Jon says:
>Dunno where the Clash fit in - not my cup of tea, you might say - but Weller
>was pretty heavily involved with the Labor Party-related Red Wedge, at least
>during his Style Council days. Or so my not-always-reliable memory tells
>me, anyhow.
>
Jon is correct (and I'm amazed that Jon has even heard of Style
Council--pretty impressive for a guy who pays so little attention to rock
that he's never heard "Stairway to Heaven") that Weller made the leftist
politics of the Jam's records more overt by doing the Red Wedge tours with
Style Council. But what Junior is remembering is an earlier (mis)perception
on the part of many in the punk orthodoxy that the Jam were conservatives.
This stemmed almost entirely from one Melody Maker interview in which
Weller hinted that he was thinking of voting Tory in the next election (the
one that put Maggie Thatcher in power) because he was so fed up with the
Labor party's inability to do anything about unemployment, etc. He didn't
vote Tory, probably couldn't have voted Tory unless forced to at gunpoint,
but it tarnished his reputation for a while among the punk and press
orthodoxy in the UK. He had to get fairly explicit in his leftism to fully
live down the comment, I think, and that happened mainly in the last days
of the Jam and then during the Style Council years. Before that, he was
often accused by the British press of fence-sitting and being too
noncommital politically, because his songs tended to be sort of slices of
working class life rather than sloganeering polemics (like, say, the
Clash's later work). And the perception of Weller as a conservative wasn't
helped by his Mod infatuation and the tendency of the British press to
sometimes cast the Clash and the Pistols in the role of the original Mods'
arch enemies, the Rockers; in their pre-revival form, Mods were generally
viewed as lower middle class and establishmentarian, while the rockers were
viewed as working class laborites. (As Iain Noble, I think, has explained,
the reality was that both groups were generally working class, but that
wasn't the stereotype.)
I'm not sure that the idea of the Jam as center-rightists got entirely lost
in the US translation, at least at first; in NYC there were even some punk
fans who wouldn't bother to go see the Jam on their first tour, dismissing
them as poseurs. If the whole debate never gained much widespread attention
here, it's more because the Jam themselves never got much attention here
either; they were simply too parochially British to capture the attention
of a lot of US fans (though the small following they had was certainly
fanatical), and most US critics didn't like them much either.
The Clash were the band that changed everything for me, but they lost me
after London Calling. I was a huge Jam fan and remained one long after I'd
given up on the Clash, and though I love to delve back into the Clash's
pre-Sandinista stuff, in general I find that the Jam have worn much better
than the Clash. I'll agree with Junior that Stiff Little Fingers have aged
well, but I won't grant Don the Pistols; though the first record still
sounds great, it's a much less fresh, more nostalgic listening experience
than either the Jam or the Clash, IMHO.
And if all this doesn't flush Gary Wilson out of hiding, he must have
unsubscribed.
--Amy
