Down in the Tube Station at Midnight: The Best Song The Jam Never Recorded
Rick Buckler, drummer for The Jam, passed away this week. His contributions to the band's sound were immense, and rarely better than on Down in the Tube Station at Midnight—one of The Jam’s most distinctive singles.
The lyrics, among Paul Weller’s finest, tell a gripping story of a brutal attack in a tube station, growing darker with each verse. On the surface, the song's protagonist—a socially ambitious man on his way home—seems at odds with Weller’s usual working-class perspective. He is upwardly socially mobile, almost Thatcherite.
"I've a little money and a takeaway curry,
I'm on my way home to my wife.
She'll be lining up the cutlery,
You know she's expecting me,
Polishing the glasses and pulling out the cork.”
He meets his end at the hands of working class thugs, with the memorable line “they smelt of pubs/and wormwood scrubs/and too many right wing meetings” which could apply to all kinds of social media amplified right wing scumbags these days.
The British Class System: Self-Policing and Brutal
Weller was pop music's most astute observer of the British class system. The song captures the rigid, self-policing nature of Britain’s class system, where social mobility is often met with hostility—not from the upper class but from within the working class itself.
I grew up in a working class village in the north east of England and the worst crimes you could commit were having ideas above your station, forgetting where you came from. Actually the worst crimes were being gay belonging to an ethnic minority, but there weren’t any of those people so they found their enemies where they could.
The people who would police any kind of social mobility weren't the posh people at the top: they always had a bit of room for some fresh talent, but the working class people further down the hierarchy who knew instinctively that if the advantages accorded to gender, race and sexuality were removed they would be a lot lower down the order than they were. They violently enforced a class hierarchy where any attempt to move up was brutally put down.
British class politics, at its core, isn’t just Labour vs. Conservative—it’s egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. Weller understood this and hammered it home in song after song.
The Song That Never Was
The Jam recorded Down in the Tube Station at Midnight during a tough period. Their first two albums had sold reasonably well but not spectacularly. Under pressure from Polydor, they recorded a third album—only to scrap it due to poor quality.
Producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven was brought in to salvage the project. Despite their best efforts, Tube Station wasn’t working. They recorded multiple takes, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. Frustrated, Weller wanted to cut it from the album.
But in the middle of the night, Coppersmith-Heaven returned to the studio. Using a razor blade, he spliced together different takes, masking the edits with Buckler’s drumming and tube train sound effects. The result? A standout track on All Mod Cons, their first truly brilliant album.
More Than Just Keeping Time
We mostly associate The Jam with Weller’s sharp lyrics and guitar riffs, but some of their best moments broke that mold. Two of their No.1 hits—Start! and A Town Called Malice—were driven by Bruce Foxton’s bass and Buckler’s powerful drumming.
For me, the best example of Buckler’s brilliance is Funeral Pyre, one of The Jam's darkest tracks. Weller steps back, sharing vocals with Foxton, while his guitar delivers only jagged stabs of noise. The track is carried by Foxton’s bass and Buckler’s thunderous drumming. The lyrics paint a chilling picture of right-wing authoritarianism rising, without ever spelling it out.
With Tommy Robinson’s thuggish followers marching and authoritarianism creeping back globally, these songs feel more urgent today than ever.
A Life Beyond The Jam
After The Jam split, Buckler played in various bands, though never with the same success. He later became a furniture restorer but never lost his love for the music. He remained approachable, always happy to discuss the band with fans.