I WAS A TEENAGE JAM FAN by Janine Booth
On the 25th anniversary of The Jam's first single, 'In The City', and the 20th anniversary of their break-up, Janine Booth reviews two new retrospectives.
'The Jam at the BBC', 3-CD set, Polydor/Universal
'The Complete Jam', DVD video, Polydor/Universal
Rush my money to the record shop
I was thirteen when I heard 'Going Underground'. It blew me away. No-one understood me and then suddenly someone did. The Jam's music took unsettled youngsters, lifted our heads up and made our feet move. Everything fell into place.
Paul Weller was lambasted as a miserable git by music journalists who missed the point. This was not music for fun: it was serious. Music had to mean something, and with The Jam, it did. We were 100% confident that this band was the business, (nearly) all the rest crap.
Hang on, this review is supposed to be about these recordings, not about my teenage fandom. But The Jam's music can not be separated from the people who lapped it up and lived by it. Jam fans: passionate, angry, sharp, positive, not groupies, no time for fashion or banality.
It's the system, smash the system, what's the system ...?
I caught The Jam at the right time: although always anti-authority, Paul Weller did not sort out his politics until about 1980, even - notoriously - saying he would vote Tory in 1979. But there are some cracking, sweat-drenched performances from the first few years here: Away From The Numbers, This Is The Modern World, When You're Young.
Then the decade turns and it gets more political: the rise of the New Right (Funeral Pyre), a world dominated by money (Pretty Green), nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes (Going Underground).
Whether about war or inner-city decay, romance or shopping, Jam songs struggled against tedium and apathy, straining to burst out of society's limitations and punch conformity in the face. They propelled me unstoppably towards being a socialist.
I've got the gift of life
Punk rock faded at the end of the 1970s. The Jam were sort of part of it (the energetic, aggressive part), sort of not (well-dressed, a bit too pop- and soul-ful, suburban rather than inner-city). The Jam endured beyond the rest partly because unlike others, they were positive. They did not just want to smash it to pieces, they wanted to build it up again. They were for music, not against it.
By the start of the 1980s, they were the biggest band in the country. The biggest one that meant anything, at any rate.
The DVD has pretty much every TV appearance the band ever did, the CD collection all their recordings for the BBC. Virtually all the best is on one of the two (of my favourites, only 'Standards' is missing). So there is stuff here that you will not get anywhere else - unless you taped them all at the time and kept them for two decades.
Ideals are fine when you are young
One song, 'Burning Sky', is about young activists growing up. We all swore that we would never be the song's main character, who made peace with the system, moaning that now "work comes first, I'm sure you'll understand".
I wonder about the others who were teenage Jam fans. No doubt some let their youthful rebellion be drowned by the demands of life. I hope that they buy these compilations, if only for nostalgia, and it wakes up the sleeping rebel inside them.
I could go on for ever and I probably will, but I'd sooner put some joy back in this Town Called Malice
Link: PaulWeller.com
