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

To retread some old ground re the too many right wings odour, I wonder if a visual representation helps? See: http://crappygraphs.com/user_graphs/?id=5443

Previous posters have assumed that "they took the keys and she'll think it's me" means that the thugs will use his keys to get into his home.

My interpretation is that he will get home very late and will have to wake his wife up to let him in. He will say that he had his keys stolen but she will think that it is him who lost them.

PS Who is this Paul Weller you all speak of?

Is mweller any relation?

deserves a bump, as every time i hear this now i can't stop laughing

People, check the Uncut Weller special, specifically the page where they review "All Mod Cons", you may find some parts you recognise...

..

Do tell.

this thread is all-time

There was Throbbing Gristle song about Genesis P-Orridge getting beaten up down in a tube station (hour not specified) that I'm certain Paul Weller never heard before writing this.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FU0OC8IWYAEuYB5?format=jpg

I've been spinning this song for 40 years, and now I don't feel like I've ever heard it at all.

The morning paper is probably the NME or Sounds. Weller was a teenager and would be oblivious to the normal tabloids (cf. It was Foxton, a few years older, who composed "News of the World"). This part of the song references the biggest news story for mods that year - Keith Moon's death ("headlines of death and sorrow") and the poor reception that Kenney Jones received as his replacement in The Who ("Mr Jones got run down").

I've found the transcript of my interview with Bruce Foxton in 2008, which concludes thusly:

That’s all my main questions, but I have got a couple of cheeky extras for you, because I can’t resist the opportunity to take you to task over some of the lyrics of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight. It is one of your greatest songs, and I know you didn’t write it, but I’ve always found some of the lyrics a bit puzzling.

Firstly, there’s the moment when the man in the song uses a vending machine, and the line goes “I put in the money and pull out a plum”. Now, even in 1978, I don’t remember seeing vending machines that sold fresh fruit. Was that a metaphor?

(Laughs) You’ve got me there! I think you’d best ask Paul about that. That’s one that has bemused me for a while.

And then we meet his assailants, who “smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right wing meetings”. What is the maximum quota of right wing meetings that you might reasonably attend, before being tainted by their characteristic odour?

Well, I wouldn’t want to go to one! They were cheeky questions, you’re right.

And right at the end of the end of the song, when he’s lying semi-conscious on the platform, he says “the wine will be flat and the curry’s gone cold”. Now then, sparkling wine with curry? These people were fancy.

Now, I can answer that one. It could go off, couldn’t it? I’m not sure what wine he was drinking, but it may have been a Lambrusco or something. (Laughs)

She would have done better to have left the cork in until he got home – but thanks for clearing that up.

You’ve made me think about those other couple. I’ll put my thinking cap on. But it was a pleasure, anyway.

Do remember vending machines on tube station platforms but can't remember exact contents. Fruit being left in a vending machine would tend towards rotten fruit and a spread of mildew anyway. Might be something you might find on teh continent with adequate technology etc but not in dear old blighty.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/41/8c/0a/418c0aa98772339b08fe5c399439531d.jpg
I thought of this but grape doesn't rhyme as well as plum and so on. But did remember a purplish fruit on the packaging.

& isn't plum a lift from Little Jack Horner or something?

Right, see, Woking Station has a stinky, pissy underpass and if you come through it from the south and walk a few yards up Broadway, there's an Indian restaurant which used to (still does?) have as its unique selling point CURRIES AT 1978 PRICES, 1978 being the year it opened, so that's about £4.50 then.

need to know if this place is still going

'It's a muddle ok palimpsest if you like' makes most sense to me: weller wants to write a song about getting mugged in a tube station but all the concrete details come from Woking experience - he's remembering picking up a curry and cutting through the station; he's trying to re-imagine it as a tube journey, so he adds in the ticket machine which dispenses a 'plum' - plausibly a 70s dark pink cheap day train return to London from Woking, because that's the ticket he's most used to seeing. (I can find period examples on eBay from Guildford that could plausibly be 'plums').

The sneaky chocolate bar hypothesis is very appealing, but I suspect he's just picturing the wrong kind of ticket.

no idea about that wine though

Weller can be pretty Bernard Sumneresque when it comes to lyric writing, pulling out any old rubbish just because it rhymes. There's that line in Paris Match "As I tread the boulevard floor, will I see you once more"... Tread the boulevard floor???

the entire curry discourse comes from a speech whose sole purpose is to save him from a mugging = nothing in that entire quotation need to be taken as truthful (the curry does not exist, it is a feint, his wife's supposed activities are invented to make him seem harmless and likeable and not worth a mugger's energies)

his return to the curry and win all post-beating is thus to be read as a crestfallen and ironic analysis of the failure of this speech to do the work intended: hence "the curry is cold" means "my spur-of-the-moment invention failed and curdled bcz i was set upon anyway, thus all aesthetic endeavour" [swoons, dies*]

as for plum: it's a metaphor entirely interrupted by the arrival of the crime - he pulls out a "queen" (= smiling, beguiling) and then a "plum" (= characterisation never arrives), there's a rhythm to the figure (one metaphor followed by another) but his happily inept and self-absorbed attempted poetics is smashed to pieces by harsh hateful reality and we never learn how effective his metaleptic device was going to be: thus all art (good or bad) in the face of implacable violence

*more metaphor maybe

in conclusion the gang is basically saying "tear him for his bad verses" (shakespeare) and the tragedy is that we never discover if they're right abt how bad they are

ADDING
the implied and hoped-for response to thumb-pulling out a plum is the audience affirming the plum-puller's judgment: "what a good boy am i!" but THIS audience is impatient to teach him another response and while doing deny him even the complacent completion of his literary performance

There was Throbbing Gristle song about Genesis P-Orridge getting beaten up down in a tube station (hour not specified) that I'm certain Paul Weller never heard before writing this.

― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Thursday, February 9, 2017 4:17 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

1977! Jubilee! There's a lot of stuff in the lyric about Prince Philip doing unspeakable things to the Queen.

so maybe the urban dictionary defn of "pulled out a plum" helps expand on the unspeakability here

Did he conclude that he was a good boy?

"wine flat curry cold boy not so good" is his sad conclusion IMO

David Quantick's regular page in Record Collector, dated July 2022

Just sayin...

https://www.mixcloud.com/FrenchSpurs1/retropopic-727-the-jam-the-evolution-of-down-in-the-tube-station-featuring-drummer-rick-buckler/

"Alongside two group classics The Saint talks with The Jam's drummer Rick Buckler about the creation of "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight'.

Why did Paul Weller throw the lyrics of Tube Station in the bin? What was so complex about the song? Who was responsible for the group revisiting the song until completion? How highly did the group themselves regard the song? On what basis did they insist on the song being a single? What was their attitude towards their record company? Why were The Jam not necessarily the best judge of just how great some of their songs were?"

That's a lot of questions. A lot of questions.

I'm puzzled by the line about fumbling for change and then pulling out the Queen. Presumably a £1 note, but a £1 note was never change, and it would have been too much. And yet the narrator doesn't seem displeased. This is what the ticket machines used to look like:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/London_Underground_ticket_machines_-_Flickr_-_James_E._Petts_%281%29.jpg

The wording implies it's a ticket for the tube, and perhaps the line that Weller used most often had plum-coloured tickets, but they don't seem to have been all that common though:
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection?f%5B0%5D=collection_type%3ATickets&f%5B1%5D=object_type%3Aticket&f%5B2%5D=topics%3ATube

If that was the case how come no-one else used that slang? Was it just Paul Weller's mum? Hmm? Paul Weller and his mum, and no-one else? Not even his bandmates? When they were on Top of the Pops did Topper Headon and Billy Bragg look at Paul Weller and think "what's he talking about" and "I have no idea what I'm singing" and "this is rubbish" and "at least The Human League make sense".

Is Weller implying that the machine crushed his thumb, so it looks like a plum? Is it plumb, like a plumb line? Is it "pulled out aplomb" but someone has misheard? On a more serious level my reading of the lyrics is that they're padded out for style, and a more mature Paul Weller would probably be more direct and less Pete Bloody Sinfield.

I've never got The Jam. They were massive from 1979-1982, when I was three years old, but unlike e.g. Madness or The Clash they were never played on the radio after that point - they didn't have wide, uncontroversial crowd-pleasing appeal - so if you weren't alive at the time they were lost to time and memory. The same thing happened to most of Elvis Costello's singles, at least the ones that aren't "Oliver's Army".

I mean, I don't remember hearing their hits on the radio when I was growing up, but there was Madstock, and Keith Floyd's TV shows had The Stranglers, but the other second-wave Ska / Mod / post-punk-punks seemed to vanish from the airwaves post-1982.

I grew up in the western United States, far, far from Woking. The Jam have always struck me as the most British of the post/post-punk bands. To my mind, Setting Sons is a near-perfect snapshot of lower-middle-class life in the U.K. in 1979 (keeping in mind that I have never set foot in the U.K.). Nevertheless, I have always found them to be a particularly compelling band. I think this comes primarily from Weller's vocal delivery, in which I find no artifice, even when his lyrics are risible (or unintelligible), as well as the instrumental chops of the band, which are as good as anyone's of that era. I mean, it's 40 years on, and the opening of The Gift still gives me chills. From the video evidence, they were a very potent live band as well.

*punk/post-punk

I spy plums

https://i.imgur.com/4lY2DaB.jpg

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