Amy says:
>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.
Indeed. As I recall, Weller (as himself not Style Council) toured
with Red Wedge in the run up to the 1987 General Election (along
with Billy Bragg and others) but dropped out of such things soon
after. Red Wedge was primarily intended to promote support for the
Labour Party. I think that PW got disillusioned when people didn't
want to discuss Labour's policies but preferred asking him to do
old Jam numbers. I saw some TV coverage of what they did and it
looked pretty damned dull. Almost as dull as Style Council (who
were deadly dull). Or even Weller's more recent recordings (the
British music press has coined a term 'dadrock' to cover this).
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.
Hmmm. I read that interview (though in the NME I think unless he
said it twice). And while my memory may be playing tricks on me at
20 years distance, this is not my recall of this at all. As I
remember he was asked about how he felt about the supposedly
Leftist politics espoused by The Clash et al. He thought it was
shallow sloganising and attitude striking and far too 'trendy'. The
"We're actually thinking of voting Tory at the next election" seemed
to be some sort of group joke (you know, rather like all those ironic
statements by Jon Langford) rather than a seriously intended
preference for Thatcher's policies to reduce unemployment over the
then Labour Government's. The Jam were essentially apolitical (that
is they had no idea themselves at that time about what politics is
or could be). The 'punk orthodoxy' may have looked at things
differently, certainly writers like Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons
had it in for him after that.
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.)
One of the main reasons why Weller got asked that sort of question
in the late 70s was that The Jam made great play with classic Mod
iconography, in particular using the Union Jack all over their
stuff eg Weller wore a Union Jack waistcoat (vest to you US types,
although to us a vest is something wooly you wear through the
winter next to the skin). There was at this time a strong revival
of the extreme Right in the UK (National Front), a revival the
Anti-Nazi League was formed specifically to fight. The NF has
always used the Union Jack as its symbol and The Jam's use of it
could be seen then as flirting with that (which is far more
dangerous than thinking about voting Tory) and therefore such
questions seemed (and still seem) legitimate. And, as Amy notes,
Mod itself was seen by many in the 1960s as a working class
backlash against both the liberal progressiveness of the times in
music and the older rocker culture founded on US rock and roll. But
it would be hard to hold a hard line on this as Mod was probably
responsible more than anything for establishing the British taste
for black music styles, beginning with jazz then moving through
Tamla, soul and various Caribbean music styles. But Mod could be
seen as a populist reaction against 'Leftist' styles that invoked
ideas of working class solidarity but actually stemmed from rather
different social strata (this may have accounted for Weller's
preference for locating The Jam in the Mod Revival of the late 70s
rather than in the more 'orthodox' punk rhetoric of Pistols or
Clash). And we had already seen Mod mutate in the late 60s anyway
into skinheads who were often reactionary and racist. This
questioning of Weller's politics at the time was thus inevitable
and it was, I believe, his own inability to come to grips with such
questions then that put him on the path to Red Wedge.
>
>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.
I didn't think much of The Jam at first as I thought they were just
another Mod revival band. Very soon it became clear that they were
a lot more than that. Their music still strikes me as OK and out
of the ordinary but it's not something I get all that excited
about. What was interesting about them is that they did represent a
very genuine voice of something that's generally excluded from
even British official culture in a way that The Clash certainly did
not. I tend to agree with Weller's opinion of The Clash. I couldn't
understand the enthusiasm for them back then and I certainly can't
now - gesture politics and amateurish music - not my cup of tea
either. As for The Pistols - they're a laugh and always have been,
they were never meant to be something you took seriously, if you
want serious then listen to PIL (though preferably not while I'm
within earshot).
>
>And if all this doesn't flush Gary Wilson out of hiding, he must have
>unsubscribed.
>
>--Amy
>
Maybe this will pull the chain and set the waters flowing (well if
we're talking about UK working class culture you've got to have at
least one toilet joke)
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Iain Noble
Hound Dog Research, Survey and Social Research Consultancy,
28A Collegiate Crescent Sheffield S10 2BA UK
Phone/fax: (+44) (0)114 267 1394 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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