The Beat Defender
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The Jam’s powerhouse drummer Rick Buckler left us suddenly on February 17. Pat Gilbert pays stunned tribute.
“I MUST ADMIT, I found it a little bit difficult,” said Rick Buckler, with admirable understatement, of The Jam’s dramatic split at the peak of their success in 1982. Speaking to MOJO’s Chris Catchpole about his 2022 photobook The Jam 1982, in one of his last in-depth press interviews, he continued, “It just seems so completely unreal, that here we were, after everything that we’ve done, for it to literally be junked… it felt like a sort of musical vandalism, when we felt we had so much more to do, so much more to record.”
A generation of Jam fans agreed with him – just as they knew the group would have been unthinkable with anyone else behind the kit. The Jam, one of the greatest bands of their era, would have been a hugely diminished force without their drummer’s singular skills and unassuming cool.
Buckler, the son of a postman turned GPO engineer, was born on December 6, 1955, in Woking. He was recruited into The Jam by Paul Weller and guitarist Steve Brookes in summer 1973, when the three were pupils at Sheerwater Secondary School. Rick was 17 at the time – two years older than Weller and Brookes – and had first encountered his new bandmates during jam sessions in the school’s music room. Unable to afford decent gear of his own, he had to borrow a drum kit from Guildford’s YMCA for his first live appearance, at Sheerwater Youth Club, for which Weller primed him with a stack of Chuck Berry records. Born Paul Richard Buckler, the drummer was also required to undergo a re-brand as ‘Rick’: there could only ever be one Paul in The Jam.