Going Underground (Single, 1980)
Paul and Fame (Part Two)
FUNNY STORY. IT was summer, the early eighties, maybe 1983 or 1984. Paul was definitely in The Style Council by then. It was midweek, and the pair of us had just been for dinner at Kettner’s restaurant on Romilly Street, Soho. Paul was wearing a bright yellow jersey. We stood by Cambridge Circus looking for cabs. None was currently available. As we looked in vain, both of us noted two guys staring at us from across the street. I took them to be fans, but when we walked down Shaftesbury Avenue the pair followed us.
‘Paul,’ I said, ‘those guys—’
‘Yeah, I know, they’re following us. Keep walking.’
We walked on, came to a building on our right that was under renovation. Paul said, ‘Wait here. If they start anything, grab those planks down there.’
We stopped, looked around. The guys were walking purposefully towards us, staring quite blatantly. I thought, Here we go, and prepared myself. But before I could do anything, one of them reached into his pocket, pulled out a small black wallet, and opened it.
‘Police!’ he barked, shoving the badge into Paul’s face. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Paul.’
‘Paul what?’
‘Paul Weller.’
He stopped for a second, then he turned to his mate. ‘I fucking told you it was him, didn’t I? We were only playing Going Underground in the canteen last night. Up on the tables, we were.’ Then he started singing: ‘Going underground, going underground …’
Paul smiled, said, ‘We saw you looking at us across the street.’
‘Yeah, we had a report of someone wearing a yellow jersey trying to steal cars, that’s why we were checking you out.’ Pause. ‘Hey, it wasn’t you, was it?’
Going Underground was the record that told the world just how big The Jam had become. Two years earlier they had been close to destruction. Now, with advance orders of 200,000 copies sending this song straight to number one (consider that today you can actually sell two thousand copies and go top forty), The Jam had become something like a phenomenon.
Such was the hysteria around the band, and Paul in particular, is it not possible to see Weller’s desire to exist underground as the reaction of a shy man to the huge attention the world now focused on him? The song details absurdities, a world where rockets and guns are more important than kidney machines, where fascism is on the rise, where people accept and never challenge. These were typical Weller concerns at the time, reflecting his great unease at the modern world. His poetic pronouncements, his sullen persona, his manifest anger at injustice, his way with melody and noise, and sound and arrangements, his image, his hard-edged but poetic lyrics, all of this made Paul a true man of the people.
Yet he was not particularly cut out for such acclaim. As an artist he was inward-looking, and in those days he took everything very, very seriously. Many were the times he would snap at people if he found fault with their conversation. One time in a café in Hanover Square, Gary Crowley was talking about some of the guests he had interviewed on his Capital Radio show. Paul remained quiet until suddenly he brought his fist down on the table, stood up, angrily said to Crowley, ‘If I didn’t like you so much, Gary, I would kick your head in,’ and stormed off, leaving us to wonder what the hell had just happened.
Records such as this one gave him the dubious title of Spokesman for a Generation, a meaningless label he pushed aside at every opportunity. It was a mantle he would bear for another two years, and then he would cast it aside for ever and gleefully throw himself upon the winds of fate and discovery.
Although The Jam hammered this record in most of their live sets, after their demise it was over twenty years before Paul played it again, one time, at a radio show performance in West London. Grown men were not seen to cry, they were seen to jump on one another’s shoulders and sing and shout, for in these three and something minutes they heard strong echoes of their youth coming right back at them again.