When Den Davis (The Jam’s archivist) asked me if I wanted to interview Rick about his new book I thought, hang on, why do I want to ask questions when the man who knows more about The Jam than even the band does is sat next to me? So, I just shut up, let the camera roll and took notes. Remember the old adage. If you’ve got a Ferrari, there’s no point keeping it in the garage.
We met up at Rick’s home, so it was a very chilled interview, but the depth of feeling and remorse of the year came through….
Den: 1981 was a quiet year. Were you all a bit burnt out at that point?
Rick: We were up to other things, recording. We started The Gift at the end of ’81. I don’t think we were ever really quiet. We were always very busy doing something, though we probably did decide to pull back a bit.
Den: From a fans’ perspective, two singles and an import was all we got. The two singles didn’t do so well as previous releases; both reached number four, rather than number one. Was that part of the reason that you weren’t releasing The Gift until March ’82?
Rick: It wasn’t really up to us. Polydor set the release dates. We knew six months in advance what we were doing and scheduled live work around release dates.
Den: You did plenty of international stuff; TV programmes across Europe, a Paris gig, Sweden and Japanese tours too. So you were still on the treadmill of tours. Normally around October, November we’d get an album with an associated tour. In
