Tom Dunne: The Jam and a glorious era of scathing gig reviews
The Jam with Paul Weller were the subjects of a hard review for a New York gig. Picture: Chris Walter/WireImage
The art of the scathing music review is dead. This damascene revelation came to me as I lay in a Covid haze on the eve of what would have been my first ever solo show. Was this linked I wonder? If the show had gone ahead would the ‘scathing music review’ tradition have been revived?
These thoughts came to mind as I read a truly hateful review of a show by The Jam in NYC from 1980. “It might as well have been Deep Purple up there,” said the reviewer, Jim Farber. Even 40 years on, that hits hard.
I imagined The Jam themselves, on that long van drive from NYC to their next gig, Newcastle, would not have taken it well. “Deep Purple, Paul!” Bruce Foxton would have said accusingly. “Deep f**king Purple, Paul!”
However, if Bruce had read on, on that cold, dark and very wet 3,332 mile drive, he’d have realised Jim had other issues. Firstly he hadn’t enjoyed how they had played songs from the new album Setting Sons, an album that boasts Eton Rifles, Smithers Jones and Heatwave.
Begrudgingly, however, he concluded, that Setting Sons was an improvement on the “self-conscious and aurally flat All Mod Cons”. That album has David Watts, English Rose and Down in The Tube Station, a song which, live, he described as “not worth the sweat.”
This was before he really got stuck with not just the Deep Purple comparison, but also, whisper it, a quick mention of Rush. Yes, Rush. Bruce, if it helps at this remove, I think you should face it, he just wasn’t that into you. It wasn’t you, it was him.
It was however some quality mad criticism. Mean spirited, personal, over the top, unbalanced and hateful, of a type you rarely see in print these days. Online, yes, in the comments section, but not so much in print. And oddly, reading it, I kind of missed it.
There was a time when being in a band made you fair game for verbal attacks from some of our generation’s wittiest and most talented writers. A decade later they’d have gone straight into comedy or Chanel Four panel shows, but back then the music press was their only outlet.
The reviews were generally very funny and generally very true. I’ve mentioned before that I think it peaked with the review of Shakatak in the early 80s. An album from the ‘jazz-funk’ combo (all you need to know) was dismissed with one word: “Lack-Attack”, accredited at the time to “The Pacamak Backarach”. The Lee Hazlewood album, Poet, Fool or Bum? was also reviewed in one word: “Bum”. Bless their hearts.
Reviews like this don’t really happen anymore. There appears to be no middle ground between ‘profound gushing’ or a 22 page ‘long read’. We’ve lost something here, something possibly called actual criticism.
Of course it wasn’t that funny to be on the receiving end and Irish bands frequently were. One band that I knew very well had just been badly mauled when our paths crossed in the Colombia Hotel.
As I hadn’t actually seen the review I was trying to pry the gist of it from their singer. He kept repeating the phrase, “I can’t remember, now, what it was they said,” but every time he did their guitarist grew more and more perplexed at his apparent memory loss. Eventually he snapped: “They said we were fat c***ts!”
The Irish press was a little more forgiving, with one notable exception, the now sadly deceased George Byrne. He believed that once any band released something it became fair game. Your rivals became Radiohead, Blur and The Beatles. It was their records you wanted to knock off radio with yours. Radio playlists were not based on the Montessori Method.
In a review of one Irish band he argued that the lyrics were so bad the English teacher of the band’s songwriter was now hiding in a cave in Borneo. Frequently invited to see a band he hated play The Baggot he said he “wouldn’t cross the road“ to see them. Then, realising they were soon to play NYC, added, “mind you, I would cross the Atlantic.”
Being cancelled would have been water off a duck’s back to George. As long as he wasn’t cancelled in his local bar he’d have had no issue. But his reviews would have struggled to find publishers. These days it seems dangerous just to ask, “So lads, where are the actual songs?”
