Non Stop Dancing (In The City, 1977)
Paul and Soul
AT THE TIME of this song’s release, April 1977, most people believed in a Holy Trinity of punk: The Pistols, The Clash and The Jam. Of late, The Jam’s position within punk history has been disregarded, not least by Paul himself. For example, in his book Punk Chris Sullivan deliberately makes no mention of The Jam whatsoever, a decision that found favour with Paul. In later years he has become somewhat Stalinist when considering his past. ‘I see you were on TV talking crap,’ he told me once after I’d been on, discussing The Jam. By then, I knew him well enough to know that whatever idea he had got in his brain would not be dislodged by my truth or reason. What Paul thought at any given time was the only truth. Same with punk. Although an integral part of it, Paul’s distaste for the 1977 scene is such that he now wishes to distance himself as far as possible from it, even if that means rewriting the books.
As we have seen, punk was a scene Paul embraced, purely because in his eyes it should have been ‘the first working-class musical movement that our generation had had … that’s what I wanted it to be.’ Instead, punk mocked Paul. No wonder.
British working-class culture has never had much to do with rock music. Original Mods, for example, held their noses up at bands such as The Beatles and The Stones and their woeful appropriations of American r’n’b music. Punk never reflected the world of true working-class culture that Paul knew, the world of skinheads and suedeheads, brogue shoes and loafers, button-down shirts, scooters, soul music and amphetamine-induced all-night dancing. This was a parallel world, and as his career unfolded, Paul would be instrumental in highlighting it.
Non Stop Dancing celebrates the Northern Soul scene, and it name-checks James Brown, an artist no one was talking about in 1977.
Paul’s first experience of Northern Soul came when he attended an all-nighter as a teenager, probably at Bisley Pavilion near Woking, an event still running today. As usual, Paul stood at the back, and observed. ‘I am not a dancer and I couldn’t really get into it,’ he said in 1978. But over the next few years, Northern Soul became increasingly important to Paul. I recall us going to various Northern nights at clubs such as Le Beat Route, all of us self-consciously dancing on its tiny stage, Paul too.
On the inside sleeve of The Jam’s 1982 album The Gift, Paul placed a full-size Kevin Cummins picture of a Northern Soul dancer. He also heavily borrowed from the World Column song So Is The Sun for his own Trans Global Express song. Paul’s only beef with the music was that constant exposure to it rendered it quite ‘samey’. Still, there were records he absolutely adored: Time Will Pass You By by Tobi Legend, That’s Enough by Roscoe Robinson, Picture Me Gone by Madeleine Bell, and If I Could Only Be Sure by Nolan Porter, which featured on his covers album Studio 150. This was true council-estate culture, an area Paul explored with much success during his Jam days, and which made him a hero to many.