Just saying blog: That’s Entertainment

10 Oct Just saying blog: That’s Entertainment

Accompanying this blog is a photo of myself and some mates sweaty and post-gig from the farewell tour of one of Britain’s finest ever bands, The Jam, in 1982.

We hired a van and cruised down to St Austell for a memorable weekend.

The photo inspired most of us to meet up on Facebook (including the guy actually taking the pic, Steve Mann, my partner-in-crime at an inordinate number of Jam gigs) and follow that physically when we go to see a Jam tribute band (Band Called Malice) at Huntingdon Hall in Worcester on October 11.

Most of the audience, I guess will be people ‘of a certain age’. Hey ho, that’s life – and there’s a unique part-tribute band doing the rounds called From the Jam, which features Jam bassist Bruce Foxton who are a super combo in their own right.

So what? Well, some of these guys, like me, followed The Jam around the country and even overseas. Personally, I clocked up 30-odd gig following the Woking wonders starting in 1977 and culminating in their final eve gig in Brighton (Mod-wise, where else?) in December 1982.

Why? Because I truly can’t think of a better way to have spent my life at the time. The Jam were, above all else, an incredible live band with an enthusiastic following to die for and their music still resonates today.

Paul Weller, the band’s singer-songwriter, then as now, was an arbiter par excellence of his times – the ultimate, indignant, ‘angry young man’, ranging from the opening salvo in the apocryphal In the City (where ‘there’s a thousand things I want to say and do’ – what better spine-tingling entrée to a career) to the outgoing final single, Beat Surrender.

How many of us feel there’s a lot today that ‘makes this boy shout, makes this boy scream’ at the state of modern politics or an inequitable society that sees the likes of ‘kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns’ – and feel like Going Underground.

Or the desperation of lonely metaphorical housewives clutching empty milk bottles to their hearts that is indeed ‘enough to make you stop believing when the tears come fast and furious’ (Town Called Malice), or the ‘smell of brown leather blending in with the weather’ from the game-changing Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, to life being ‘a drink and you get drunk…When You’re Young’ and ‘graffiti about slashed seat affairs’ (That’s Entertainment).

Weller created all these visions and more with an argot, rage and gum chewing style almost every young British band has tried to emulate since – be it The Smiths, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Ordinary Boys, The Streets, Stereophonics, The Enemy, Kaiser Chiefs et al.     

Tomorrow evening I’ll meet up with a great bunch of lads to chew the fat. We’ll doubtless celebrate great memories, have a chinwag about our current lives and recall days when we kipped in cars, on floors, blagged our names onto guest lists, ran the gauntlet of being ‘chased’ by punks and rockers (and others who didn’t get the message).

Growing pains for sure – but classic memories of night we laid our heads to rest with the music ringing in our ears – reflection of a special time when music mattered and a time, dare I say, to stand up and be counted in all kinds of ways.

We all had more hair then (or last some in my case!) and none of us knew how our lives would pan out.

For me, The Jam and all it encompassed, was a blessed relief from a mundane office job which I’m not ashamed to say I spent time bunking off from.

Ultimately it took the demise of The Jam and The Clash, the other band I adored and followed around the country, for me to follow my own star (in journalism rather than music).

The Jam and the guys I’ll be with tomorrow evening are part of the landscape of my life.

In many cases – okay let’s name and shame – Steve Mann, Andy Southall, Duncan Kings, Carl Austin and Sean O’Callaghan in particular – there never was or even will be any need to explain or apologise for anything that happens or failure to keep in touch with anyone else come what may – good, bad, indifferent. It is just how it is.

We shared experiences – and those experiences were shaped by the music, the style, the tone, the rhetoric and, yes, the politics of The Jam.

When it was finally all over in on December 11, 1982, as Duncan Kings and I left Brighton Centre with 3,000 other shell-shocked fans, a group of merry goers danced outside the venue to Buffalo Girls (Go Round the Outside).

It was all over in more ways than one…