RIP Rick Buckler & Why you Should Always Compliment Strangers

The date is June 12, 2010. I'm on a flight back from Ireland to the UK and I've noticed someone on the end of my aisle wearing a very cool leather jacket. I compliment him on it, and say he should be in a band with that jacket. He replies, 'I was.'

Turns out that band was The Jam and he (Rick Buckler) was the drummer. I immediately whisked out my dictaphone and asked if I could interview him. Incredibly he said yes so I shuffled the manager over to an empty seat on the other side. With the recent passing of Rick, I thought it might be timely if I publish this interview now, never seen nor heard before. I have it on audio should anyone wish to listen to the file.

You've got a book coming out, Rick. It's called That's Entertainment, all about the years in The Jam. So you say about 80,000 words. How long did it take to actually get the book together from start to finish?

RB: I still say I started doing it over a period of months, just making notes, and then eventually I realized that I have probably had enough to put all the bits together. So I suppose, about 10

months really. I mean, the book is not in a chronological order. It starts off with The Jam's split in 1982, get that out of the way. And then it sort of darts backwards and forwards over my school years, right up to sort of the present day, and backwards and forwards.

Did you keep any handwritten notes, set lists etc?

RB: I had a lot of tour itineraries and that sort of thing, which I draw the facts and figures from. And I've got a website which is called the jam fan.net (still active) which is really just the archive of Jam photographs and data and information and what gigs we did and that sort of thing, but it is just an archive site. So that was really helpful because I put that together. It's nice to draw some of the information. But like I say, the book isn't really written in a chronological order. It's written in a thoughtful way, as you would as your brain works, I suppose, as you remember things you know. Like one thing that happened was relative to something that happened years ago, and cause and effect and all that sort of thing.

So basically a stream of consciousness?

RB:It's not written like a diary. You know, 'then I woke up in the morning and then I had breakfast tea'. It's not like that. My initial approach was to try and write it down in the correct order in which everything happened. But it doesn't really work. Your brain isn't wired like that, even though you can't really unload your brain from the minute you're starting the band and then onwards, the most immediate thoughts and the most present thoughts are the ones you want to get out there first, and then you can perhaps fill in the gap later on.

So why? Why do you think it's the right time to write the book?

RB: Like I say, it was just something that I wanted to do. It took about 10 months. And so when it was pretty much done, I thought, well, I might as well just go and get it published. Yeah, there was no real rhyme and reason. No real sort of grand scheme to it.

What are Jam fans like?

RB:It's a weird thing with Jam fans, that they're incredibly dedicated, and I think because we had such a great relationship with our fans at that time. That's gone on, even from last night, (a book signing) we belong to them and they belong to us. It was a real close relationship. And the most amazing thing for me is people who weren't alive have got into the music coming along. Yeah, they seem to be just as much into it as maybe the dead.

What are people going to read in the book that they didn't know about?

RB: They're really going to know about what happened with The Jam. It's really the side of the story from being a working musician in a band that becomes very successful. I'm sure a lot of people will relate to that; get into bands and play clubs. It shows that there's no magic ingredient to it, really. In that respect, it's not like a business plan that you can put together and say, this is all the ingredients. It's lightning in a bottle sometimes. You see a lot of bands for inexplicable reasons, don't don't click, don't work. So I certainly feel very lucky the band that I was involved

in did, because it's not everybody who makes it really gets the attention that goes on and does all the things that we did. I mean, everything we wanted to do is when we were growing up, we did. But what we didn't see coming, it was only after five years of being professional that was it. It was all over at the top of our game.

And it was the most, strangest experience to go through as well after all of the good luck and the hard work, etc. I always find that's most amazing thing with fans these days, that, for example, with The Jam, you're leaving so much money on the table. You're leaving so much potential behind. When you've done all the hard work and you've got there, you think, well, even if we just put our feet up and post this for the next couple of years, we can still bang out a couple of albums.

A bit like the Stone Roses as well. I mean, we were never once resting on our laurels. If you listen to every single one of the albums, they're different from the album before. We always went out of our way not to go over old ground. We've already done that. So we'll go on to something else. We would deliberately take a different tactic with an album, for instance. And so go back to basics.

We'll have some completely different approach to it, which, because a lot of bands go 'that will do'. We'll make another album, the same as the last album, the last album was successful. So this one, yeah, same formula, and then that's when you become bored. I think that's one of the things that is fatal for groups to become boring. Once they become boring, that's not what it's about, really. So I suppose we never, ever had the chance to fall into that trap, which is probably a good thing. But on the other hand, I know that we really should have had maybe a couple more years, maybe two or three more albums in us, which we should have done.

You only learn that in hindsight. At the time, you don't think that at all.

You said that Paul Weller's not really reached out to you, how much has that hurt you?

RB: We could obviously understand that if he wanted to leave the band, and we all lived with that decision, and that's fair enough. We're all big enough to absorb that one. What I found was, and I know Bruce felt the same way that we didn't really understand was his comments like, 'oh, we weren't mates anyway and we never really got on anyway.' Where'd that come from?

Anybody who's in a band knows that if you don't get on with people, you don't exist. And yet, we did exist. Why this sudden, this outburst of those comments, really. And it just seems. I feel unnecessary, maybe I think it's not very civil, it's not very polite. It's just something very odd about that, why somebody would take a view like that and to not answer your correspondence or your telephone calls or your emails.

Thanks, Rick, thanks for taking the time out. Sorry, I've cornered you on the plane here. Hopefully it kills 15 minutes.