Growing Up Punk: On The Jam, Finding Meaning in Music, and More

Before he was a best-selling author and journalist, Tony Fletcher was a wide-eyed 13-year-old music fanatic. In this interview, he shares the thrills (and heartaches) of meeting your heroes and more.

All subcultures are built on lineage, and punk is no different.

Someone always came before you. They forged a personal style, made a statement, maybe even created some durable art in the process. For people like me—captivated by the ‘70s punk explosion but just a bit too young to participate—Tony Fletcher is one of these path-breakers. If as a 12-year-old he missed the early days of the Sex Pistols and Clash, he succeeded in catching the next (and more musically diverse) wave, getting up close and personal with The Undertones, Crass, Scritti Politti and most notably The Jam, with whom he forged an unlikely friendship.

But Fletcher wasn’t a mere fan: He was a budding journalist, and his long-running fanzine Jamming! gave him the perfect cover to infiltrate grotty green rooms and squats. After reading his excellent and fast-moving memoir, Boy About Town, I knew I had to ask him deeper questions about coming of age among his heroes, balancing objectivity and reverence as a writer, and what music means to him today.

A Conversation with Journalist and Author Tony Fletcher

Part I: On Missing the Boat

Seth: When I first entered the punk scene, I felt like everything had already happened, that I'd somehow missed it all. I wonder if you ever felt that, seeing as you were at the epicenter of Punk and later the Mod revival.

Tony: I have felt it all my life, yeah. My initial thing as a really small kid—like 12, 13—was: “I wished I'd been at The Marquee to see The Who in 1964,” right? As it turned out, I discovered when I wrote the Keith Moon book [“Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend” / “Dear Boy”] that I was born the week that Keith Moon joined The Who, almost to the day. And as the Punk / New Wave thing was exploding in ’77, we were only 13…[there] was this sense of: “Oh, I missed all the early days of punk. Now I've got to go see The Jam at the Hammersmith Odeon,” not realizing that they would actually have a bit of a dive with their second album. I'd be seeing them at The Marquee only two months later.

And then being right there in the thick of it for some of the New Wave, like seeing The Rezillos and The Undertones together—what just amorphously gets called “Post Punk.” And it's Scritti Politti and The Raincoats above a pub in Westbourne Grove in ’79.

[You] catalogue all this stuff and realize you were there, but [that feeling of missing out has] actually carried on. I'd heard about Burning Man for years but I was like, “Man, I'm just too late to this party!” Like I shouldn't go, but then it fell into place and I took my son. And we realized one of the first things everybody says to you is: “Welcome to Burning Man, it was better last year!” And it's a way to knock you off your stride. So I think that's really continual. Unless you were literally developing the manifesto for something brand new, you're always just influenced by something else, and there’s something else that you wish you'd been a part of.

Seth: This actually leans into another of my other questions. I hadn't quite put the pieces together, but you name it in the book: It's that punk (and especially The Jam) are about the voice of the underdog. It's not the people on top; it's not the people making the plays and setting the tone. It's about the people who feel like they don't have a shot.

Tony: This is where I feel so incredibly fortunate—and it doesn't matter that I missed out on early Pistols and Clash and the Roxy Club. None of that really matters. I thought of it as very much a DIY scene; it was everybody pressing up their own records and fanzines and bringing them into Rough Trade. So I've always prided myself that I had this foot in both camps because I was on the Mod revival which to me was like: “I get my Who in 1964,” just for like a few weeks. I get to go see bands in clubs, playing the music I'd wanted to see [from] 15 years earlier.

Seth: You’re also candid about how tough school was. I'm imagining you feeling your agency coming on as Jamming! takes off, as you discover music, as you get to go to these gigs and suddenly you're in the inner circle. 

Tony: Yes, I think that's what fueled a lot of the hostility I was getting at school. To be fair,  as we get older and we can reflect on who we were, I'm suitably embarrassed by who I was in many ways! I also didn't have a dad at home, and my mother was probably too close and too loving. And I think there were many ways in which I was not normal. And I don't mean in a good way; I think there were just ways I wasn't properly developed. And I'm sure that sort of manifested itself with me being a really annoying little twat at times.

But in fairness to myself—and it's hard to say this in an easy way—I was smart and people wanted me to go to better, posher schools. When I started off at my secondary school I just aced the class without trying. And there was an element of punk where we were all dumbing down. There were only 3 or 4 of us who really got it in a class of 30. And there's a lot of people who don't get it or they only got the violent side of it. But I could hold my own conversationally and [the kids on the terraces] liked having me as a little mascot. And the shops and the record labels all welcomed me in so I developed proper acquaintances with the likes of [Rough Trade’s] Geoff Travis really early on; [printer] Joly MacFie took me under his wing. Like literally at 14.

I would go and just hang out at Scritti Politti’s squat and try and learn from them. I was getting my education elsewhere, so it became harder and harder for me to come back into school and have to sit in a history lesson when I just had somebody trying to talk to me about Jacques Derrida or Communism. There was probably like a real hostility to it [from my peers]. 

Part II: The Perils of Meeting Your Heroes

Seth: You posted audio of a cassette, a live recording of [your teenaged band] Apocalypse opening for one of The Jam’s final shows. When I was coming of age—12, 13, just as I’m starting to join bands—and becoming aware there’s an underground, The Jam were one of the first bands where I recognized: “Oh, they see what I see; I’m not alone.” There was a deep identification and I had this fantasy: What if I could meet them? What would it be like if our bands could play together? And then you post this recording, and I realize you actually did that. 

So the reason for this preamble is: As a writer, I have to dance with the idea of reverence. I want to express how I felt as a young person looking up to people I admired. But as a writer, reverence is tricky to pull off, because it degrades objectivity. How do you approach that writing about people like Keith Moon or The Jam? 

Tony: It does come up, it definitely does. There's obviously a very big difference between [nonfiction and] memoir; memoir allowed me to literally relive being in the room and feeling that I had to be honest about my emotions. And I talk about the reverence I had for some of these people, and that they were good to me and welcomed me in. Why not welcome in a 14-year-old fanzine writer who at least knows how to ask a question—rather than the hostility of the professional press? And [as the publisher of a fanzine], I didn't want to waste my time with people I didn't like. Yeah, the only exception would be if you really liked somebody and then they did something you didn't like and you wanted to talk to them about it.

That's that memoir side of it. When it comes to biography, my feeling is that there's only a few things you get to actually put your name on in life. We all have to work, and lots of my friends have jobs they hate, they don't particularly agree with the company they work for. We all have to figure out a way to make it through life and so what I'm saying is, every now and then—even as a freelance journalist—you only have so many things you get to attach your name to, and books are one of them. And you have to have a love, which is not reverence, but a love for your subject. You have to be ready to spend a couple of years with your subject. So whether it's the Smiths or Wilson Pickett or Keith Moon or R.E.M., you have to be ready to subject yourself to spending a lot of time with this subject. And you have to be ready to listen to the same record many times. Fortunately pretty much everybody I've written about, I've loved those records at the end. And you have to be able to take a few hits. You have to be ready for the fact that you may piss somebody off. And I don't like pissing people off. I don't like confrontations at all. But you have to be ready for the fact that you may be writing something that somebody who's alive is not gonna necessarily agree with.

I never go out of my way to do that, but I have to be prepared and I have to acknowledge—particularly with people like Keith Moon or Wilson Pickett—that they were incredible [artists] and that came at a really heavy price for those that were around them. It was a little easier going into the Pickett book because I knew what I was going to be dealing with. With Keith Moon, it was this steady unraveling. There were layers of getting to the point of: “Oh my gosh I'm not sure how much I actually like this person anymore, even though I love him!”

Seth: Incredibly, with Moon you have a moment of personal interaction [in “Boy About Town”], which is the kind of seed of it all! 

Tony: When I wrote about Keith Moon—here's just one example—Keith went knocking on Carlo Little’s door, Carlo Little of the Savages who was the big rock and roll drummer on the scene, and he was a superstar in West London with Screaming Lord Sutch and his band. Keith went backstage and said: “Will you teach me the drums?” I do think that everybody is actually quite flattered in a way to be approached and they also remember what it was like to be a kid and trying to knock on doors and find your way in.

Seth: This may be a complete sidebar, but I grew up in the Washington, D.C. punk scene. And there’s a real through line to The Jam. You can look on YouTube and see footage from The Jam’s soundchecks and—you know this well—but they had a policy of letting the kids who couldn't come to the show in for the soundcheck. And there’s 8mm footage scanning out across a crowd of 13-year-olds filling the hall. And that deeply moves me. And that spirit is very present in bands like Fugazi, this idea of approachability and generosity—which is not universal. 

Tony: Yeah. I understand mildly regretting some scene you never experienced! The D.C. hardcore scene sounds amazing to me and (especially) the straightedge aspect of it—which we most certainly were not. I’m quite in awe of what Fugazi pulled off.

The Jam were a very commercial group. The fact that they attracted such a young audience often worked against them. There were people who said [the band] were very simplistic and that's why they were popular with 13- and 14-year-olds, and in some ways I'm way more admiring of a band that decided to stay independent, similar to Fugazi. What's been really interesting to me doing my fanzine podcast in the last couple of years is the number of times Crass has come up as the biggest influence. Forget the Pistols, forget the Clash. Crass has come up. And it’s with people that I have spent time with—Tim Burgess of The Charlatans and the Hartnoll brothers [Orbital]—two acts that you just wouldn't expect to have grown up on Crass.

Seth: Do you still have a relationship with Paul Weller?

Tony: Nope!

Seth: [Laughs.] Okay.

Tony: It was just a moment in time. There's potentially a longer answer to that I think; if you start digging in you realize that Paul's left a lot of…. I think he’s deified to a degree that I don't believe is justified. And I don't mind saying that because I don't think most of the people I admire want to be deified anyway. I look back on [those days] as being like an incredible journey that is almost like watching somebody else's life story, and I do feel really fortunate for it.

But again when you talk about missing out on things, the pocket money only went so far. There were only so many [gigs] you could afford to go to. [There was a lot] of Black music that I didn't get into at the time; it's a lifetime of catching up. And I know a lot of people are jealous of me because I saw The Jam countless times [but] it was often at the expense of other music. I didn't get to see The Clash remotely as much as I should have done; I didn't get to see The Buzzcocks back in the day. I didn't get to see Blondie back in the day. It was always just around The Jam. I am the one who threw myself in lock stock and barrel to The Jam, and when the band broke up, that was the end of a lot of people's relationship with Paul Weller.

Part III: On Punk, Aging, and Our Evolving Relationship to Music

Seth: There's a tension writing about the D.C. punk scene. You can go down one of two roads: You can become a sort of absolutist, like “my time growing up was the most important, this scene and this culture was the most important.” Or you can recognize that it’s the animating spirit that’s important—not the specifics.

All this to say: What you’re naming is that it's not just the art that’s important, it's the liberation. It's the liberation from feeling like an underdog. It's the liberation from a less-than-happy home life (and I think everyone who came to punk had some kind of a father wound). It's this notion that we have agency to go and discover the world and actually participate in it. To me, that's far more interesting than: “I was there in ’82.”

Tony: I agree with you. And the agency is really important. And I wrote about a lot of this in my post [“Generation Gap? What Generation Gap?”]. You gotta accept that the world moves on. I don't want to just listen to the old music; I want listen to what's new—there’s too much of it!

But I was going to get to a point that music is now seen as something of a career. You know, The Who thought they were going to be a flash in the pan, and The Beatles [and] The Stones. The punk bands did and they were right to some extent.

The world has changed. There's a lot of money floating around—less of it now!—but if you do this right and build up your talents in the (music) industry you may have a 30- or 40-year career. I do feel that in the old days—gosh, careful with that term—but it attracted the misfits and the loners and the people who didn't fit in and that was what rock and roll had for people who didn't fit in. You had the embrace of this music culture. 

Seth: I absolutely agree with you, and it's something I express many times to people who didn’t grow up in the same scene as I did. I'm 53; it'd be very easy for me to say “Things are different and therefore not as good.” I don't. However, I do feel that the rock and punk scenes really were a haven for truly marginal people who could not figure out how to live any other way. And there's something very beautiful about that.

Tony: There’s a quote from Dee Dee Ramone, go find it because I'm always using it and I'm sure I mangle it more every time. What it came down to was: “Normal people don't join rock and roll groups.” What that came out of was I'm sure him being asked about his own very difficult background and the characters in The Ramones. And he's making a point that normal people go off and get jobs.

Seth: I often ask younger people what today’s version of punk is. There's any number of kids recreating the original culture with dyed hair or leather jackets. But I think today’s version of punk is not visible to us—by design. It's people who are unplugging or detaching from the network and making their own art. It's not made for our consumption. It's not made to be shared [with us]. Frankly that gives me hope. I believe it's out there and I don't need to interface with it. I don't think I can. 

Tony: The most important thing with aging is just not to turn into that old person. I don't need to be a music critic who gets assigned the new Olivia Rodrigo album or whatever. That's good, because very often this music's not touching me emotionally. But I understand how it would be touching somebody else emotionally. And I do think that us people who've been around music a long time, I do think we have that understanding of that basic—it's such a cliché word, but I can't think of a better one—“is it authentic?” And it can be authentic recorded on a phone transmitted around council estates that I wouldn't dare step foot in. And it can equally be authentic when I hear a big production by Chappell Roan. I'm hearing that and it's wonderful and it's utterly authentic! Like opposite extremes. In either case is it aimed at me? No, but I'm really glad it's there and there will always be people doing that stuff. It's up to us to get out of the way and let them do it really, I deeply appreciate that. I think it is important to get out the way and let people have their platform to experiment and be who they are and not think that it has to find its way to your Spotify playlist.

Seth: And ironically Spotify being kind of the worst end result from an artist’s standpoint.

Tony: And I use them specifically because so much success now is measured in Spotify listens and YouTube views. It's really nice to actually now be on the platform with Qobuz [streaming service] where there are no numbers and you can just get back to the music. And I think ultimately Facebook and YouTube would be better off without those numbers as well, probably Substack too. It's just what it is: Everything is numbers. 

Part IV (Bonus Question): What the Hell Are Sleaford Mods?

Seth: I have one “extra credit” question for you: How would you explain Sleaford Mods to an American?

Tony: [Laughs]. I think sometimes people think I know more about British music than I do. But what I like about Sleaford Mods is there's this really good combination of…I was gonna say “classic working-class poetry.” but it’s with an understanding of all the music that has filtered and gone through the UK, where we have a lot of people in a very small island. It’s very intense and that helps explain why most people get exposed to different sorts of musics and things because it's just that dense.

Seth: I notice that talking with my older punk friends in D.C.—which is still how I take in a lot of newer music—they’ve all lost their minds over Sleaford Mods. 

Tony: I love it when something like that happens and you can join the dots back. [I’m] really taken by something like that. I've got friends in the States who always want to talk about The Fall. There are certain characters that have a very certain sort of influence that just goes so far beyond their own background. Mark E. Smith is a really good example of that. The audience he eventually reached—which when you consider who he was, his background, what he was talking about, how he lived his life—is pretty enormous.

Seth: Thank you Tony! What a pleasure and a gift this conversation has been.

Tony: Here’s a great way to close because I want to give you some props and me at the same time. I wrote “Boy About Town” because I wanted to write it, but I wrote it because I also thought it would connect. And it did, but I always thought its connection would just be “my generation”—deliberately using those two words—of my crowd, going down 5 years, coming up 5 years at most. And that was its core audience, those people who said: “Yeah I grew up in London in the ‘70s, and although you lived this unusual life, there's enough there that I identify with, it's why I love the book.”

[But] it is such a joy for me to see that there are people in the United States—or in Spain where the book got translated and published—and especially there were plenty of girls who really loved the book and identified. Because I knew it was very much a boy's story. And we lived at that time in a very sexually segregated world, and it means a lot to me that the book connected further than where I hoped it would. It really does. It makes me happy. And if it gave anybody something other than jealousy at not seeing The Jam, then it was a success.