Phil Bull Bsc🏇

Paul Weller and his father paid The Jam's drummer and bassist more than £100,000 partway through a High Court hearing in 1996. The drummer, Rick Buckler, had sold his gold discs to pay the lawyers. The manager holding the band's money was Paul's dad. In the video below, Buckler, who died in 2025, tells BBC Breakfast he barely saw any money while The Jam were famous: "It wasn't really until the band finished that you start seeing some of the profits." Those profits ran through John Weller, a bricklayer in summer and a taxi driver in winter. Polydor wanted a professional manager in 1977, and the band refused to sign without him. Each of the 3 got 25% of records and gigs, and songwriting money went to whoever wrote the song, almost always Paul. A couple of years after the split, Buckler says, "we basically caught John with his hand in the till." The settlement sent the royalties straight to him and Bruce Foxton, not through the management company. The case for Paul Weller: he wrote all 4 No.1 singles, he ended the band at its peak, and even Buckler gives him "the benefit of the doubt" that he didn't know what his dad was doing. If one partner's family counts the money, get your share paid to you directly from the first record. So did Paul Weller just write the songs and leave, or did his family keep money that belonged to all 3 of them? I post one famous deal like this every day, with who got paid, who got played, and the numbers that never made the poster.