I liked him enormously.
With the eight pounds I was earning from a Saturday morning job stacking shelves in the local Co-op, and fired up by Steve Jones’s sweary appearance on telly, I’d go into Our Price Records in Camden and hoover up music by all sorts of bands that John Peel introduced me to. Some of the songs he played were a bit out there but every so often you’d hear a gem and think, ‘I MUST get that’. He played ‘New Rose’ by The Damned. I loved the ‘huh’ shout at the beginning. He played The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Stranglers. He played X-Ray Spex. DLT was not playing X-Ray Spex. Basically, I was into anyone who sounded as pissed off as I felt. And none of it was nice.
When I first heard The Jam on his show, I vividly remember thinking 1) This is the band that my friend Simon has been talking about and 2) I had to go and see them. I suggested this to my mother. She was having none of it.
‘You’re too young. It’s dangerous in town in the evening.’
‘How do you know? You never go into town.’
It was ridiculous. I was travelling up and down the country watching Arsenal away games. That was actually dangerous. I’d once been chased down a dual carriageway in Stoke, and come very close to being killed on a number of other occasions. But whereas my mother deemed this acceptable, possibly because she didn’t know how bad it actually was, she put her foot down when it came to going to The Marquee in the centre of London to see The Jam. I think it was purely because it was in the evening. I was livid. I don’t think I said more than two words to her for about six months. I was a very teenagey teenager.
My mother was reading snippets about the new punk scene. It was all a bit hysterical. So was she. I tried to tell her that The Jam were mods, not punks, but it fell on deaf ears. She wasn’t interested in the fact that the press, in an effort to pigeonhole them, lumped The Jam in with the punk movement. It was all the same to her. I could see that Paul Weller was not a punk and he was never nihilistic in the way The Sex Pistols said they were. ‘Get pissed, destroy!’ was not a lyric that Paul would ever have written. The things that Paul sang about were much more relatable. More authentic. There was none of the Kings Road art school poser type thing with him. He was the real deal.
Paul got The Jam to wear suits. Unless he was appearing in court, one couldn’t imagine Johnny Rotten in a suit. The clothes were a big part of it. The look was as important to Paul as the music. This meant a lot to working-class kids like me. I used to see the punks with their ripped clothes and their safety pins and while I liked the ‘fuck off’ nature of that look, I could never do that myself. It might be fine for middle class kids who wanted to dress down, to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the establishment of which they would one day become a respected part, but it was different for us. We tried to dress up, not down.
There was no doubt that Paul’s voice was rough around the edges and he definitely shouted a bit too much on the first album. As my dad said, ‘He’s no Matt Monro’. I couldn’t disagree. He wouldn’t be singing a James Bond theme anytime soon. But I didn’t want Matt Monro and nor did any of the fans I talked to. Paul might be shouting a bit but it was what he was shouting about that got us going. It was angry, it was focused. It crystallised exactly what we all felt.
The first chords of ‘In The City’ thrill me every time I hear them. And when Paul said that he’s got a thousand things to say to us, I believed that he did. It took me a few listens to realise that the song was about police brutality, a theme that Paul would return to on more than one occasion. I was aware that it happened. Even the tabloid rags my father read occasionally had stories about young men dying in police custody. My mother thought that a song about police brutality was also not nice. She was right, but I tended to think that actual police brutality was worse. She didn’t appreciate it when I pointed that out.
I knew that the relationship between the police and the general public was at a low point. There was very little respect on either side. There were deaths in custody. There was stop and search and arrest without trial and internment in Northern Ireland. The Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose and the police seemed to be unable to find him. There were also rumours of the police regularly making up evidence to convict people for things they hadn’t done. These rumours turned out to be true.
The public probably didn’t help. Quite a large minority regularly called them filth or pigs or suchlike. I briefly had a poster on my wall of a pig wearing a police helmet. My mother hated it and asked me to take it down.
‘Who’s going to see it?’ I asked her.
‘I will when I go in your room.’
‘Well, don’t go in my room.’
‘What if a policeman comes round?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. When’s a policeman ever going to come round here?’*1
Aside from the energy of the song, what got me more than anything were the references to youth and young ideas. This felt like music and lyrics written specifically for us. For me. This was what I’d been looking for. The fact that up to that point, I didn’t know I was looking for it was neither here nor there. Paul Weller knew, and I was an instant disciple. When he said that the kids know where it’s at, it was the most empowering thing I’d ever heard.
‘Yes’, I thought to myself, ‘the kids do know where it’s at.’ Not me though, or anyone I knew; I didn’t have a clue what it was let alone where to find it. But I figured Paul Weller knew what was what. That was enough for me. I was hooked.
*1 Little did I know what my dad was planning.
Things We Didn’t Have in the 1970s
Part Two
Much in the Way of Entertainment
I realise things are relative. When my parents were growing up, there was almost no entertainment at all. People would have had to ‘make their own entertainment’. What that consisted of I have no earthly idea, but no one looked particularly entertained. By the 1970s, things were marginally better but the paucity of decent things to watch on TV or listen to on the radio was still bordering on criminal. For kids, the most wholesome show was Blue Peter. I recently watched a clip from the early 1970s and it featured a woman wearing a football kit (including boots) whistle a song. She was a very good whistler. Why she was wearing football kit was never mentioned. Later in the decade, the most popular kids’ show on BBC TV was presented by a paedophile who made children’s, and no doubt his own, wishes come true. All three TV channels stopped broadcasting around midnight. Most evenings, it was a relief.
We had board games, although the idea of my mother and father playing Cluedo (a popular Whodunnit game) does not bear thinking about. I think even the thought of murdering someone with a lead piping in the kitchen might have given my mum too many ideas. Sometimes we went out. Living in London, there were choices. There was theatre and opera and ballet and probably modern dance if you looked hard enough but we never went to any of them. We went to the cinema once or twice but as my parents couldn’t go five minutes without screaming abuse at one another, we’d barely get through the trailers.
Chapter Three
David Watts
I attended JFS (the Jewish Free School), a co-educational comprehensive secondary school with 1,500 kids in Camden, North London. My parents wanted me to go to a Jewish school, so it came down to a choice between that or the much more religious Hasmonean High School in Hendon. Our family had recently moved into a housing association flat in West Hendon, a non-descript area off the Edgware Road. (Two thousand years before-hand, the Roman army would’ve marched almost past my house). My mother had very sensibly turned down the chance of living in a slightly