"Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" by The Jam - What Does It Mean?

It'd be just the thing one of these tabloids might print, unaware that it's an urban legend.
It also explains why Weller has to take the tube in the first place: he wasn't able to complete his driving test.

I'm staring to move towards the belief that when "he fumbles for change" (within himself) he's actually wrestling with his own conscience because he knows that he shouldn't be lurking about in subterranean passageways, seeking out opportunities to provide hand-relief to passing homosexuals, when his wife is at home "polishing the glasses and pulling out the cork" and generally fulfilling her role as a dutiful wife, in blissful ignorance of his sordid hidden activites and proclivities.

However he ultimately loses this battle and gives in to his baser instincts.

too many right wing meetings ?

An 'acceptable' number being one. Where you go 'fuck that bollox' and never go again.

(fwiw, I have not.)

No, wait, sorry, those weren't right wing meetings, they were right wing rallies.

Exactly.

(Unless they were of the same prim Victorian mindset that resulted in piano legs being covered up with little velvet curtains, that is. "My God... those steps... they're practically NUDE.")

I put it to you that what Weller actually wrote was:

"I'm partially naked, except for toffee wrappers and this morning's papers. etc."

This fits the "tube nutter" theory admirably. Drunk, shirtless, covered in litter, one bollock hanging out of his trousers, rent boy on his arm, rambling on about his transexual "wife"... well, you can see why he might have attracted some unwelcome attention.

So he's at very least imagining what it would be like to wander 'round the cities subterranean transport system "partially naked, except for toffee wrapers and this morning's paper....".

In reality 'though I don't think he's prepared to risk the shame and public humiliation attendant on his actually being caught wandering 'round the tube station completely starkers, and is forced to settle for surreptitiously pulling out one "plum", attempting to disguise the action of so doing by pretending to be getting his money out of his posket and purchasing either a ticket or a bar of chocolate from a vending machine (it is unclear which).

These are strangely prescient newspapers. My money's on The Fortean Times.

(For just after he loses consciousness, his attackers push his body over the platform edge, where he remains until savagely mowed down by the first train of the morning.)

I can't believe it has taken so long to deduce this simple, yet crucial, fact.

He's obviously tried it on with some guy, but it's a setup and his mates are going to beat the shit out of him. In a panic he makes some story up about having a wife, who's getting ready for the curry, but being in a panic the story is confused and illogical and doesn't save him from the inevitable beating.

Mr. Jones got run down
Headlines of death and sorrow - they tell of tomorrow
Madmen on the rampage
And I'm down in the tube station at midnight

I think all this business about "madmen on the rampage" is just an elaborate cover story that he's dreamed up to try to explain to his wife why he's so late home after she's spent her entire evening lining up the cutlery, polishing the glasses and pulling out the cork while she waits for him to get home; when in fact he's been off doing the nasty down some back alley with an asian rent boy he picked up for four and half nicker.

However he's now going over this story in his mind, rehearsing it and panicking as he imagines himself having to keep coming up with ever more elaborate stories to cover repeated absences, until eventually he has to fake his own death in some sort of as-yet-undefined motor-vehicle related accident (hence the vague "Mr. Jones got run down").

"Have an Awayday - a cheap holiday. Do it today!"

Please note the use of the phrase "a cheap holiday". Recognise it from anywhere?

"A cheap holiday, in other people's misery..."

...from "Holidays In The Sun" by the Sex Pistols: a song which stole its introductory riff from The Jam's debut single, "In The City".

By lifting these three words, Weller deftly closes the circle, and rights a monstrous wrong.

"My life swam around me
It took a look and drowned me in its own existence"

What do these tell us (I mean, apart from the fact that Weller was a pretentious little wanker, obv.)?

I think that, far from "righting a monstrous wrong", Weller was actually using the lyrics to this song to take another cheap shot at the 'Pistols!

He's having an out of body experience, much like his dislocated testicle.

"At midnight" - the hysterical present tense to which the lyric inevitably returns despite its efforts to escape - our protagonist is trapped in a loop in which queens, plums and corks are forever being "pulled out", he is forever on the receiving end of a kicking, and the curry is forever cooling.

There can be no "awayday" from this eternally recurring moment - hence the sneer implicit in the edict that it be undertaken on a "today" which can never arrive.

"Today's" newspapers can tell "of tomorrow" because neither truly exists; there is only Wellerian "midnight"; we are not on the social realist London Underground, but in Paris, on the existentialist Metro.

The tube tickets in the seventies were green and the wine could have been the sparkling matteus rose variety which would have made a waepon like a bat so wifey should have been fully protected

Well, they're a symbol of the attractively eye-catching but ultimately disposable veneer that covers the surface our modern consumer-driven society and conceals the sweetly seductive but ultimately insubstantial product within, which lacks any real nutritional value and ultimately serves only to corrupt and destroy our souls like so many decayed and rotting teeth awaiting the dental care of spiritual enlightenment, obviously....

Could the lyric actually be the voice of the narrator, talking to police, trying to excuse his part in a mugging or attempted bombing? In which case, are we to trust the narrator? It could all be an alibi attempt. This raises new and puzzling possibilities.

He needed a vitamin 12 booster. Local news. Don't you love it?

Why if he'd just made a bit more effort to eat a few less takeaway curries - and maybe to pull out a plum just a little bit more often instead - this nutritional disaster might have been avoided!