"The Jam Army were committed, dedicated and ferocious... Almost every day of my life I have a person in their 40s or 50s come up to me to say how much our music meant to them and telling me of their Jam gig experiences. That passion never withered or died.”

Paul Weller recognised just how passionate and dedicated The Jam’s fans were, a love that has continued long after the band split up in 1982.

One life-long fan from Watford, Stuart Deabill, has collated the memories, photos, ticket stubs and pin badges of his fellow Jam Army members in a book – Thick as Thieves: Personal situations with The Jam, to which Weller has written the foreword, above.

”He said it was the best book on the band he’d ever seen,” says Stuart. ”I met him two weeks ago for an interview – it was mental. We sat and drank tea and chatted about everything, it was brilliant.”

This meeting was the culmination of a lifetime’s membership of the Jam Army for Stuart, which began in 1979 when he was 13 and his cousin Claire played him Down in the Tube Station at Midnight. He made her play the record another four times before she said he could have it.

The book takes its title from The Jam song of the same name, and is, says Stuart, ”our stories about going to see them live, buying the records, and how much we loved them.”

Stuart remembers seeing the band perform at Wembley on their final tour in 1982. ”They smashed the place up, I had a really good seat down the front – it was great.

”My other personal highlight was when Going Underground went to number one in 1980. A friend had a transistor radio in the playground and we were huddled around it on the Tuesday lunchtime, all cheering.”

Stuart and Ian contacted their many friends among the Saturday’s Kids, as the fans are also known, after a Jam single, asking them to send, in 1,000 words, a memory, an incident and why they loved The Jam.

”Then we started hearing from people who worked with them, as well,” says Stuart, ”and getting to speak to the band themselves was a bonus.”

Stuart and Ian have spoken to the A&R man at Polydor, The Jam’s label, their producer and the sleeve designer, as well as bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler.

As well as fans’ reviews of each album and their memories of gigs, the book is full of anecdotes exemplifying the band’s close relationship with the fans and how well they looked after them – being given tickets by the band when the gigs were sold out; giving Weller some poems and him remembering them a year later; being invited in for tea by Weller’s dad John before a gig; getting a lift with the band to the next gig to save on train fares; and sitting in on a recording session and playing pool with the band during the breaks.

The book came out in September and is already having to be reprinted, such is the demand from Jam fans who want to relive their younger days and rejuvenate their love for the band.

”They were one of the iconic British bands,” says Stuart, ”and, through their music and through looking after them, they really did change their fans’ lives.”

  • Thick as Thieves: Personal Situations with The Jam is out now in bookshops and from Amazon.