When You're Young: The Joy Of Following The Jam

Back when tickets and travel were cheap, it was easy to trek round the country to see your favourite band

The Jam were the only band I supported like a football club. By that, I mean travelling across the country to gigs in a similar manner to away games. Like going the match, you were desperate to be there.

It wasn’t unusual. Quite a few characters from around the country were regulars on the tours. The crossover with football was strong, too. They were a band that seemed to attract matchgoing types.

The first time I saw them was in July 1977 at Mr Digby’s in Birkenhead. By then punk had firmly established itself and although Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler didn’t quite fit into the new genre as comfortably as the Sex Pistols and the Damned, their energy was mindblowing. They were the first new wave band I’d seen and they were astounding. I tried to capture the impact in Good Guys Lost, my novel, when the protagonist, a singer songwriter, has his initial experience of The Jam.

            Then the band came on and everything changed.

They were a three-piece combo in badly fitting suits and

looked young enough to be playing a school fete, Billy thought,

even though he had never been near any such event. Even before

they started, feedback wailed from their amps. Automatically,

he sniggered at their lack of professionalism. He had spent the

past couple of years learning how to avoid making such an

unpleasant noise.

Eventually, with a gruff ‘One-two-three-four,’ they began to

play. Billy was not prepared for what he saw and heard: the

visceral fury, the energy, the rawness of the voices, and the

string-ripping strumming. They made no attempt to be cool, to

project the aura of stardom. For this band, sweat was a prop to

be embraced and celebrated, not something to be wiped away.

The level of commitment astounded him. This was musicmaking

as a physical act, providing the adrenaline-squirting

euphoria of a brawl. Against all his preconceptions, he loved it.

He recognised Slow Down, the Larry Williams standard he

had played and sung a thousand times, but it was like hearing

it for the first time. The performance was intensely brutal, pop

music as a contact sport.

The rear sleeve of This Is The Modern World hints at how exciting the band were live

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time when travel and tickets were cheap, whether for football or pop concerts. The manufacturers of Persil, the washing up powder, did a two-for-one ticket promotion with British Rail. Young scallies up and down the country started taking an interest in the laundry habits of their mothers.

Getting tickets for gigs in other cities was more difficult. Normally, you’d have to send a cheque to a Post Office Box address found in one of the music papers. This was done weeks in advance. Eventually, the tickets would show up in the mail.

The other route was to get to the venues early and often and become familiar with the band. The Jam were very good about letting fans into their soundchecks. Go often enough and they would recognise your face. Weller would frequently ask, “are you sorted to get in?”

Accommodation afterwards could be a problem but even when there was nowhere to stay, you were so full of adrenalin that it had barely worn off by the time the first train arrived. You soon got tied into a network, though, and someone often let you kip on their floor.

My mate Tim became friendly with the band and went almost everywhere (for me, in clashes with the match, football always won). But there were plenty of memorable adventures.

Two open air events stand out in the summer of 1980. The Pink Pop festival in Geleen, the southern Netherlands, was a phenomenal event. The Jam were the headliners on a day that also featured The Specials and Joe Jackson. Van Halen were second on the bill and most of the crowd were there to see them. The denim-clad masses began to drift away during The Jam’s set but not before setting fire to piles of rubbish. A-Bomb In Wardour Street was played out to an apocalyptic background of flames and smoke. The set was blistering. Look it up on YouTube.

The Loch Lomand festival was a few weeks later. The grass in front of the stage was boggy and wet. Stiff Little Fingers were performing, too. When they launched into Alternative Ulster, a huge battle broke out in the crowd. I remember saying to my mate, “Christ, the sectarian Somme.” They were still fighting when The Jam came on.

Wild anarchy was not unusual at gigs. The Two Tone tour featuring The Specials and Madness was insane. Whenever The Jam played Deeside Leisure Centre, Liverpool, Manchester and north Wales came together in a manner that defied any notion of a United Kingdom. But, like with football, you could avoid the trouble if you were careful.

The Jam played the Rainbow in Finsbury Park on the same Easter Monday that Tottenham and Arsenal met at White Hart Lane. A huge mob poured out of the tube station and scattered the lines of mods queuing up to get in. You just took it all in your stride.

Tim became so familiar with the band that they invited him – and, by extension, me – to the Townhouse Studios on Goldhawk Road during the recording of Sound Affects. We watched them record Boy About Town and played pool. Myself and Weller talked politics.

The Jam’s creative powerhouse was undergoing a journey. Some of his early songs – Time For Truth off In The City, for example – suggested that he was a little Englander with right-wing inclinations. He told the New Musical Express early on that he would vote Tory.  He later said it was a joke. Mmmmm.

By the time we sat on the windowsill near the pool table in the Town House, he had moved significantly leftwards and was eager to discuss the fight against racism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the battle against Thatcherism at great length. Having been brought up in Woking, he had emerged from an instinctively conservative (small ‘c’) background. He was very interested to know what it was like to grow up in Liverpool, where – for many of us – radicalism was a birthright.

In that summer of 1980, the band were huge. Going Underground sent them into the pop stratosphere. The venues got bigger and Weller, Foxton and Buckler got more remote. There were less beers in their hotel afterwards and the soundchecks had more security. You could sense Weller was enjoying it less and less. It was hardly a surprise when The Jam broke up in 1982.

The last time I saw them was at Bingley Hall, three days before their final gig. They were good but, to anyone who’d seen them in the early days, it felt a bit flat. But one thing’s for sure, I’ll never follow a band the same way I followed The Jam.

In When You’re Young, Weller wrote,

“You’re fearless and brave, you can’t be stopped when you’re young,

You used to fall in love with everyone,

Any guitar and any bass drum…”

No Paul, not just any guitar. Not just any bass drum. Not by a long stretch. You only fall in love with something special. Like The Jam.