker match). We also went for long bike rides which I thoroughly enjoyed, despite Rik’s racer weighing less than my saddlebag which meant that I had to pedal four times as much just to keep up with him. I didn’t mind: I was developing calf muscles which looked like legs of lamb. I was happy and healthy and I loved to explore the surrounding villages on my BSA tourer. We’d cycle to Barwick-in-Elmet and sit under the maypole drinking lemon barley water from our flasks. They were happy days.

  * * *

  Recently, there’d been a bit of trouble in Bridgford, and that was one of the reasons why Grampa came to stay. He’d been phoning up most nights and none of us could make out what he was going on about. Grampa had my room and I was going to be on the zed bed thingy, in Chris and Phil’s room. The first thing that Grampa did when he arrived was to take out a bottle of Scotch from his handbag, pour himself a glass, light a gigantic cigar and ask if there were any wildlife documentaries on the telly. ‘I like wildlife, Davey. And Juliet Bravo …’

  Chris had got a Rubik’s cube and he took the thing everywhere. It was like it was glued to him, never leaving his soft, pudgy hands. Even when he was in another room, I could tell where he was in the house just by listening for the telltale click-clack, shlick-shlack of the cube as he forever twisted and turned the thing, trying to crack the combination and fall upon the answer.

  I watched him through the fug of Grampa’s cigar. We were all sitting round the telly watching Juliet Bravo. Chris was watching the box, but his mind was on the cube, whirring the columns round and around. He was doing it without knowing, and even if Chris did crack the cube, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed. Later that night, when we were all in bed, I fell asleep to the sound of Chris and his cube. I wondered if he did it in his sleep. Chris had started wearing Kickers on his feet – they were favoured by French exchange students and geography teachers and to tell you the truth, even though they weren’t standard mod issue, I quite liked them. I’d never have worn a pair, though. Not unless Paul did.

  On the news before bed there was a piece about an amazing new revolution in music. It was called a compact disc and was known as a CD. They were very new and set to become massive in America and you could get hundreds of songs onto one little silver disc which was smaller than a single. Paul wouldn’t need those CD things – The Jam didn’t sell well in the United States. I decided at that moment never to set foot in the cursed country as at the time it was clearly a place not worth visiting. It must be rubbish if they didn’t dig The Jam. I didn’t dig the idea of the CD, either. They looked antiseptic. ‘Who’d have thought it, eh?’ I looked at Grampa, slumped in the armchair, ash all down his cardigan, scanning the carpet for something.

  ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it, Gramps,’ I said, pointing at the television. Anything to make conversation.

  ‘You can say that again. I could have sworn I had a bottle down here …’

  From the kitchen, I could hear Dad pouring the rest of it down the sink.

  At breakfast the next day, Grampa put his cigar out in the empty shell of his boiled egg and asked me, ‘Them posters up on your wall, do you like those Jam people, do you?’

  I swallowed a mouthful of toast and replied, ‘Yeah, Grampa, I like those people.’

  ‘You’ve done your hair the same way as the lanky one.’ Here we go. ‘I said, you’ve got the same hair as the lanky one.’

  Quick sip of tea and a nice smile was the only reply Grampa was getting on that one.

  ‘You used to have such lovely hair till you moved up here. Wavy Davey, that’s what we used to call you. Wavy Davey.’

  I felt like my head was going to explode. ‘More tea, Grampa?’

  ‘You never used to part it down the middle. It used to be a side parting, it used to be a man’s parting. You won’t get your hair cut like that in my barber’s shop, not now or ever …’

  I struggled to find a suitably acidic reply, but unfortunately my caustic cupboard was entirely bare. Thankfully, Mum changed the subject.

  ‘Jess, let me take you down the garden and show you my camellia.’

  Grampa Lines had the most amazing life, but despite this, each time that he visited or we went and saw him in Bridgford, there was never anything that I felt I could actually say to him. I wanted to ask Grampa about how he served as a fireman during the war, stationed on the South Coast, about the boats ablaze from the bombs which rained down on the harbour, night after night. I wanted to ask Grampa about all sorts of family things, like just why was it that Slack Alice never came down for tea with us when we visited and instead had cake left outside her door? What happened when his partner in their song and dance routine got hit by a tram and died? Couldn’t he find another partner to team up with, or had that done it for him? What was it like to come from completely nowhere and end up being the best and most famous barber in the Midlands? What was it like when Granny died and how did he feel being left alone in the house with that scary
mangle in the wash house? I wanted to ask him if there really was a Black Hand that lived in the little orchard at the bottom of the garden which scratched the trunk of the tree where we sometimes sat in the sunshine. Did he think he might meet Granny again when he died? Did he wear his slippers when he went out to the shop for cigars?

  I sat on the sofa and thought about these questions. These were the sort of personal things that I could easily have asked Grampa Sewter about, all day, every day. Until we moved to Leeds, that is. Ten minutes later Mum and Grampa came in from the garden.

  ‘David, I’m making coffee. Would you like a cup?’

  ‘Yes please, Mum.’

  ‘Good. We can all sit down and have a nice little chat whilst your Dad fills the car up before he takes Grampa back to Bridgford. You sit with your gramps while I put the kettle on. You never know, I might even conjure up some Blue Ribbands from somewhere.’

  Grampa sat down next to me on the sofa. He leaned back and put his arm around me, pulling me towards him in an all-lads-together kind of way. ‘Now then, Davey boy. What have you got to tell your old Grampa?’ I couldn’t see him. He’d got a Havana on the go and I looked at a big, blue cloud which was suspended above the sofa. The cloud cleared, and Grampa Lines emerged from it, blinking out at me from behind the lenses of his spectacles. I thought about what I could possibly tell this man. I could have told him about my poetry, my new friends at school, how I’d got some new hay-fever pills and how they weren’t bad at all but that they made me feel drowsy. I could tell Grampa about how much I still missed Bridgford, with its avenues lined with cherry blossom, and even though I was settled in Leeds it would always be my real home. I thought of telling him about kissing Fiona on the cricket pitch and I wondered about asking for tips on cutting my own hair. I thought of all of those things, and then I said, ‘I think there’s a programme on, all about giraffes.’