Pop Art Poems

SHAUN HAND
Pop Art Poems: The Music of the Jam
(Amazon & Elsewhere)

Shaun Hand’s Pop Art Poems: The Music of the Jam, reads in some respects like Lizzy Goodman’s seminal Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011, the verbalised street story of those bands that came to prominence after the turn of the century. LIzzy lets loose the tales that took them off the streets. Shaun Hand’s Pop Art Poems has the same immediate immediacy of the very best creative nonfiction. It plants you instantly inside an evolving story of musical and youthful hope, ambition and change. It’s so intimate, you might as well be learning to play the guitar the Weller way. Learning to play with Paul. It puts you into the studio with the band, documenting every recording session ever from the earliest Jam days, and earlier still. The world outside the studio is changing fast and those locked inside with the music were ready. 

Shaun's other work, the novels, The Strange Deaths of White Working Class Men (2024), The Sadness of The King George (set in Sutton Colfield) and his recordings as Birmingham Music Library reveal his great versatility as an writer and musician. His fiction, driven by an array of characters you may not love and his instrumental music, acerbic, off-kilter, possibly very, withdrawn, often quietly understated are the work of a singular artist. (He does sound like a shoo-in for a role at Outsideleft!)  But, why then, boot up a career with an exhaustive book about the Jam? Shaun knows...

Outsideleft: It doesn’t feel like an obvious thing to take on such depth of research required to do what you did… What made you want to do it. Did it start out as something else and become what it is….
Shaun Hand: I always wanted to write this kind of book from way back. I loved song-by-song books like Revolution in The Head (about The Beatles), Songs That Saved Your Life (The Smiths), and The Complete Clash. I thought The Jam deserved a decent one too, so it was always intended to be in the format it is.

OL: Not all music books, if many, are written by musicians there are fascinating insights because you can play…
SH: Ta! That’s one thing that I strongly feel gets overlooked about The Jam—their musicianship. A lot of the stuff written about them is “by the fans, for the fans”, which is great, but some of the more technical, analytical stuff gets lost in the process. That said, I wanted to balance it so that non-musicians could still enjoy it—I like depth but not dryness.

OL: Did you ever get any feedback about the book from any of the Jam people?
SH: Yes, their A&R guy Dennis Munday wrote a kind review on his Facebook page, which was much appreciated. I did send one to each band member but never heard anything. Bruce Foxton posted his straight back, albeit autographed.

OL: Is it still in print?
SH: Yes. After the first edition sold out, I gave it a fresh edit and started selling it through Amazon, where it can still be found in paperback or ebook form. I’m still happy talk about it; it got me on the Paul Weller podcast.

OL: Why start your writing career here?
SH: After I graduated (aged 27), I made a couple of abortive attempts at a novel but succumbed to procrastination. By that December, despite having a first-class degree (or maybe because of it?), I was working 13-hour shifts in Café Rouge (boo hiss, etc.) and having a fairly standard post-uni breakdown (they affect mature students too, you know). Café Rouge let me go with 24 hours’ notice a couple of days before Christmas, so I started taking Citalopram, slept for a couple of days, and decided to start writing that book on The Jam I’d always planned to write. In short, it was therapy and escapism as much as anything else. I could lose myself in researching what the Top 40 looked like in December 1982 and forget that I was skint, unemployed and depressed.

OL: How do you approach a book about a band that hasn’t existed (in your lifetime?) without getting into mewling nostalgia.
SH: I never thought about it, to be honest, but it probably made it easier and idefinitely made it more fascinating. One of my main aims was to place The Jam in their time, as opposed to amongst a load of mod targets. That meant researching the contemporary landscape and trying to imagine what it felt like to be alive in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. It was great in that respect, as that’s my favourite period of music and I often feel like I was born 25 years too late.

OL: Is there a high and low and Would you ever do anything like this again?
SH: I remember enjoying the challenge of researching and writing it. It was a chance to discover loads of great records, too ('There It Is' by Shalamar. What a tune!). It was also relatively successful, both in terms of reception and sales, which was gratifying. I do regret not employing a proofreader, though, as the first edition is typo-ridden, which is embarrassing. I’m now a freelance writer and editor by trade, so I was able to correct that in the second edition.

I do find I’m a lot less “into” The Jam since, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing or that the book ruined them for me; writing it was almost like releasing a pressure valve—I dropped from obsession to a much healthier level of just being really into them.

I’m trying to do something similar at the moment by writing a history of music in Birmingham. But as I’m wiser to how these things work, I’m pitching it to publishers and agents first rather than spending years writing it and then going through the submission process, which can feel like stepping on rake after rake, especially when you get nothing but rejection (as happened with my most recent, criminally underrated novel. Boo hiss, etc.). It's a much more ambitious project, and I've had a couple of knockbacks already, but I keep trying to come back to just enjoying the process. It's still the same principle of discovering great songs and writing about them ('Still Moment in Time' by The Quads. Proper lost classic). 

Birmingham Music Library is here

OUTSIDELEFT BOOK WEEK
Billy Childish: To Ease My Troubled Mind
Alan Moore: Behind the Illusion
Shaun Hand: The Jam Pop Art Poems
Moving Music: The Memoirs of Rikki Stein