They were forever rowing about not having enough money. I remembered my mum and dad: I don't think the swinging 60s ever hit Woking. "Even before the 80s, a lot of people were living hand to mouth. The 'ghost of a steam train is about my childhood, because we lived close to the station, and I could always hear the trains shunting about at night. "That line 'rows and rows of empty milk floats dying in the dairy yard' was directly influenced by Woking, where there was a milk yard. He said of the lyrics: "They're partly about Woking, where I grew up, which had always been a depressed place in a way. But not everyone that lived there could afford the suburban life. Weller's birthplace Woking was a classic "commuter town", 23 miles out of Central London and a Conservative safe seat. The lyrics of Town Called Malice contrasted the ambition of the new middle classes with the grim reality of living in the 1980s: "Better stop dreaming of the quiet life - cos it's the one we'll never know." "I was trying to capture a sense of the anger that I felt - that a lot of people felt - about Thatcherism and the way that she and the Tory Party at that time were trying to dismantle the communities of the working classes." "There was a phoney pretence that we could suddenly all be middle class because we were allowed to buy our own houses, get a mortgage and be in debt for the rest of our lives," Weller recalled in the book Suburban 100 - Selected Lyrics. Paul Weller sat on the roof of AIR Studios in London's Oxford Circus, January 1982. Against this backdrop, the establishment celebrated the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and the privatisation of some of the country's key assets began, including the selling off of British Telecom. In April, riots broke out in Brixton over the police's heavy-handed attitude towards black youths, and similar disturbances sprang up across the country. The country was three years into Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministership, the recession had started to bite, key industries were beginning to be closed down and unemployment passed the 2-and-a-half million mark for the first time in 50 years. Instead, Weller's lyrics reflected the social upheaval that had blighted the UK in the summer of 1981. The title is a pun on Nevil Shute's 1950 novel A Town Like Alice, which concerns a couple who move from post-war England to Australia, but Weller later claimed he'd never read it. When the band played a short tour before Christmas 1981, fans were treated to a handful of new songs - one of which was called Town Called Malice. It was a heady time for The Jam - AIR was owned by former Beatles producer George Martin and the Woking lads found themselves in the studio next door to Paul McCartney. Paul Weller and Bruce Foxton performing at Wembley Arena in December 1982. The fifth Jam album, Sound Affects, had been released a year earlier and spawned the No 1 hit Start! For the follow-up, Weller and the band entered AIR Studios in London's Oxford Street to work on the follow-up with producer Pete Wilson. So, rightly or wrongly, I was getting into brass sections and female vocals and keyboards and trying to expand our sound." "There are only so many variations on the guitar/drums format. "We'd been a three-piece for years," he told The Guardian in 2012. The Jam at the time Town Called Malice was No 1: 12th February 1982.ĭespite huge success - all 18 of the band's original singles made the UK Top 40 - Weller had become constricted by the trio's format and felt his songs needed to be augmented in some way.
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