Rick Buckler drummer with The Jam. RIP
It was a shame he left the Jam to focus on his non alcoholic lager
Weller breaking up the band was the bitterest pill.
Did you have a parka @balbec ?
And a Harrington jacket
You must have been the pride of Kilmallock
All the cycling club were mods. A few years earlier they had those teddy boy jackets like Showaddywaddy.
Couldnât afford Vespas?
I interviewed Buckler (over the phone) about 20 years ago. Seemed a nice fella.
The Jam were a truly phenomenal band who to my shame Iâve only properly got into lately. Properly got into lately as in only since Christmas. The last month and particularly the last week Iâve been constantly listening to The Jam. I donât know why it took so long, maybe sometimes you have blind spots towards something you instinctively love, maybe it was that I donât remember them because I was 3 when they split up, maybe it was that I thought some of Paul Wellerâs solo output was fairly dull, maybe it was because I was too preoccupied with other music, maybe it was because I thought of the years The Jam were active, 1977 to 1982, in a negative light, partly because I was born during this period, partly because these years seemed the epitome of bleakness.
Even though I was aware of songs like Going Underground, Thatâs Entertainment and A Town Called Malice from a reasonably early age and always respected them, I didnât really dig much deeper. Until recently, when I started to pick up the bass again after a long absence, and was scratching around for new bass lines to learn. I instinctively knew The Jamâs bass player Bruce Foxton had been good. Very good. So I started listening to The Jam, and listening to his basslines. They were not only fun to listen to, but fun to learn, fun to play, and the more I listened and played, the more the overall greatness of The Jam began to hit me with the force of a train. The music. The lyrics. The anger. The fun. The intelligence. The loudness. The musicianship. The style. The sense of The Jam being a movement, a true band of the people. The frontmanship of Paul Weller. How had I not let this band into my head 25 or 30 years ago?
British society badly needs a modern equivalent of a band like The Jam right now. Especially young British manhood. They need something intelligent that represents them that they can get behind. They need a creative force to rally behind, not a destructive force.
The great football journalist Tim Vickery (born 1965), who is also an encyclopedia on music, once said something that stuck with me about the music scene when he was growing up in the new town of Hemel Hempsted near London, that every depressing suburban working class place like that had its own bands, that they were almost like local youth defence battallions, channelling young male energy into (largely) all the right places. The Jam were from Woking and were the definition of this. Vickery is a one man machine of being right about everything, from football to music to politics to life. He frequently mentions The Jam on the brilliant The Brazilian Shirt Name Podcast, which also regularly featured Paddy Barclay (RIP). For Vickery, The Jam were HIS band. In the back of my mind that was one of the reasons why I remained open to letting The Jam into my head.
That culture Vickery talks about died out a long time ago. The Jam were the definition of the working class intelligence and solidarity Rupert Murdoch sought to kill off. Utterly manly and an utter rejection of what 2020s toxic masculinity preaches. Most of all The Jam, like their contemporaries The Undertones, were about being young, but they described youth in words and music worthy of poets way beyond their years.
I did a jam session with my old mates the weekend just gone. I asked myself why couldnât I play like Bruce Foxton. Why out guitarist couldnât play guitar and sing like Paul Weller. Why our drummer couldnât drum like Rick Buckler. I stayed over in the house we jammed in. When I was going home the next morning I had to go into town. Even with not one but now two gammy eyes and being in my mid 40s and pretty much bald at this stage, or at least missing enough hair in important places that means going bald is the only viable option, I imagined as I listened to Strange Town and When Youâre Young, walking through the centre of Dublin, that I was a 20 year old Paul Weller, with a floppy fringe hidden under my beanie cap, dressed like a mod, and that I could and would write very loud and angry but fun songs about Dublin like he wrote about London and about life, with a razor sharp moral compass and understanding of whatâs good and whatâs shit, and an understanding of who are good people and who are bastards to be unapologetically vilified. Though I do conveniently forget Wellerâs brief Tory turn around 1978 before he effectively became a communist. I felt young again for a short while.
The last two days I asked myself why I had never seen Paul Weller play live. I looked for a list of future Paul Weller gigs. No shows currently planned. I thought, âah shit, heâs going to die soon isnât he?â
I looked back over his gigography and saw he played in Dublin and Ireland a lot in recent years. He played in Leisureland in Galway 2022. I couldnât have gone to that because it was 10 days after I had major eye surgery. But I could have gone to see him last summer, and yet it never even occurred to me to go.
I looked back over The Jamâs gigography. They played only twice in Ireland. Once in the Top Hat club in Dun Laoighaire and the other in Leisureland in Galway the following night, a Saturday night, October 21st, 1978. I went looking for the Top Hat club, where is this place? It was on Longford Place, near Monkstown village. It was demolished years ago. Leisureland is the only remaining existing venue where The Jam played in Ireland. I imagined being at that gig and I imagined the mayhem that must have occurred at it, having already read about the mayhem that occurred at the Dun Laoighaire gig.
The Jam split up at the end of 1982. Paul Weller decided the band had run its course. He was 24. Foxton and Buckler were devastated. Wouldnât you be? They never got back together. That froze them in time as being young forever. In one sense itâs part of the reason why their music remains so potent â because thereâs a mystique to accompany the musical greatness - but itâs also part of the reason they remain curiously forgotten when people think of great bands, when in reality they were close to the very best. If a music anorak like me forgot them for so long?
Thats a great piece of writing Sid.
Fantastic post, stirs a lot of memories
You should submit that to a newspaper for publishing.
I bought a parka and my first day wearing it to school I was suspended for kicking a basketball.
We all knew the real story. My parents said nothing.
+1
Been said here plenty before.
@Cheasty, would you ever put together a few pieces and fire them into a Galway newspaper or hot press or something?
I once played a slowed down version of strange town and passed it off as my own to impress a young one who had just moved to cork to start college back around 1994, I changed Oxford to Patrick Strreet 
His Grace Willie Walsh. An absolute gent.
Aged 90. RIP
Give me a top ten starter playlist. I only know thatâs entertainment, malice and eton rifles.