McMinn & Cheese

It wrecks you

March 7th, 2023

I didn’t formalise it as a New Year’s Resolution, but I was kind of disappointed in myself at the end of 2022, when I realised how little music I’d listened to. It’s not as if I wasn’t listening to audio content, but my obsessive consumption of podcasts had taken over at the expense of my first love, music.

So I’ve been dedicating some time to listening more this year, but I also want to get away from wallowing too much in nostalgia. I used to listen to a lot of new music, and that is what has been really missing from my life.

So on nights like this, I sometimes turn the TV off early, and go into the Music app on my TV and fire up some songs, just like somebody on the internet.

But here’s the thing about that. It’s making me feel lonely. No matter which way you come at it, music is something you impulsively want to share. Playing the remixed Too-Rye-Ay by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, I was infused with a feeling of times long gone, people I used to hang out with forty years ago. Nostalgia, yes, but also an acknowledgement that, introverted as I am, I did use to go out sometimes, drinking in pubs, hanging out in people’s houses. Nights as vivid to me now, thanks to working on The Obald, as anything that happened more recently.

I envy my OH and her friendship group back home, which is still fully intact. My younger daughter and I marvel at her ability to talk for hours on end with people she has known fifty years, and yet this is something she gets to do.

My problem with music is more acute. Music has always been such a huge part of my identity, and I am so very fussy about it, and that fussiness has left me dying on this hill with nobody else around. Because it’s not just the nostalgia that leaves me feeling lonely.

The other night, I listened to the new Dierks Bentley album, Gravel and Gold. Which is great. He has a distinctive (gravelly, yes!) voice and his records are beautifully recorded with the usual top-drawer Nashville musicians, and the songs are great (gold, yes!), a real cut above the dross that’s out there, in the current country landscape of trucks and beer and baseball caps. It’s so good, and yet I know nobody who would take the time to listen to it or even, probably, recognise the artist’s name. The lonely feeling is compounded by the sense that your (meaning my) online presence is largely pointless, with very few people even seeing your tweets, let alone “engaging” with them, and a few people on Mastodon sometimes acknowledging that you exist, but not many and not consistently.

So, yeah, I could post a link to a YouTube video or audio, but nobody’s hitting Play, so it compounds the loneliness really, enhances it. Tumbleweed.

Why is this bothering me so much now? You can’t help noting the turning of the calendar pages, and I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with aspects of my life, the working life, and I’ve been ill since December. But you can turn 60, and at the same time still inside you is the 17 year old on his knees in front of the record player with a mix tape and a mission.

This is what has changed. The streaming. As Rick Rubin says in his interview with Dan Carlin, there’s a conveyor belt of stuff and it goes by so fast that your relationship with what you once loved has changed.

So I find myself listening to Quietly Blowing It by Hiss Golden Messenger and thinking how fucking tragic it is that there is nobody with whom I can share the beautiful music. And then it has gone.

It’s a big wash, said my friend Roy back in the mists of time, and we had no idea, back then, of just how much of a wash it would turn out to be. The stream of media coming at you all the time, including this, including that, all my stuff, all your stuff. Everything you do is part of the problem, but what are the options? Where is the exit?

So here’s how that’s going. Maybe my 2022 self, who didn’t listen to much music, knew where it would lead. Knew that playing “Come on Eileen” (in any version) would put me back in that room with Kim Moles at the 1982 office Christmas party looking out of the window at the lights of the town and yearning.

This is what music does, it wrecks you.
I’ve been watching

March 5th, 2023

Something old, something new…

The new (and final) season of Endeavour prompted a brief subscription to ITVX so I can watch without suffering the torture of ad breaks, which are not only frequent and repetitive, but cause buffering in the stream. BUFFERING IN THE STREAM, I tell you.

So I watched some old Morse, back to the beginning in the 4:3 standard def late 1980s. So weird! Television has come a long way. John Thaw’s portrayal of the character is all grumpy bluster, a mere sketch compared to Shaun Evans as Endeavour. And the framing of 4:3 feels claustrophobic, an effect doubled and redoubled by directorial choices: scenes shot from behind a screen or barrier, through a window, doorway, and so on. On top of this, a lot of the editing feels abrupt, almost arbitrary, with scenes finishing before they quite seem done.

And what is most notable in those early Morse episodes, of course, was his terrible habit of being fatally involved with a woman who turns out to be a suspect. I feel that the eyeroll emoji was invented to facilitate reactions to this.

What else is on? There’s Liaison ( TV+), which is British-French co-production thing about terror(yawn)ists and hack(yawn)ers and a compromised intelligence agent keeping sec(yawn)rets from her Significant Other and some rogue French agent running around duffing people up. I’ve no idea what’s happening.

Then there’s Shrinking ( TV+), with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, with Vanessa Williams and Luke Tennie. It wants to be the new Ted Lasso, and it has its moments, but really its just property porn. It’s interesting seeing Harrison Ford doing a bit of light comedy, and I’m watching it, but it’s not very memorable.

Meanwhile over on Amazon, we’ve got The Consultant, which is one of those doesn’t-know-what-it-is shows. The biggest question hanging over it is, how did this get made? Amazon lists its genres as “comedy, suspense, drama”, and there’s your trouble. It doesn’t know what it is. It’s certainly not funny, and substitutes a kind of crass nastiness for humour, along with a bunch of characters working in the tech industry who are all terrible. It’s Amazon reverting to type, basically, because they are the streaming network which has no taste.

Also on Amazon, we have the first three episodes of Daisy Jones and the Six, based on the best-selling novel. This is moderately entertaining, a tale of the music industry in the 70s in the same vein as Almost Famous (good), and Grace of My Heart (also good) with some elements of HBO’s Vinyl (not good). But there’s a simple problem with this kind of thing, which the TV series Nashville addressed head-on: for this potentially great Fleetwood Mac type band to be convincing, you need some convincingly good songs (and performances). So far, the songs in the show have been underwhelming, on the dull side, B-sides at best.

Then there’s the question of how great this band is supposed to be. So far, not very convincing. Partly, this is because there’s a lot of focus on the front man (and his opposite number, who for most of the first three episodes has yet to encounter the band), whereas when it comes to truly great bands, the backline are just as important. Fleetwood Mac, after all, are named after their rhythm section. So you don’t get much of a sense that this is a good band.

Then there’s the way the show tries to dramatise the process of writing songs. I feel like Macca’s conjuring of “Get Back” in Get Back is now the baseline for this kind of thing. Which is before you get to the bit where Daisy Jones joins them in the recording studio and they start arguing about which set of lyrics they’re using. LOL.

It’s watchable enough but as fascinating as we all find the stories that the music industry throws up, there is a sense that it’s always the same (old) story. I wonder about musicians, as they start ingesting too many drugs and too much alcohol: do they see themselves ploughing the same old furrow? The drink, the drugs, the womanising, the oversized egos, the moustaches. Is there anything new to say about all this?
The Obald – Episode 2

March 4th, 2023

Memories of Debenhams in the Arndale Centre in Luton are at the centre of this episode, in which Ronnie goes to lunch with Mel, determined to finish things with her. But she’s a trickster: outmanoeuvres him at every turn, and his plan to end the relationship ends up with him agreeing to a trip to see a film with her at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London.

If I had one regret about moving away from the area, further North to Nottingham, it was losing access to the NFT. There was a time, in the early-mid 1980s, when I was a BFI member and regularly went down to that London on the train to see the kinds of films that didn’t play at the Odeon. Nottingham had the Broadway, of course, but there was always something special about a trip to the South Bank, to browse the second hand book stalls under the bridge, to have a drink in the NFT bar, to browse their bookshop. Just the smell of that building made it feel like a special occasion.

It was only 40 minutes away, really, and it was only a few minutes from the office building where I worked to the train station. Simpler times.

Meanwhile, Ronnie’s friend Dave Cooper seems to have an inside track on secret intelligence that might lead to widespread panic if more widely known. More memories here, of the pub that used to be directly underneath the office, actually part of the building. What a concept! A watering hole designed to facilitate long boozy lunches for civil servants, and after work drinks too. Sometimes, I’d go drinking at lunchtime, carry on after work, and stagger down to the bus stop at closing time. Sheesh.

Follow the link for Episode 2 on Apple Podcasts.
The Obald – episode 1

February 25th, 2023

The third season of my fiction podcast is a reading of my speculative fiction espionage thriller The Obald (follow that link for the first episode on Apple Podcasts). Perhaps not the most indicative title in the world, but (as always) I reserve the right to perverse self-sabotage. I wrote the first half of (the original) The Obald in 1983, when I was around 20 and 21 years old. I was inspired then by the idea that secret passages existed in the London Underground, behind unmarked doors and closed off tunnels. The idea of these secret rooms came from my imagination, as I had no idea (at 20) that such places did indeed exist. The title came from a neon sign in a shop window, the sewing machine brand Theobald rendered in two slightly separated signs.

Considering it now, I think it might be the best thing I’ve done. The ending was a bit naff, however, so I’ve been in and lopped it off. If you want the original – naff – ending, it’s available on Amazon for the moment, but I’ll probably update the ebook at some point.

When Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere appeared on TV in the mid-90s, I felt like someone had been inside my head and stolen my thoughts (about the hidden tunnels), only with more actual research. In the meantime, I’d converted the original story of The Obald into a short story entitled “Movie” that appeared in the small press Slow Dancer magazine.

I’d long-since lost the original Obald manuscript, which I had typed out on pink foolscap paper (see above re perverse self-sabotage – the emphasis is on fool). But when I decided to participate in the 2009 National Novel Writing Month, I wanted to revisit the idea from memory. I also decided to add a section that took place thirty years later.

(On the subject of perverse self sabotage, I feel I ought to also confess that when I was in a band – like the protagonist of The Obald – and we hired an 8-track machine to cut a single, I insisted it was mixed in mono. Of course, this was me being a way-ahead-of-my-time hipster, but the result was that literally everyone just assumed we couldn’t afford stereo, or something.)

So if you’re looking for me, I’m the one with a pink foolscap manuscript and a mono single.

Anyway, for some reason, I left the new version of The Obald sitting on a shelf for four years before pulling it out and reading through it again. I’d convinced myself it was still unsatisfactory in some way. Reading it again in 2014, I decided I quite liked it – it’s even funny in places, which is something that used to characterise my work. So here it is.

*

In 1983, I was a year into my first job. I’d been politicised by 18 months on the dole before that, and I was an active trade union representative and “known troublemaker” who had been on a CND rally or two. I’ve written before about my certainty that I was one of hundreds of civil servants who were blacklisted back in the 80s. We’d seen the Falklands War, and we were gearing up for the miners’ strike, and trade unions (and other forms of collectivism) were under attack from a government that had just been re-elected (in June 1983) with a huge majority. I spent the next couple of years kicking against the pricks and doing my career no favours. I was dumped from department to department, office to office, under a series of managers who criticised my every move and the clothes I wore. There’s a conversation in The Obald in which a manager criticises the protagonist for the way he walks, for the collars on his shirts, the ties he wears, and even the way he looks through files. That conversation is a thing that really happened to me.

I applied for dozens of other jobs but got nowhere. It was enough to make you paranoid. One day, a union friend of mine who was ‘in the know’ told me my name was on a list—one that, so it went, contained no pertinent information, just names. Your name on the list was enough to signal that you were a troublemaking pain in the arse, a dangerous radical.

I’ll tell you what, if you want to radicalise someone for life, just stick them on your shit list, and they’ll hate you forever. It turns out, I think, that 1983 was some kind of watershed. January 1984, for example, saw the release of the first Apple Mac. Before that, there was DOS and the Apple II and nobody knew what was to come. November 1983 saw the release of the first Now That’s What I Call Music compilation, which I think means that the hits of that year are vivid in the memory of anyone who was around at the time. It was the beginning of the era of such lists in the media, the eternal recycling of the recent past.

With a Parliamentary majority of 144, Margaret Thatcher’s government could, in earnest, begin their work of dismantling society and creating a nation of selfish individuals who actually feared many of the things that had served to improve our quality of life in the previous forty years (public health, public education, taxing the rich, joining a union). Further afield, construction started on the 27 kilometre tunnel that would eventually be used to house the Large Hadron Collider. 1983 saw the last serious shit-your-pants nuclear alert of the Cold War, which of course we knew nothing about at the time.

I don’t feel a particular nostalgia for 1983. I was unhappy, lonely, and unlucky in love. But, looking back, it does feel like the end of an era – or the beginning of one – in the same way that 1963 now looks like the proper beginning of the 1960s. For my generation, sexual intercourse began in 1983, which was rather late for me.

*

Prologue/Episode One

Ronnie Smith, 21, is in a band but still has to work. His day job is mainly admin, in some kind of civil service department, and pricks his conscience somewhat because it involves collecting data on people with perfectly legal political beliefs. It’s 1983, his love life is complicated, and there’s something in the air…
The Gold and Better (iPlayer)

February 18th, 2023

These two crime series dropped at more or less the same time, so I watched them in parallel.

The Gold is an adaptation of the true story of the Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery, starring Hugh Bonneville, Charlotte Spencer, and Jack Lowden (River Cartwright in Slow Horses), among many others. So we’re in the 1980s: a bunch of armed robbers get (much) more than they bargained for, leaving themselves with the problem of what to do with three tonnes of gold bullion. How do you rinse than much gold? It needs converting into cash and then the cash itself needs to be cleaned. And in order to clean that much money, you need to step outside your usual circle of career criminals: you need to involve some “respectable” white-collar criminals, who can turn your dirty gold into legitimate property investments in London’s Docklands.

The Tory economic miracle, in other words.

Bonneville plays Brian Boyce, a clean copper in a sea of corruption, surrounded my secret handshakes and tipoffs. He’s ably supported by ambitious Nicki Jennings (Spencer), who comes from the same streets as many of the original gang.

If there’s a problem with a story like this is that you need a cast of thousands, and the spider’s web of criminal connections spreads (and spreads) far and wide. When the loot is split so many ways, and so many people are involved in what happens to it, that it becomes very challenging to turn into a coherent television series. Too complex! And never really over, so there’s no such thing as a neat and satisfying ending. The producers focus on a few key crims, but even then the story can get messy, as juries have a tendency to find people not guilty, or they abscond to other countries. In the case of Kenny Noye, who wasn’t in the original gang, but got involved in the laundering, he’s first found not guilty of murdering a police officer who was on his property, and then guilty of conspiracy. The afterlife of Noye, as a road rage killer, is not included.

It needed more than six episodes really (and it needed to be properly solved), but it only got six, which leaves you feeling a little unsatisfied, especially when you consider the unpunished fortunes that have been made from the proceeds of this crime.

Better is the one that really surprised me. Because you think it’s going to be one thing, and it turns out to be something completely different. A smaller cast here, and a neater (fictional) story, so potentially more satisfying, even if it does stretch credulity.

Leila Farzad plays DI Lou Slack, whose career has been enhanced by her connection to Col McHugh (Andrew Buchan), a crimelord who’s own career has been aided and abetted by Slack, who has helped put away his rivals while keepng him clean. But when a family crisis tests Slack’s conscience, she vows to, um, do better.

So you think you’re heading into a tense story of turned tables and trust issues, and you are, for a bit. But then the story takes an unexpected turn, and nobody behaves the way they are supposed to in these mid-level dramas. In other words, you think it’s going to descend into cliché: cross and double cross, wearing-a-wire, patdowns, surveillance, continuous peril. But it goes somewhere else.

Best of all, it has Anton Lesser in it. And Anton Lesser makes everything better, from Endeavour to Wolf Hall and Game of Thrones. Lesser plays Vernon, an ex-copper with a history of corruption, to whom Slack turns for advice. But can you ever trust a bent copper? As another character says: once they bend, they keep bending.

In short, I was ready to give up on Better after two episodes, because it was looking unpromising. But then it, um, got better.

(You can’t help thinking throughout that at least one of the parts was written with James Nesbitt in mind, but it’s non-the-worse for his not being in it.)
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

February 17th, 2023

While I downloaded a sample of this book ages ago, it wasn’t until I was looking for another audiobook to entertain me on an airport run that I engaged with it. And how weirdly coincidental it is that I’ve now listened to two audiobooks in a row that require the narrator to read out a lot of transcript timecodes! First The Ink Black Heart and now this!

The coincidences don’t end there. Both books feature characters who are obsessed with an intellectual property. In this case, it’s a series of books by an out-of-fashion children’s author which are reputed to contain a secret code…

A further coincidence arrives in the shape of the year 1983. Nothing to do with The Ink Black Heart, but I’ve been watching The Gold on BBC iPlayer (very good), which is about the Brinks-Mat robbery, which took place in November 1983. Meanwhile, I’ve also been recording episodes of my forthcoming audio version of The Obald, which is set in… November 1983. And in The Twyford Code, young Steven Smith stumbles across a copy of an Edith Twyford book on the top deck of a bus in… 1983.

Steven is an old lag, just out of prison and trying to go straight. As part of his rehabilitation, he’s using an old iPhone 4 to record his story, and Hallett’s novel consists of the transcripts of those recordings, complete with glitches, [background noise detected], bleeped out swearwords and mistranscriptions. “Kos” for ’cause, and “mustard” for must’ve.

Does this sound promising? I wasn’t sure at first. The voice doing the narrating seemed kind of flat, and there were a few moments where I felt he’d missed an emphasis. What’s THIS for instead of What’s this FOR, that kind of thing. Easy mistakes to make. Even reading out things I’ve written, I find myself getting the odd emphasis completely wrong. But beyond the mistakes in emphasis, I felt like I could hear in my head what Steven, out on parole, would sound like, in terms of a working class London accent, and yet the narration made no attempt to capture that (obvious) voice, nor any of the other characters.

But then you have to ask yourself, who is the narrator of The Twyford Code? Because, sure, Steven is speaking into his phone, but then the software is (almost completely accurately) transcribing the recordings, which have been printed out and sent to someone, who is reading them. It’s a proper old mise-en-abyme, my favourite literary trope. So nice!

And once you realise that “the narrator” is somewhere in that labyrinth, the flatness of the voice seems right. Which is before you get to the “Enid Twyford” books, which are in there somewhere. Twyford is an analogue for Blyton, obviously, but her books about six children solving crimes are also supposed to contain hidden messages. So it’s all texts within texts, and great fun.

Steven, dyslexic, was in a small English class at school for the struggling readers, and when he found a children’s book on the top deck of a mysterious bus, it ended up in the hands of his teacher Miss Isles, who apparently grew so obsessed with the Code that she organised an unofficial school trip down to Bournemouth, where Twyford lived during World War 2.

Now, forty years later, Steven is trying to remember what happened on that trip, so he’s looking up other members of the class and enlisting the help of a kind librarian, recording everything on an old phone given to him by his son, with whom he has had no relationship, thanks to his criminal past. Going straight isn’t easy; there’s always the sense that the fate of Miss Isles isn’t the only event from his past that concerns him.

This was a properly entertaining, very clever, puzzle box of a book. I enjoyed the audiobook so much that I immediately started listening for a second time.
The Obald: a trailer

February 15th, 2023

I’ve been on my own this week, so I’ve been making progress on the audio version of my novel, The Obald, which was conceived and written in 1983, then lost, then rewritten from memory and reworked, 30 years later.

Coming soon, and here’s a 2-minute trailer to prove it.

More news as soon as we have it.
Darkness Darkness

February 14th, 2023

I’m not a gamer, so watching The Last of Us on TV is a real test. Have they really made a good series out of this title, or are all the positive reviews filtering the perceptions of people who loved the game? Actually, I am quite enjoying it. I do think they were trying a little too hard to tug at my heartstrings with the much-praised third episode, and I think the cast is a little bit too boy-heavy. You see Anna Torv, and you think, oh, cool, but then: oh.

The action sequences do feel very game-like. That sense of having to do this and this and go here and here and the onrushing, neverending, hard-to-kill fungus people. Hard to kill, but also easy to kill. And if they were always that easy to kill, why are there still so many of them after 20 years? Questions like that. Plot logic! And how are they nourished?

They’ve hand-waved the petrol problem (unconvincingly – and that goes too for the gasoline fire in episode 5), but what about the bullets? Everybody seems to have loads of ammo still, after 20 years. Who’s making all the bullets? In my own half-finished post-apocalypse writing, I wrestled with the petrol problem especially. Of course, if Americans weren’t so anti-diesel, they could have written-in some bio-diesel operation, be turning vegetable oil into fuel. As to the gasoline they presumably are using, well.

I guess these are the kind of questions you don’t ask when you’re playing a computer game. Which is not to say this TV show is terrible – it is quite good. One thing I always think of with stuff like this: it’s good, and there’s a decent storyline, and per-episode storyline; there’s no shortage of creativity in the television industry. So why can’t anyone write a decent Doctor Who storyline? The eternal question.

But most of all, and the title to this blog post is the giveaway, like too many contemporary TV shows, The Last of Us is dark. Dark, dark, dark. It’s a puzzle right up there with the why-can’t-they-write-a-decent-Doctor-Who-storyline question: why does everything have to be so fucking dark? Perhaps they save money on costumes and CGI.

Also dark, and a couple of years old now, is Raised by Wolves, which I finally got around to finishing. I watched season 1 when it was first on, thought it was all right, but then I only just caught up with season 2. Five minutes of the first episode and I knew I didn’t remember anything, so I had to rewatch season 1 in its entirety before picking up season 2 again. Also dark.

This is partly because we’re supposed to be on an alien planet under an alien sun. Well, Kim Stanley Robinson would have a lot to say about the chances of human life from this earth surviving on a planet with completely the wrong kind of light. Nevertheless, they persisted.

Raised by Wolves has any number of plot logic issues, but mainly it is just too dark. Cancelled, too, so I doubt I’m heading towards a proper ending. It’s already showing signs of a lost cause. People being captured and escaping over and over again, and surviving in the wilderness on what? Using what for food and water? Which is not to mention being killed but not killed killed, if you know what I mean.

Most of all, I’m put in mind of a terrible Nicolas Cage film from a few years ago, Know1ng. In this film, something something apocalypse, but some children hear whispering and are rescued by space aliens with arks, and they end up on a new planet with a Tree of Life. Their parents can’t go with them because they don’t hear the whispering (hopelessly cleaved to the old ways). The strong suspicion is: this film was made by scientologists. Dump your parents, kids!

It’s like when you watch Battlestar Galactica for the second time. The first time, you were gripped by the production design and the tense scenes and the great acting and the who-is-really-a-robot plotlines. The second time, you notice all the religion (in this case Mormonism). With Raised by Wolves there are arks, and children who have left their parents, and people who hear whispering, and – oh look – a Tree of Life. There’s also a little bit of the who-is-the-real-robot theme. Humans can be programmed and reprogrammed, just like us robots. And, oh fuck, it’s dianetics, isn’t it?

What I don’t know is, was this meant to be propaganda for the tax-dodging NRM, or is it just lazy screenwriting, in search of a mythology. I mean, I know they got a lot of it from the Roman Mithraic cult, but c’mon. The Romans didn’t talk about overwriting your programming, did they?

Anyway, it’s too fucking dark, is what I’m saying.
Funny Woman

February 13th, 2023

I’m unlikely to ever actually read a Nick Hornby novel, but I like a bit of 60s period drama, and I also like modern trends in inclusive casting and the reimagining of history, so I thought I’d give this a go.

Charming is the word for this, I think. It’s not edgy or dark (thank goodness for some illuminated pixels), and nobody here who (for example) quits on principle has to pay the economic price. So it’s a kind of magical realist version of the 1960s, best understood with the way show lead Gemma Arterton is cleverly CGI’d into some vintage footage. It isn’t remotely convincing and looks a bit shonky, but it’s tremendous fun.

Beauty queen Barbara, whose dad makes Blackpool rock, sets off to that London to make her fortune. She dips briefly into the seedy side of Soho but her gift for sending herself up means that she inevitably finds her way onto a sitcom. Everybody concerned (apart from stuffy BBC exec producer) falls for her, and she’s a big hit with the public, and a lorra lorra laffs ensue.

The cast is great, especially Morwenna Banks and Rupert Everett as her agents, and David Threlfall as her old man. The soundtrack is excellent too, and takes a robust view of strict chronology, which is as it should be.

There’s a little bit of social commentary. There’s that nasty Enoch Powell; women being mean to women but letting men off the hook; and TV’s use of blackface and brownface. But as I said, although there is plenty of quitting on principle, nobody really suffers.

All in all, an enjoyable watch.
That’s Entertainment

February 11th, 2023
For reasons I don’t need to go into, I happened to play “Wasteland” by The Jam to a class the other day. I’ve never really been able to make my mind up about this particular song: on the one hand, indelible earworm; on the other, lyrics awkwardly sploodged in order to fit the melody. The system works because it does not work.

A few days went by, and I’m driving to the supermarket and I ask Siri to play “The Jam on Apple Music”. She leapt into action, and about two minutes later started to play the country band Midland and their album On the Rocks. An easy mistake to make. I tried again. And again. And a third time, with variations of “Paul Weller” and “The Jam”. Eventually, at a traffic light, I dabbed at the infotainment screen and managed to find what I’m sure is every Accidental Partridge’s favourite Jam album: The Very Best of the Jam.

So I finally got to listen to some of my favourite singles in the few minutes before I reached the car park. I’ve got a mixed history with The Jam. Looking back, it’s absolutely clear to me that they belonged to my generation (late Boomers, early Gen-Xers) in a way that, say, The Beatles never really did. Which is not me saying that The Jam were better or greater than The Beatles. But The Fabs belong to everyone, whereas The Jam were timed perfectly to coincide with the second half of my teens.

Their first album was released in May 1977, when I was 14, and All Mod Cons arrived 18 months later, when I was about to turn 16. Setting Sons came out when I was in my first year of Sixth Form, and Sound Affects coincided with my 18th Birthday, coming out about a month before I left home (and school) and started 18 months of unemployment. Finally, The Gift, their only UK number one, came out towards the end of that 18 months, when I was (unbeknownst to me) on the cusp of getting a proper job.

Of course, the story of The Jam wasn’t so much about the albums as the singles. They were a proper singles band. I’ve already written about “Strange Town”, which might be the perfect single. But there were others. I still remember the frisson of excitement in the Sixth Form common room when we played “Going Underground” for the first time.
To give you a sense of how in synch I was (or ought to have been), their song “Just Who is the 5 O’ Clock Hero?” came out on 3 July 1982, about five days after I started that “nine to five” job in the Luton Tax Office.
```
From this window I've seen the whole world pass
From dawn to dusk I've heard the last laugh laughed
I've seen enough tears to wash away this street
I've heard wedding bells chime and a funeral march
When as one life finishes another one starts

Alright then love so I'll be off now
It's back to the lunchbox and worker-management rows
There's gotta be more to this old life then this
Scrimping and saving and crossing off lists
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So I was thinking several things in the car this morning. First of all, there was that sense that I did feel an affinity with The Jam, they did belong to my generation. But for some reason (my tendency towards perverse contrarianism, probably), I drifted off. I remember feeling a sense of detachment, of not being involved, when I caught them on Top of the Pops doing “Town Called Malice”, and by the time of “Beat Surrender” (November 1982), I’d spiralled out of their orbit altogether. I remember feeling somewhat snarky about the presence of a horn section and backing singers. What is this? Kid Creole and the Coconuts?

And the other thing I was thinking was that the great thing about The Jam was that feeling that they were on our side. Right from the beginning, but especially with lines like “Too many right-wing meetings”, you knew that Weller was correctly aligned. And it struck me that the students to whom I played “Wasteland” the other day don’t have anything like The Jam, Weller, or the chance of seeing them perform something angry and righteous on Top of the Pops. There really needs to be another Punk Moment, I think. I was no punker rocker, but there are so many institutions in need of a good kicking at the moment. We need to burn down the talent shows and shuck off the bling, bin the John Lewis advert soundtracks and play some power chords.

Probably Weller’s finest set of lyrics is “That’s Entertainment” – an uncontroversial opinion, I’m sure. But, as an English teacher, I look at that and think, yep, so many teachable moments in that song. Juxtaposition, onomatopoeia, irony, pathetic fallacy, pathos, bathos, oxymoron, personification, and (my personal favourite) a transferred epithet.

La la la la la la
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