Rummaging in the back of a wardrobe in my childhood bedroom I came across a long forgotten collection of Jam posters. Some were so thoroughly forgotten seeing them now only brought back the tiniest flicker of remembrance. These four here though, pulled from the pages of Smash Hits between October 1981 and December 1982, are clear as day. They represent precisely the period of the band's career I was aware of and experienced first hand, albeit from a distance - I never saw them live.
The Jam meant the world to me then and stuck with Blu-Tac to my walls and cupboard doors these "song words", as Smash Hits called them , were quickly committed to memory, where they've remained ever since. The phrase "Repeat chorus and ad lib to fade" entering common parlance to folk of a certain age whose reading matter was still confined to the pages of Britain's glossiest pop mag.
I recall being very annoyed with Smash Hits for their treatment of "Beat Surrender". Here was the Jam's swansong and they gave it the laziest piece of non-design artwork in the history of the mag. Look at it, shocking.
I was not acquainted with "Smash Hits" till the Summer of '82 when I met a girl at a Summer youth program who's mom was British and her relatives across the pond would religiosly send her copies
ReplyDeleteNot knowing half the artists she happily gave them to me and amongst Kajagoogoo and Bananarama were The Jam and occasionally Madness or Dexy's. I took to them with scissors immediately!