That's Entertainment
A Distracted Music Writer Tries To Watch A Movie
My wife and I recently watched Blitz On Apple TV.
It took me a beat to realize that Paul Weller of The Jam and The Style Council played the grandfather. I had convinced myself that it was Jeremy Irons, a bit of cognitive dissonance caused by my brain categorizing Weller as “musician” and not “actor.”
“Is that Paul Weller or the guy who played Kafka?” I asked my wife.
“Who?” she replied.
I looked it up on IMDB and sure enough it was the “Modfather” himself. (IMDB also reminded me that Weller played a dead Viking in season 4 of Sherlock.)
I pulled up the moody video for “That’s Entertainment,” one of my all time favorite songs by The Jam, to show my wife what peak cool Weller looked like—‘60s mod hair, suit jacket, Paisley button down shirt, acoustic guitar angrily strummed. It took a lot of will power for me to turn the song off and try too refocus my attention on the film.
This all happened in the course of a couple minutes while German bombs rained down on 1940s London across our large-screen TV. It’s a pretty perfect snapshot of how my family and I experience movies at home these days—too much discussion, endless distraction, phones in hand for fact, text and social media checking.
“That’s Entertainment” is a song about dismal working class conditions in late ‘70s/early ‘80s London, a world that almost seems like a war zone through Weller’s eyes.
A police car and a screaming siren
A pnuematic drill and ripped up concrete
A baby waiting and stray dog howling
The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking
Weller grew up in Woking, Surrey, but was living in The Big Smoke when he penned one of his signature tracks. In interviews, he claims to have written “That’s Entertainment” in “10 minutes flat” after a night on the town.
“It was so easy to write. I came back from the pub, drunk, and just wrote it quick. I probably had more verses, which I cut," Weller told Mojo in 2015. “It was just everything that was around me y'know. My little flat in Pimlico did have damp on the walls and it was fucking freezing.”
A smash of glass and the rumble of boots
An electric train and a ripped up phone booth
Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat
Lights going out and a kick in the balls
Some say the actual lyric is “the kicking of balls” which is even more British, especially in a “bread and circuses” football context.
To my American ears, the bleak Britishness of the poetic lyrics is part of what makes this song endlessly fascinating 45 years later. No wonder it has been covered by English musical royalty including Morrissey and Billy Bragg, among others:
Waking up at 6 a.m. on a cool warm morning
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard
Watching the tele and thinking about your holidays
Bragg has long been an outspoken advocate for the working class—including three Mermaid Avenue Woody Guthrie albums with Wilco—so his voice adds a lot of credence to the underlying themes of class struggle. But you might be surprised to hear why he counts “That’s Entertainment” among his favorite songs.
“What I love about it is that for all the suburban grit that’s in there it’s celebratory, it’s not damning,” Bragg told The Line of Best Fit in 2021, adding, “I’m uplifted whenever I hear that song, which is weird to say, because you wouldn't think of it as that kind of song. But I'm ‘I remember those days.’ And I remember the struggle to live a positive life in those circumstances.”
In particular, Bragg points to the skeptical flash of romance—a simple but profound human connection—that Weller weaves into his unapologetic appraisals:
Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude
To my ears, it’s the juxtaposition of Weller’s unflinching assessment with those fleeting moments of solace that put this track up there with some of the greatest British rock songs ever written, including “Waterloo Sunset” by The Kinks.
“That’s Entertainment” has always reminded me of The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.”
Although they were only released 13 years apart, each song is stylistically of its own era. Yet there is an undeniable commonality in the perspective, that of the artistic outsider surveying his surroundings and coming to comparably dark conclusions.
I think my mind first created a connection between the songs based on the “Two lovers kissing…” line from “That’s Entertainment,” which always struck me as a continuation (updating?) of the this verse from “Waterloo Sunset”:
Millions of people swarming like flies 'round
Waterloo underground
But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And they don't need no friends
As long as they gaze on
Waterloo Sunset
They are in paradise
Ray Davies’ lyrics from 1967 might seem positively tame compared to Weller’s post punk snarl from 1980, but both tap into similar reactions to the workaday chaos swirling all around them. And, of course, they’re both singing about getting lost in romance amidst the chaos of London.
Another 15 years later, Pulp unleashed their signature track “Common People” on Cool Britannia.
A scathing indictment of classicism, Jarvis Cocker and his London-by-way-of-Sheffield band tackle the topic of “class tourism” (aka “slumming”) with biting sarcasm and pointed condemnation:
Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you'll never get it right
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah
As with “Waterloo Sunset” and “That’s Entertainment,” this track—released in 1995—bares the sonic and stylistic hallmarks of the Brit pop ‘90s, but it’s possible to tug on the thematic threads connecting “Common People” with those predecessors.
Over the course of these three songs, the romance devolves from the simple escapism of Terry and Julie, to the mutual loneliness of The Jam’s “two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude,” to this pointedly pragmatic distillation from Pulp:
And then dance, and drink, and screw
Because there's nothing else to do
Together, these three tracks explore British working class life in the back half of the 20th century. There are countless other examples—John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” The Specials’ “Ghost Town”—but “Waterloo Sunset,” “That’s Entertainment” and “Common People” have always felt like a multigenerational narrative to me.
And that’s what I was thinking about for the better part of two hours while I was supposed to be watching Blitz.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This movie really made me think.
That’s modern entertainment, I guess.
Or maybe just my music writer’s brain?
25 Protest Songs Spanning Decades
S.W. Lauden is honored to be part of this project put together by
on the Rock and Roll With Me Substack. Can you guess which song he chose?
Nice piece!
You should watch more movies if we're going to get essays like this.