Paul Weller on the punk movement: ‘A lot of it was a big business con’
While Paul Weller might be most famous for his status as ‘The Modfather’ thanks to his principal role in the Mod Revival of the 1970s and 1980s, he is also inextricably linked to the punk movement. Of course, his first band, The Jam, are primarily recognised as the pre-eminent Mod Revival outfit, but The Jam are also one of the finest punk bands of Britain’s first wave, fusing gritty, dynamic music with the young Weller’s astute, political lyrics.
The trio is so closely connected to punk that Weller famously punched Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious for allegedly stealing their song ‘In The City’ and turning it into one of their best-known hits, ‘Holidays in the Sun’. Clearly, Weller and his songs were so potent that even the era’s most famous punk band felt compelled to pinch their music.
However, Weller played down the incident in Uncut in 2007 and maintained that he wasn’t the one who started the altercation but simply the one who finished it. “He started it, and I finished it,” the former Jam leader said. “I don’t know if anyone can claim any victory. He just came up to me, and he was going on about ‘Holidays In The Sun’ where they’d nicked the riff from ‘In The City.’ I didn’t mind them nicking it – you’ve got to get your ideas from somewhere, haven’t you? Anyway, he just came up and nutted me. So I returned it.”
It’s safe to say that Weller has mixed feelings about the punk days. Speaking to Paul Du Noyer for Mojo, The Jam singer described a lot of the first wave of punk as “a con”. Intriguingly, in light of Sid Vicious punching ‘In The City’ and The Jam’s apparent lack of alignment with the movement, Weller claimed the group “were never accepted”.
Asked if punk reminded him of 1960s music, Weller said: “Two and a half minute songs, yeah. The Pistols and The Clash were the two groups for me, the first contemporary groups that I’d ever liked. There are groups I’ve gone back to from the early ’70s and checked out, like Free, and I really like them now but not at the time. When punk came, at last there were some groups more or less the same age. And the details – they had short hair, straight trousers, they didn’t have beards. It made a difference to me, because I was a mod by this time, and they used to play covers like ‘Substitute’ and Troggs tracks.”
Weller was questioned why he never became an outright punk, to which explained: “I liked the attitude of punk, but I also thought a lot of it was fake. We all saved up about 20 quid to go to McLaren’s shop – it was called Sex at that time – and we went in to buy some mohair jumpers and found we couldn’t afford anything. We thought, This is bullshit. At the same time, what I got from those bands as a punter was good, because it inspired me. Especially The Clash’s lyrics – some of those early Jam songs were awful, my attempts at being socially aware, but that was me just aping The Clash, after reading interviews with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, saying people should be writing about what’s happening today. I’d never even thought of it before. I was busy re-writing ‘My Generation’.”
When Du Noyer wondered whether Weller had become “disillusioned” when he joined the “peer group” of the above acts, the former Jam leader asserted: “Yes, because a lot of it was a con. Big business. We were never accepted. We were always a little outside of the whole punk circle, which was quite elitist, cliquey and art school. Not Rotten, I think he’s genuine, but the people who used to hang around that scene. They were mostly middle-class kids with rich parents, and they’d run away to join the circus.”
He added: “We weren’t hip at all. We came from Woking, for a start. We saw things differently. I couldn’t understand that trendy side of it at all, that college crowd. I thought punk was the first working-class musical movement in my time, that’s how I perceived it. And I think that’s why The Jam clicked. We made our own scene. What we and our audiences were about was more the real spirit of punk. Some of those groups were fucking awful, don’t you remember? The Cortinas…”
Listen to The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ below.
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