Jilted John

As Jilted John, Graham Fellows went to number 4 in the singles charts in August 1978. He released three singles and an album, all produced by the late Martin Hannett.

Punk span off a handful of novelty hits, songs like 'Banana Splits
(Tra-La-La)' 'Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, Please', and
any number which had to have been written and recorded with tongues
planted firmly in cheeks (viz: virtually everything the Sex Pistols and
Sham 69 did). But the pick of the bunch has to be Jilted John's
eponymous tale of teen angst, rejection and confrontation, underpinned
by its wickedly infectious "Gordon Is A Moron" chorus and featuring
perhaps the most poignant line ever to grace a Pop song, "I was so upset
that I cried all the way to the chip shop."

And if Jilted John had left it there, just the one killer single (NB:
its flip, Going Steady, was just as good), it would still have been one
of the outstanding records of the Punk era. No question.
But somehow, Jilted John's prometheus 18-year-old, Manchester-based,
Sheffield Polytechnic drama student Graham Fellows managed to conjure up
a whole album as well! And to complete a near-perfect body of work, the
LP turned out not to be merely an exercise in cynical opportunism, but a
slice of genuine inspiration, arguably the finest concept album of its
era (despite what Fellows himself thinks!).

Yet like so many of R&R's best stories, Jilted John's very existence
owed everything to a fragile combination of luck, inspiration and sheer
chance. As Fellows recalls: "It all came about by naiveté really. I'd
written a couple of songs and I wanted to record them.. So I went into a
local record shop and asked if they knew any indie or Punk labels. They
said there were two, Stiff in London and Rabid just down the road. So I
phoned Rabid up, and they told me to send in a demo"
'We did the demos with the late Colin Goddard - of Walter & the Softies
- on guitar, and the drummer and bass player of The Smirks. I took it
along to Rabid, who loved it... so we rerecorded it a few days later, at
Pennine Studios, with John Scott playing guitar & bass and Martin Zero
(aka Martin Hannett) producing. Martin did a great job creating the
vocal choruses and that bass pattern before the 'here we go, two, three,
four' bit."

Rabid issued the single (TOSH 105) with the artist credit to Jilted
John, taken from the title of the B-side ("...originally, I was going to
be called John Thomas!"). However, although 'Going Steady' was the
designated A-side, Piccadilly Radio began playing the flip, following
which a couple more local ILR stations also began to pick up on it. The
disc then began to move, and 'Jilted John' was hastily re-promoted as
the topside.

Fellows even played a handful of gigs as his Jilted John alter-ego: "I
think we only did about six or seven.. all in Manchester. Although to be
totally honest, I only really did those to get an Equity card!" By all
contemporaneous accounts these were shambolic - if fairly amusing -
affairs, Fellows decked out in Jilted John's best quilted anorak, coming
on all nerdy, geeky and awkward, with Bernard Kelly doing his Gordon The
Moron routine:
Bernard was my 'Baz' really, but he was also a big musical influence -
he knew far mote about Pop music than I did and he was a really
important part of the live presentation. He'd do a moronic dance, some
finger-jiving, and then just stand there in a catatonic state He even
had his own fans, and eventually started doing gigs on his own"Rabid, meanwhile, had got their marketing act together, using the sleeve
pic - of 'John' clutching the ubiquitous bag of chips, looking sad, with
'Gordon' and 'Julie' sneering behind him - as an effective promotional
tool. It began to sell heavily in the North-West and NME soon picked up
on it, Tony Parsons designating it Single Of The Week' status in late
May. Then, just weeks later Paul Morley penned a typically-OTT piece in
NMF on the Manchester scene, homing in on Rabid and Jilted John in
particular, viz: '.. classic... a wondrous hybrid of the heartfelt
pessimistic perception of Shelley and the blow-dried innocent optimism
of Child. This is an everyday, ordinary tale of everyday adolescent
infatuation, and yet it is conceived and performed definitively: a Pop
drama, no less. Ultimately, absurdly, there is too much intense
accessibility for it to be a commercial success, even if it had the
backing of a major label."

It continued to shift in increasing numbers and eventually showed up in
an unofficial indie listing compiled by Record Business researcher Barry
Lazell - who promptly fell in love with the disc and played it
repeatedly in the office, eventually persuading the mighty EMI Records
that it might be worth a punt. Next, John Peel got into it and began
plugging it heavily on his Radio One show - at that time the ultimate
badge of critical acclaim. EMI finally reissued it on their EMI
International label (EMI INT 567) the first week in August, and sat back
whilst it emphatically proved Paul Morley's prognostications wrong.
'Jilted John' eventually peaked at #4, shifting nearly half a million
units, and for two or three months Fellows was everywhere - he even
turned up briefly in Coronation Street, chatting Gail Tilsley up in a
cinema queue. He also made a memorable TOTP debut 'That first one was
great. The band were superb, and Bernard's dance routine was terrific.
It was years ahead of its time... quite arty... deconstructed, even.
Mind you, the next time I did TOTP I forgot the words!" It also allowed
a rare photo opportunity with Debbie Harry ("and I got a snog off her!")
Early interviews fielded Fellows and Kelly in tandem, and consisted
largely of the former winding the interviewer up, convincing them that
he really was Jilted John, a naive, anorak-wearing nerd - an abject
failure with girls, who was better off breeding fancy mice.Although NME's Morley wasn't taken in, less tuitive Melody Maker, Sounds
and Record Mirror hacks gleefully printed the nonsense that Fellows fed
them. But as to where he was really coming from, in a rare moment of
lucidity he'd told Morley "In February of this year I bought an electric
guitar for £17.50. I can't play so I tuned it open and got flat chords
to write my songs. I just went 'Shoo ooh ooh shoop' and a tune flowed.
The single was the first thing I wrote.. it came in an afternoon of
sheer inspiration. Then Bernard came round and played 'drums' on a
Monopoly box..."

The LP - when it finally arrived, in December - was a revelation. A
genuine concept album, with recurring themes and musical phrases, shapes
& patterns, it remains Punk's supreme triumph. It's riddled throughout
with classic, throwaway couplets, notably in 'Baz's Party':"All the boys
have got brightly-coloured shirts/ and all the girls are in
mini-skirts/each hoping she's the sex-i-est/we're hoping our Sta-Prest
stay pressed" "I'm drinking as fast as I can/ while we all sing
'Telegram Sam" "There's a boy puking up in the lavatory his name's
Baz/it's his party". But there's loads more of em, everywhere: "Barry is
my mate/and we can sup/two bottles of cider each and still stand up";
"One summer's day in 73 I looked in the mirror and it terrified me/what
I saw was right out of place/bumfluff and acne all over my face"; "I
know that being an adolescent/is not particularly pleasant"; "I got up
at half-past six/and had two Weetabix". Priceless!
But ironically, to this day Fellows remains ambivalent about the LP: "To
be honest, I was disappointed with it - particularly that re-cut of
'Jilted John'. It all sounds so over-arranged and over-produced. Not
Punk at all. By the time we did the album, Martin's musical taste had
changed.. he'd decided he didn't like John Scott's guitar after all, so
he kept John's contribution to a minimum. Instead he went for a far more
commercial feel, using all the keyboards. Steve Hopkins played those.
Consequently, the album ended up sounding very much softer than the
songs had sounded at the rehearsals."
"Then again, I think I was taking it all a bit too seriously there was
no-one to step back and say 'hang on, don't let's do it like that, let's
do it like this. That's where I missed Bernard - he and I had fallen
out... we'd had a fight at a gig one night. Stupid, really, but you do
daft things when you're 19. If he'd been around for the album sessions,
I'm sure it would have come out different... more like I would have
wanted..."

A couple of points which have always intrigued me are (a) why, when the
story is set in the North-West, does Jilted John sound like Robbie from
Eastenders, and (b) why was it that those superbly goofy girls' voices
were so obviously done by a bloke? (thus rendering the girls so
spectacularly thick). Fellows recalls: "John's accent was a bit of a
problem... we just hadn't really thought it through, I suppose. The
original single was intended as a straight send-up of Punk, and all the
early Punk records I'd heard came from London
(affects cockney accent: 'Ere we go, one, two, free'). I just went along
with that.. and we stayed with it for the LP. I did all the voices
myself - I was a big-headed bugger in those days, thought I could do
everything and I probably just didn't spend as much time on the girls'
voices as perhaps I should."

But the bottom line remains that you just don't release an LP a week
before Christmas unless it's White Christmas - and in the final analysis
only NME allocated it much more than a passing nod, giving it to a
teenaged Julie Burchill to review. Astonishingly, La Burchill didn't
deliver the expected hatchet job, and although she affected sniffiness
about a couple of tracks, she readily acknowledged the LP for the flawed
classic it patently was (although being Burchill, she of course got well
carried away, drawing inane musical comparisons with then cult bands like
The Doors, The Zombies and Love). Nonetheless, as she observed, "Unlike
most Pop singers who attempt to hang on to their adolescence John is
fresh out of his, and throughout Side One is clinging to pre-pubescence
like a dying man. He does it well." She went on to gush: "Side One is
remarkable for its memory/imagination/honesty.." singling 'Baz's Party'
out for special praise, adding "Side Two is a concept within a
conceptette, and towards the end it actually gets great. 'Karen's
Letter' is a soapy yet serious killer, a deserter-girl's lament read by
John in choicest Shangri-Lamonologue, whilst 'Shirley' has the most
brillian t music, like The Seeds' one and only riff, high on reserved
English desperation instead of dumb acid. The last quarter of this album
is actually stupendous..."

However, by the time his follow up single 'True Love' (b /w 'l Was A
Pre-Pubescent', EMl INT 577, Jan '79) was out, Fellows was back at drama
college, his Jilted John persona already behind him. Consequently, with
no artiste available to promote them, both the album and the single
stiffed (the LP ended up selling around 15,000 units). Sadly, 'The
Birthday Kiss' (b/w 'Baz's Party', EMl INT 587, April '79) fared little
better (a scandal, that: shoulda been a Number One!), ditto the three
cash-in singles, Gordon The Morons 'Fit For Nothing' (Rabid TOSH 111,
Spring '79) and Julie & Gordon's 'Gordon's Not A Moron' and 'J-J-Julie
(Yippee Yula)', both on Pogo. Ironically, the Julie & Gordon releases
were very nearly the subject of legal action from Rabid, although
Fellows himself was tickled that anyone was 'ufficiently impressed to
want to do an 'answer disc'.

Meanwhile, those of us who'd had the foresight to blag/buy/nick the
album the first time around have cherished it over the years,
occasionally running off cassette copies for less fortunate friends
who'd missed out on it (NB: noted Jilted John fans include Jarvis
Cocker, Damon Albarn, Mark Lamarr arid the bloke from Carter USM). The
most miserable period of my life was when the ex-wife effected custody
of all my records. Took me years to track down a replacement copy - and
I was never able to get another Mice & Ladders game!
Topped and tailed by the original Rabid single, the magnificently
gormless 'Going Steady' ("I go with her/to watch telly the kids are
horrible and the house is dead smelly") and the Punkier, angrier version
of 'Jilted John', this marks 'True Love Stories' CD debut.

And what of Jilted John himself? Well, Fellows of course eventually
re-emerged with a rather more resilient character, John Shuttleworth,
the self-styled 'worst songwriter in the world' and the star of many-a
BBC TV and Radio series. However Graham has recently devised a new
character, Brian Appleton A Rock musicologist and part-time lecturer in
media studies, Brian - from the West Midlands - delivers a lecture on
the true history of R&R, with Brian himself as the unsung hero ("He's
the Forrest Gump of R&R"). As these liner notes go to press, Brian is
about to be unveiled at the Edinburgh Festival.
Roger Dopson

acknowledgements: special thanks to Graham Fellows, and also to Richard
Bucknell Management, Tosh Ryan, Dave Wilson, NME, Sounds, Music Week,
Alex Lilburn, John Galpin, Frank Lea.

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