The one band Pete Townshend said he never liked: “It’s falling short”
Rock and roll was never meant to be a popularity contest. While many people revel in being at the top of the charts, making the songs that people love to hear, a lot of songwriters are only hoping to write songs that best represent what’s in their heart, and if other people happen to resonate with it, that’s practically an added bonus. But for all of the heart and soul that Pete Townshend put into every song he wrote for The Who, he could understand when some people weren’t hitting the nail on the head like they should have.
But Townshend didn’t get to be that kind of songwriter without fighting for it. He knew it was an uphill battle even getting into a band to begin with, so when he first started woodshedding songs on his own, it took him a long time before he could start putting his feelings into his songs. And even when he began to get open and honest, he knew it was better to frame everything within the context of a character.
Music is the perfect medium to tell stories, and across albums like Quadrophenia and Tommy, there were always pieces of musical dialogue that felt like they were passed down from Townshend’s life. Jimmy from the former might not have been a one-to-one twin of Townshend’s teen years, but considering how many Mods got left behind when he struck it big, he had to have wondered how many of them ended up like the desperate kid he wrote about.
But the Mod scene never fully disappeared, and as punk was starting to rear its head, Paul Weller was bringing that musical spirit to the next generation. Sure, The Jam were definitely more aggressive than the Mods that had started everything back in the mid-1960s, but listening to In the City and All Mod Cons, you can hear echoes of Townshend in the days before he dreamed bigger and was writing tunes like ‘I Can See For Miles’.
Whereas most kids looked up to Weller as the next generation of rock star, though, Townshend did have some reservations about the band in their prime, saying, “That there’s not much music I don’t like, but I don’t like theirs. I like the image they’re trying to put across, and I like their commitment. But somewhere, it’s falling short. I think they’re starting to realise that now. I think I’d go further and say one thing my publicist said: ‘The Jam lacks a sense of humour.’ That’s the thing.”
Then again, does a band really need a sense of humour to be great? There aren’t too many songs by The Cure that are exactly a pick-me-up, so why can’t Weller be able to make the music he wants to? But considering where Weller would eventually go, he seemed to be at least willing to listen to what people like Townshend had to say.
He was already a fan of songs like ‘So Sad About Us’, but even if the tone didn’t get any less serious, songs like ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ and ‘A Town Called Malice’ at least managed to pick up the pace compared to the morose strumming of ‘That’s Entertainment’. The Who mastermind may have acted like the rock star older brother in this case, but Weller wasn’t always interested in taking cues from his heroes.
He only sought to be the greatest artist he could be, and even if not every album ends with a bang, that’s not always what he’s aiming for. The goal is to still chase after that one song that no one has ever written yet, and even if it takes a lot of hard work and a bit of a stiff upper lip, Weller is never going to stop that journey for a second.
