When you're young

As Paul Weller polishes his award for his Outstanding Contribution to British Music at this year’s Brits, Chas de Whalley looks back at the days when The Modfather was still an angry young man and The Jam were the band to beat.

FOR ABOUT A YEAR SOMETIME between 1978 and 1979, Paul Weller and I shared the same tailor. Or rather we both bought our clothes from the same branch of the same shop - Mr Byrite on Oxford Street, where you could get button down shirts in garish colours and power-popping, straight-legged jeans in bright reds, yellows and green. Also on the hangers were a wide range of Harrington jackets which were a direct throwback to the casual everyday gear worn at the tail end of the 1960s by those old mods and suedeheads who hadn’t bought into psychedelia. They suited Paul from the ground up whereas they probably looked a little out-of-time on an ex-public school hippy like me.

I was in the A&R department at CBS Records back then, while Paul was in and out of Polydor Records, in Stratford Place, a few hundred yards up Oxford Street, where The Jam was signed and where he spent every spare moment not hanging out with the secretaries and blagging free albums as you might expect, but feverishly demoing new songs in the little eight track studio on the fourth floor.

Admittedly those spare moments were few and far between. The Jam played over 70 gigs in six countries in 1978 ( including a gruelling 25 shows in 31 days on their second trip …

by Chas de Whalley
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