As the drummer with the Jam in the late 1970s and early 80s, Rick Buckler, who has died aged 69 after a short illness, helped to give the band its drive and urgency, as well as a smart, street-wise outlook in combination with his band-mates, Paul Weller on vocals and guitar and Bruce Foxton on bass.
Buckler was never a spectacular star drummer, but his contribution to the Jam’s distinctive, ever-evolving music was vital – as it had to be in a three-piece band, where there is no hiding place.
“I’m not the greatest in the world, but I did take a leaf out of Ringo Starr’s book,” he once said. “He realised that the song is the star. None of us were really outstanding musicians in a lot of ways, but I think we were trying to be as inventive as we possibly could, so that we worked well together as a band.”
Buckler’s pivotal role in creating the Jam’s sound helped them to become one of the most successful and influential of British bands, first at the forefront of the punk explosion and then as a more reflective outfit under the influence of soul, Motown, the Who, the Kinks and Small Faces.
His drumming featured on six highly popular and critically acclaimed studio albums from 1977 up to the band’s split in 1982, as well as on 18 consecutive top 40 singles in the UK, four of which went to No 1.
Buckler was born in Woking in Surrey, to Bill, a postman turned telephone engineer, and Peggy (nee White), a factory worker at the James Walker engineering firm, a big local employer. With his twin, Peter, and two much older brothers, John and Andrew, he grew up in a dilapidated terrace house in a street where nearby homes were soon being demolished in a postwar clearance programme.
His parents were members of the Baptist church, and as a boy he enjoyed going to weekly services – mainly for the music – as well as annual seaside holidays with other members of the congregation. At Sheerwater county secondary school in Woking he was in the same year as Foxton and well ahead of Weller, who was almost three years their junior.
Weller formed the Jam as a loose four-piece in 1972, with Buckler joining soon afterwards, appearing in one of the band’s first shows at the Sheerwater youth club. Self-taught by listening to records, he had been messing around on the drums with his brother Peter, who played the bass, when he met Weller and another early Jam member, Steve Brookes, while practising in the school music room.
With the departure of Brookes in the mid-70s, the band reconfigured in three parts, with Weller switching from bass to guitar as Foxton moved into his place, establishing the dynamic line-up that would soon take the British music scene by storm.
At 16 Buckler had started A-levels, including one in technical drawing, but after a year he abandoned his studies to concentrate on the Jam, while becoming a trainee draughtsman at the same factory as his mother.
Over the next four years he held down that job while playing a relentless schedule of gigs in pubs and clubs across the south of England. Initially reliant on cover versions, the Jam gradually began to evolve their own repertoire of songs written by Weller, and when punk burst into the open in London in 1976, they sharpened and toughened up their act under the influence of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, appearing with the latter on their fabled White Riot tour in 1977.
Standing out in appearance from their contemporaries with their dark suits and ties, Buckler, Weller and Foxton were nonetheless an integral part of the punk movement, as they proved with their fiery 1977 debut album, In the City.
But their next album, This Is the Modern World (also 1977), began to show signs of a more measured approach, crystallised in their monumental next album, All Mod Cons, which followed in 1978 and featured the classic single Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, the cover of which showed Buckler, fag in hand, standing precariously close to the edge of a London Underground platform as a train hurtled into the station.
The Jam’s fifth album, Sound Affects, contained a rare writing credit for the drummer on Music for the Last Couple, composed jointly with Weller and Foxton. It reached No 2 in the charts in 1980 before its successor, The Gift (1982) made it to No 1 with the inclusion of the chart-topping single Town Called Malice, on which Buckler was on top form.
At that point the world seemed to be the band’s oyster – until Weller called a unilateral and unexpected halt to proceedings by announcing the Jam’s disbandment just a few months later.
The end came as a severe shock to Buckler – “everything I’d got out of bed for the previous 10 years had gone,” he said, adding that “Paul was probably the only person on the planet who thought it was a good idea”. The split was rendered even more painful by Weller’s decision to cut Buckler and Foxton dead, refusing to speak to either of them for many years afterwards.
With little option but to get on with his life, Buckler went on to set up a five-piece band, Time UK. But after two years and three singles (their first, The Cabaret, sold nearly 60,000 copies), they folded, at which point he forged a new alliance with Foxton to create Sharp, with Time UK’s vocalist Jimmy Edwards – a project that survived barely 12 months.
In subsequent years Buckler spent time with the Highliners, a London-based psychobilly band, did studio production work, and even worked as a roadie for a period before setting up as a cabinet maker and carpenter in the Woking area, where he remained all his life.
There was a return to live music in 2005 when he set up the Gift to play Jam material on tours around the UK, with Russell Hastings on vocals and guitar and Dave Moore on bass. In 2007 Foxton took over from Moore, after which the band adopted a new name, From the Jam, but two years later Buckler left.
Having collaborated in 1993 with Foxton to write The Jam: Our Story, Buckler was later co-author of other Jam-related books including That’s Entertainment: My Life in the Jam (2015) and The Jam 1982 (2022).
Shortly before his death he had embarked on a series of “in conversation” nights in which he reminisced about his Jam days, until the venture was cut short by his sudden ill health.
In 1985 he married Lesley Hudson. She survives him along with their two children, Jason and Holly.
• Rick (Paul Richard) Buckler, musician, born 6 December 1955; died 17 February 2025
• This article was amended on 20 February 2025. The Gift became From the Jam in 2007, rather than two years later, as an earlier version stated.
