The Beat Defender

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…

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MOJO (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2025

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