No.3 The Jam - Going Underground

I've never really liked Paul Weller. Although I loved The Jam and Style Council (especially their later forays into dance madness), I've never taken to his curmudgeonly nature; I suspect he thinks that civilisation took a fatal turn for the worse with the invention of the wheel and that a Vespa would be perfectly fine if it ran on sled runners and was pulled by woolly mammoths.

But Going Underground turned my world around 180 degrees in 1980. Prior to this, I was politically conservative (if someone in their mid-teens whose main obsessions were music and Manchester City can be considered political). Going Underground's lyrics were the first political lyrics I ever tried to untangle.

This, itself took some doing. The family record player was in our living room, which is where my mother spent at least 75% of her day ironing. (Maybe some day I'll be able to bring myself to tell the tale of the first time I played Ian Dury's New Boots and Panties and how my mother reacted to the first line of Plaistow Patricia, not by hurling the iron at me but with open-mouthed incredulity that such 'filth' could be committed to vinyl - mind you, she'd never heard the 'c' word before, so at least it was a moderately educational experience for her, although an excruciating one for me - 'you know, mum, women's bits...').

Safe to say, I always skipped that song thereafter. (The Sex Pistols' Bodies also served to extend my mother's vocabulary).

Anyway, the following lines of Going Underground galvanised my teenage mind in a way that only sixth form left-wing doggerel can:
'What you see is what you get
You've made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets
But I don't get what this society wants.'

Even today I'm not quite sure if these are the correct lyrics, such was the venom with which they were spat out by Weller (a former Tory himself, of course). But the ferocious delivery of these lines energised me and rather alarmed my dear mum who wondered 'who's this 'they' he's so angry with?'

Until A Town Called Malice showed up in 1982 this was my favourite Jam song. And it still sounds absolutely fantastic.