THE JAM SINGLES (6)

There are days when I think this may well be the greatest record of all time….and yet I didn’t include it in my 45 45s at 45 rundown back in 2008.  But I’ll probably come back to that later in the series.

By now I was determined to buy the singles and albums on the day they came out and so it proved with this record that hit the shops on 6 October 1978:-

mp3 : The Jam – Down In The Tube Station At Midnight

A belter of a tune with an incredible lyric which to a 15-year old who hadn’t yet set foot in London was genuinely terrifying.  Not only did I never want to bump into the muggers but please don’t ever let me cross the path of the atheist nutter who sprays ‘Jesus Saves’ onto walls.

Incidentally, when I first visited London, which would have been in 1983 by which time I was at University, I couldn’t wait to take my first trip on the Underground.  This turned out be at King’s Cross as that was the nearest tube station to the ‘bus park’ where the overnight service from Glasgow dropped us off just as rush hour was beginning to take hold.   I was catching a service on the Piccadilly line as this took me onto where my digs were for the next few days (at the home of a professional footballer no less who was also a huge fan of The Jam and had been to see the band with me a few times in the past – some of my close friends will know this person’s identity!!).

I was intrigued at how deep down I had to go to get to the platform and all the way down I was singing this song to myself….and amazed to discover as the escalator dropped me off deep in the bowels of the city that I could indeed make out the distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains.

Thankfully, I never met the atheist nutter, not knowingly at least.

Two new studio songs were on the b-side:-

mp3 : The Jam – So Sad About Us
mp3 : The Jam – The Night

The former was recorded on 13 September 1978 by the band as a tribute to Keith Moon who had died at the age of 32 just six days previously.  It is a cover of a song by The Who which had originally featured on the LP A Quick One back in 1966.  A photo of the late drummer was also put on the back of the Tube Station picture sleeve.  The latter is a Bruce Foxton song which just demonstrates that while the song-writing of Paul Weller was really maturing and developing the bass player was still composing tunes that wouldn’t have been out-of-place with material from the previous twelve months.

Tube Station reached #15 in the charts and would go onto be re-released as a 7″ single by Polydor Records on two more occasions – in 1980 and 1983. The first re-release didn’t reach the Top 75 but the 1983 issue did climb to #30.

Now to the additional recordings….

I’m of the view that the album version which subsequently saw light of day on All Mod Cons a month later is different enough to warrant an airing.  Where the single fades out the album version ends abruptly and the sound of a train departing the platform is aired and then there is a musical refrain of a guitar solo.  This version is even more scary as it made me think that the victim of the mugging was now dead….

mp3 : The Jam – Down In The Tube Station At Midnight (album version)

The next version was offered up as one of the tracks on the bonus 7″ offered up with the initial 100,000 copies of Going Underground from a gig at the Rainbow Theatre in London on 3 November 1979. You can tell that this was very much a crowd favourite by the reaction when it is introduced and then from the singing along going on in the background.  It also featured what would become very familiar over the years in the live setting with a sort of mini-drum solo from Rick Buckler just before ‘the last thing that I saw…….’:-

mp3 : The Jam – Down In The Tube Station At Midnight (live, 1979)

Here’s another live version, taken from a fanclub gig that closed out what had been an unusually quiet 1981 (by the band’s previous high standards) at the Golders Green Hippodrome in London that was specially arranged and recorded by BBC Radio 1 for its In Concert series that was usually broadcast on Saturday evenings.

mp3 : The Jam – Down In The Tube Station At Midnight (live, 1981)

One other wee bonus courtesy of the Direction Creation Reaction box set and it’s a demo of The Who cover as recorded back in February 1977 during the initial sessions for the In The City material

mp3 : The Jam – So Sad About Us (demo version)

Enjoy