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

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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