by Alan Davies
I couldn’t stop listening to both songs. Turning it over to play the other side was frustratingly slow. I didn’t want a break in the music. Headphones on, cigarette lit, sitting on the windowsill looking out over the Newbys’ garden. I was transported. Hearing it now causes a rush of cold blood, a tingling of emotional memory. The songs came to mean so much that I can’t listen to them any more without becoming teary-eyed. That’s my youth, there, blazing, in spitting vocals and crashing guitar.
‘That’s Entertainment’ had a poetically bleak view that chimed strongly with me. How had I missed The Jam? I hadn’t bought their hit singles, ‘Start’, ‘Eton Rifles’ or ‘Going Underground’. I didn’t have enough money to buy many records and they were impossible to steal since only their sleeves were ever out on display.
Plus, I was loyal. Once I liked a band I stayed with them. The Police’s most recent album, Zenyattà Mondatta, I’d bought on the day it was released, having gone all the way to Upton Park, where there was one of a selected group of shops offering a free poster with the record. That was devotion. The last single they’d released? ‘De Doo Doo Doo De Da Da Da’. It just wasn’t saying anything to me.
My favourite groups were playing songs I couldn’t relate to. Singing along to U2’s ‘Gloria’ or The Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’, Blondie’s ‘The Tide is High’ or The Stranglers’ ‘Just Like Nothing on Earth’ felt meaningless. Even though I liked all those records, now I’d come across this apparent chronicler of my life called Paul Weller, they were rendered pointless. As for the Men in Black, what was that even about?
‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ tells the story of a mugging by a gang of right-wing thugs, as told by the victim, a commuter on his way home to his wife. A few years previously a newspaper had run pictures of a mugging of a commuter on a station platform. When my dad came home from work he was surprised to be greeted by me with greater affection than normal. He asked me what was wrong and I said I’d been worried that he would be mugged on the way home. To me that mugging looked lethal in the papers and it triggered a huge amount of anxiety, obviously, in hindsight, related to losing my mum and the thought of losing the remaining parent. He assured me he wasn’t going to be mugged, which seemed grotesquely naïve of him. Had he not seen the newspaper? The world was a dangerous place. I dried my eyes bravely.
I scoured Vinyl Scrapyard for Jam recordings. It turned out that ‘Eton Rifles’ was about a posh public school and the pupils’ privileged, well-connected lives.
I went to a posh public school!
I wanted to burn it down!
I travelled on the tube!
I grafittied buses!
I was angry too!
I actually went to Mr Byrite to buy clothes because Weller had said they were all right and he didn’t want his young fans wasting a lot of money on fancy clobber.
I even smoked Rothman’s cigarettes (which were rank) because a packet was featured on the inner sleeve of the All Mod Cons LP.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t working class. We didn’t go on holiday to Selsey Bill or Bracklesham Bay like ‘Saturday’s Kids’ but my dad did commute, even though his name wasn’t double-barrelled like ‘Smithers-Jones’. We were all certainly going through a ‘Private Hell’ even as we bickered our way around America on the holiday of a lifetime.
There was enough for me to relate to in every other verse of every song. By now I was having the NME delivered instead of Record Mirror and voted for Weller and co in their annual awards. They cleaned up. Every year. Best group, album, single, live act, everything, and Paul Weller was always ‘Man of the Year’.
It didn’t matter too much to me that they only released two singles in 1981, or that Weller wanted to break the cycle of album and tour every year, because I had a whole back catalogue to get through.
On top of all this, they supported CND too. Now a mass movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was staging huge marches and demonstrations. The night before one such demo, there was a CND benefit at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. I went with Nige and a punky-looking girl who I’d persuaded to go out with me (as usual for two weeks only).
On our way in the girl at the box office said:
‘The Jam are here tonight.’
We took that with a pinch of salt but, halfway through the gig, The Jam were introduced. Everyone rushed down to the front, shocked and electrified.
They played three songs, including ‘Going Underground’, Weller’s anthem of anti-nuclear protest. It’s a good one to shout along to if you’re a disaffected youth:
You talk and you talk until my head explodes
I turned on the news and my body froze
These braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy SHOUT make this boy SCREAM
I’M GOING UNDERGROUND!
They’d turned up because they wanted to play for CND supporters, not just Jam fans. The next day they played on the back of a flatbed truck on the Embankment as thousands of CND protestors marched by on their way to a huge rally. A crowd of several hundred gathered just to watch The Jam, including scores of parka-clad Mod revivalists who had been inspired by the release of Quadrophenia, and who embraced the Two-Tone label’s sound of skainfluenced groups like The Specials and The Beat.
Despite their impeccable taste in music, not all of these Mods were CND supporters. The Mods used RAF roundels and Union Flags to adorn their parkas. These suddenly seemed less decorative and more nationalistic when sported by an anti-CND mob.
Weller spoke to the crowd: ‘Let’s not forget what we’re all here for…’ he began, and continued to speak about the cause of ending an arms race that threatened world’s end. At least I presume he did. I couldn’t hear. The Mods jeered, drowning him out with: ‘Mods, mods, mods, mods, mods!’
The crowd behind the mods was larger and vociferously pro-CND but the dissenters were between the rest and Weller. He looked unhappy and, when they’d finished playing, disappeared from view. Rick Buckler, the drummer, came to the front and affably signed his name on a flyer I had, that read: ‘Together we can Stop the Bomb’.
My memory tells me I saw The Jam play live on six occasions but it won’t tell me where or when three of those gigs took place. I do remember the last one, at Wembley Arena, as part of The Jam’s farewell tour. No sooner had I discovered them than Weller had decided to split them up. Jam fans were in mourning. He was adamant that this was it. No more.
Quite a crowd of kids from school wanted to go. We went up by tube. Outside the arena, one of our number bought six programmes for other friends from what turned out to be an unofficial opportunist. He then had to buy six more real programmes inside.
Big Country were the support act. Tough gig. The crowd didn’t want to know and some cheered when they announced it was their last number, chanting: ‘Jam, Jam, Jam, Jam!’
After what seemed an age they appeared and the roar was deafening. As soon as Weller came up to the microphone and said: ‘This one’s called “Start“’, there was bedlam.
It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will
always remain
Running from our seats, high up at the side, we couldn’t find a way down to the floor where there was out-and-out mania. We had to stop at a barrier which, by the end of the night, we had pulled from its mountings.
knowing that someone in this world,
feels as desperate as me,
and what you give is what you get!
Everyone there knew every word to every song and sang all of them. It was raucous, emotional and unforgettable. They were absolutely the best live band, bar none, with a repertoire penned in a short few years by a young kid who was still only twenty-four when he broke them up. At Camden Market, a few weeks after the gig, I found a bootleg, now long lost, of the very night I was there at Wembley Arena. I thought it would be the best way to preserve the feeling but I still remember it to this day. I have never felt anything like it
since.
In 1983 Weller formed The Style Council and maintained his passionate support for many causes, including CND. I carried on buying their records and saw them in concert but they wore odd clothes that were not very Mr Byrite, and their pretentious sleeve notes took them away from me a little. There were already enough posers around, many vacuous bands I couldn’t stand. For some reason, preening and posturing always seemed, to me, as low as a boy could go. Perhaps because I had no confidence in clothes and no money to buy any. Some of my friends, who’d been Mods one week, now announced themselves as New Romantics and raved about a Duran Duran gig.
I couldn’t see the point, now I’d found a band who had a grasp and understanding of the reality of life for an audience they inspired, in listening to empty nonsense like Duran Duran. Classmates became fans of Haircut 100 and sang along to their ‘Love Plus One’ in the sixth-form common room.
‘What does it even mean?’ I said.
‘Why does it have to mean anything?’ said someone, scowling at me.
It just seemed so much better if it did. There were important issues in the world, causes to align with, but it seemed, if you didn’t listen to Paul Weller or read the NME or go on a march, it was possible to miss them.
Violet Spalding
I had been a pathological joiner for years, following up membership of the Barry Sheene Appreciation Society, the Starsky & Hutch Fan Club and the Arsenal Supporters Club with a letter to U2’s offices. I received an autographed promotional ‘Post Card From The Edge’ (and Bono Vox, and Larry Mullen, and the other one whose name I had to look up, Adam Clayton). The photo was from the October album cover with four scrawled signatures on it, in differentcoloured inks. It went on my wall and the signatures faded but memories surface on the rare occasion I hear ‘I Will Follow’, ‘Fire’ or ‘Gloria’.
U2’s was the last fan club I wrote to. There were new organizations on the teenage NME reader’s radar that placed issues above idols and passion above prettiness.
The most obvious organization to join was CND. It was clearly imperative that we should not have American missile bases on our island and that the independent nuclear deterrent was chronically expensive at a time of rising unemployment and social unrest. At least this was imperative to me, having read it in CND literature. It was hard to find such sentiments in any newspaper. All the papers I knew of, bar the Daily Mirror, were supporters of Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. None of them favoured unilateral disarmament and weren’t likely to as it was never a policy that was going to shift any copies.
Despite the inspiring mass demonstrations, where crowds of 250,000 people were estimated to have attended (by the organizers, 60,000 by the police), it was clear that CND’s membership represented a tiny fraction of the population.
The significance of the split from the Labour Party of four senior former ministers to form the Social Democratic Party, or SDP, was lost on me but I picked up that Labour was in disarray and that arguments about unilateral nuclear disarmament were one cause of the rift.
Joining CND was a doorway to many other groups. Leaflets would arrive in the post with the assumption that, if you like this cause, then all these others will stir your interest too.
They did stir my interest, and my love of joining clubs. I began filling in forms and preparing stamped SAEs.
Public disturbances began to dominate the news, when the spotlight wasn’t being either actively sought by the new SDP or directed brightly on to Lady Diana Spencer and her marriage to Prince Charles.
There were days of riots in Brixton and Toxteth which could be watched on television. Everyone became familiar with camera shots, taken from behind police lines, of people hurling bricks and petrol bombs at the constabulary, cowering in tunics, behind shields, while burning buildings collapsed and cars became flaming barricades.
The rioters were roundly condemned on all sides and the courage of the police commended. The causes of the riots were a mystery out in our part of suburbia, where the consensus was that hooligans were rioting and torching because they were bad people, while the police were valiantly containing and quelling the riot because they were good people.
There would never be a riot in our street. It was impossible to imagine one. Equally hard to imagine was the local force coming up our road using the ‘SUS’ stop and search powers they had been abusing in Brixton.
I knew about the SUS powers because I had joined the Anti-Nazi League. My membership card was on the wall next to my U2 postcard and just beneath my picture of Farrah Fawcett kneeling on a beach.
Though I was still reading Shoot! and Roy of the Rovers every week, I was less inclined to tear out pictures from them. I was developing a new personality and the bedroom wall was still the best place to post evidence of my attitudes and idolatry. At any rally there were satirical postcards to buy and flyers to read. These would find their way on to the wall as soon as I returned, particularly if they’d been signed by Rick Buckler from The Jam.
Soon included was Anti-Apartheid Movement material as I added membership of that organization to my list. Anti-Apartheid News joined the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight as required reading. I volunteered to help in the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s offices and spent the day stuffing envelopes without really talking to anyone. It was a hive of activity with phones ringing, stuff on the walls, and people going in and out. They always needed volunteers to help and I wasn’t the only one that day. No one asked questions or treated you with suspicion. They just found you a chair and asked you to fill envelopes with letters and leaflets. You could stay for as long or short a time as you wanted. It was up to you. It was voluntary. I stayed all day.
I don’t know why I didn’t go back. I was only fifteen and didn’t understand much of the conversation around me. It was intimidating and serious, befitting the struggle to liberate millions of oppressed people, whose lives were blighted by the ruling elite’s assertion that an acceptance of sub-human status was a wise alternative to resistance. Complaining about a teacher throwing a board rubber seemed less important. It was there I first heard the name Nelson Mandela.
The AAM was necessarily dealing with issues that were far from home. Searchlight chronicled brutality and terror happening only a few miles from the super-comfort of a detached house in the suburbs. The struggle against racism was immediately relevant. We were all racists and I knew from experience that it could take a while to even recognize it in yourself.
Two years after colluding in the baiting of the proprietor at The Paki Shop, I was a card-carrying anti-racist, opposing the National Front (whose insignia was graffitied all around Loughton) and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
These organizations were a gift to a teenager. Ready-made principles to adopt that were in direct opposition to the stifling, entrenched values at school and at home. Perfect. Unfortunately, the ANL and the AAM didn’t have particularly good posters for my wall. There were some wonderful spoof movie posters from the anti-nuclear movement, including a memorable version of Gone with the Wind with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Gone with the Wind was my mum’s favourite book. I knew this because her copy of it lay on her bedside table years after she’d gone. I’ve never read it and didn’t really wonder what she would have thought of this poster, where the wind in question was a nuclear blast taking the world to kingdom come.
Another big seller was a print of an old B-movie poster with Reagan as an army officer in the thick of battle. This idea, of the American president characterized as regarding military conflict a little as he might regard a war movie, surfaced again over twenty years later when George W. Bush led America into the Iraq war with the apparent consideration of a B-movie film director shouting ‘action’.
All of the organizations I joined had large and active memberships. They organized demonstrations, concerts and festivals attended by huge numbers, all staged with the compliance of the Labour-controlled Greater London Council under Ken Livingston
e (who installed a scoreboard, on top of City Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament, displaying the unemployment rate accelerating upwards).
Other organizations had nothing like the resources, the volunteers, the metropolitan HQ or the funding to organize events, with their myriad costs. Other than the occasional publicity stunt, the only way these organizations could spread their message was to distribute eye-catching, affecting literature. There was nothing more diverting, among the stalls and leafleters at a big demo, than the words ‘Chickens’ Lib’.
The first time I saw it I thought it was a joke. ‘Women’s Lib’ was an outmoded, populist term, long since replaced by the serious-sounding ‘Feminism’. Perhaps someone had taken this old label and hijacked it for fun.
On the contrary, Chickens’ Lib were real. Operating from a house in Skelmanthorpe, they distributed thousands of leaflets nationwide in a campaign against the battery farming of chickens. A thankless task in a nation of egg-beating carnivores who considered an animal well-done to be of greater interest than animal welfare
The squalor of the battery farms was unpublicized in the late ’70s and early ’80s other than by the founder of Chickens’ Lib, Violet Spalding, who, with her daughter, Clare Druce, began a campaign that was to last for three decades.
The leaflets were simple. A black-and-white photograph of a scrawny chicken, barely able to stand, with CHICKENS’ LIB above it. Making space on my bedroom wall by removing people I’d grown apart from (Debbie Harry, Victoria Principal and Farah Fawcett survived the cull), I signalled my allegiance to this dishevelled bird and the millions like her, living in pain and desperation up and down the country.