ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #038

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

#038– The Jam– ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’ (Polydor Records ’78)

Hello friends,

in the long run The Jam certainly were one of the most notable bands of all time. If you just consider the five years from ‘In The City’ to ‘The Gift’, there aren’t that many competitors who managed to keep up with such a level of constant brilliance. This makes it rather hard to pick just one single out of the big lot that the band had released within this period. So at the end of the day, basically it could have been any other one, but I went for their eighth 7”, ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’, taken from their third album, from 1978.

Why this one? Well, just like The Clash, The Jam have always been a “lyrics band” for me. I well remember that once I finally had access to internet (when would that have been? 1995 or thereabouts?) I more or less immediately tried to get hold of free porn Jam lyrics, and when being successful, it was always a revelation for me, nearly for each and every tune of theirs. But I think finally being able to understand the full lyrics of ‘Tube Station’ stood out by quite some distance.

Of course I had already realized that Weller is not exactly singing about love, peace and harmony, no, the message seemed to be quite the opposite, in fact. But only after having access to the ‘missing parts’ – the bits I simply couldn’t translate, regardless how often I would play the record – the circle closed, and I loved the tune even more than I already had done before – a masterpiece, I thought: not only lyrically, but musically as well, obviously.

The funny thing is: Weller wasn’t at all fond of the song, so I learnt very much later. He even didn’t want to have it on the album. Apparently the producer, Vic Coppersmith-Heaven convinced him in the end: “I was insistent on him reviving it, and once the band got involved and we developed the sound it turned into an absolutely brilliant track, a classic. Maybe we would have come around to recording it later on in the project, but he’d just reached that point of ‘Oh bollocks, this isn’t working, it’s a load of crap.’”

In hindsight, it seems rather ludicrous that Paul Weller thought so bad about this song. But it is easily forgotten that Weller was only 20 years old in 1978. Me, I could barely write my bloody name when I was 20, let alone write three essential albums full of clever lyrics – which often tried to give the listener an understanding of the fucked up state of Britain’s politics, economy and society.

But the BBC, in their wisdom – instead of putting the single on heavy rotation in order to spread the word – subsequently banned it: in a time when racism was commonly accepted in British society, the song’s powerful message was not acceptable to play on the radio for the station apparently. To quote Tony Blackburn, BBC Top DJ at the time: “It’s disgusting the way punks sing about violence. Why can’t they sing about trees and flowers?”

These days a down-right ridiculous attitude of course, but as it seems at least a handful of young Britons were ahead of their time, because ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’ became The Jam’s second Top 20 hit:

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

And finally, for fact-fans: the cover photo was shot on Bond Street tube station on the Central Line whereas the sound of an Underground train at the beginning of the song was recorded at St. John’s Wood Station.

Enjoy,

Dirk