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Patron
Alan Davies
To Rosie
And in memory of Helena Stone (1938–2020)
Contents
Chapter One: Ain’t that a kick in the head
Chapter Two: But you’d better listen man, because the kids know where it’s at
Chapter Four: True Inseparables
Chapter Five: Reality’s so hard
Chapter Six: You can smell the fear and hate, generated by all around
Chapter Seven: Truly out on the floor
Chapter Eight: Say you’ll stay make my day
Chapter Nine: Please welcome the best fucking band in the world
Chapter Ten: Didn’t we have a nice time
Chapter Eleven: The teachers who said I’d be nothing
Chapter Twelve: It’s blown up the West End, now it’s spreading through the City
Chapter Thirteen: They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs
Chapter Fourteen: And if I get the chance I’ll fuck up your life, Mr Clean
Chapter Fifteen: Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young
Chapter Sixteen: What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?
Chapter Seventeen: The public gets what the public wants
Chapter Nineteen: Here comes the weekend, I’m gonna do my head
Chapter Twenty: I’m going to put it in the fruit machine
Chapter Twenty-One: We’ll always have Paris
Chapter Twenty-Two: Lift up your lonely heart and walk right on through
Chapter Twenty-Three: A Whole Street’s belief in Sunday’s Roast Beef
Foreword
I first heard The Jam when I was fourteen. It was on John Peel’s late night show on Radio One. On this particular evening, he was playing slightly more esoteric stuff than normal. There may have been something vaguely Nordic and shouty, it’s hard to recall but I was thinking of turning it off. And then he announced, in those flat, Scouse tones of his, ‘This next tune is “In The City” by The Jam.’ Paul Weller’s impatient, angry guitar started up, Bruce Foxton came in behind with the bass and Rick Buckler kicked in with the drums. I felt like I’d been smacked in the head. That energy, that power, that noise. Nothing has ever come close.
From that moment on, I bought every record they ever released and every magazine with their picture on the front cover. I had Jam badges on my jacket, Jam posters on my wall. I played their singles and albums constantly. I knew every word, every hook, every beat. When I finally persuaded my mother to let me go, I criss-crossed the country to see them live thirty-two times and watched as they grew into one of the biggest bands in Britain.
They wrote some of the best tunes I’ve ever heard. The look was cool as fuck, the attitude was defiant and angry. They played fast and loud and they were not much older than I was. The lyrics were beautiful and honest. They talked about youth and young ideas and they seemed to be about and for me. It was a turbulent and divisive time to grow up in Britain and Paul made sense of it all. Through The Jam, I started to see more clearly what was actually going on.
Five years later, when I was nineteen and ostensibly a grown-up, Paul Weller announced that the band were splitting up. I was devastated. I’m just about over it now. This book is my story of that time. Those five years from 1977 to 1982 when three young lads from Woking stretched my (and thousands of others,) hitherto limited horizons way beyond anything I’d previously imagined. When I was, when we all were, in the presence of, as John Weller correctly put it, ‘the best fucking band in the world’.
Chapter One
Ain’t that a kick in the head
It’s late 1979. I’m sixteen years old and I’m on the top deck of a 253 crawling along Green Lanes on the way to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park in North London. I love this venue. I’ve seen The Jam here more than once. But tonight, I’m going to see Sham 69, a punk, pub rock band who’ve somehow captured the imagination of a certain sort of disaffected male youth. Namely white, violent and often racist. And also, for reasons I could not articulate at the time, me. This doesn’t concern me as much as it perhaps should.
The truth is I don’t even like Sham 69 that much. Jeremy Goldman, a friend from the year below me at school, had managed to get a couple of tickets and asked me if I wanted to come along. Aside from listening to my parents shout at each other, which I can hear any evening of the week, I’ve got nothing else on so I say yes.
I’ve just left Pete Bernstein’s house in Clapton. I’ve been there most of the afternoon. It’s a school day but we had Maths and double Religious Education, presumably because the school considered made-up stories from two thousand years ago twice as important as Maths, so we made an executive decision to bunk off and