The Eton Rifles - Lyrics

Lyrics

"The Eton Rifles" as such, do not exist: the cadet corps of Eton College is the Eton College Officer Training Corps, Eton being a famous English public school in Berkshire regarded as the epitome of Britain's privileged 'elite'. The song itself recounts the difficulties faced by the unemployed and lower paid working class in protesting against a system loaded against them.

The song recounts a street battle Paul Weller had read about in the newspapers concerning elements of a Right To Work march going through Slough in 1978 breaking off to attack pupils from Eton College who had been jeering the lunchtime marchers (hence Hello, Hooray, an extremist scrape with the Eton Rifles), rashly thinking that a bunch of 'posh schoolboys' would be an easy target: only for the outnumbered but far fitter college pupils to give them a beating. As the lyric put it: Thought you were smart when you took them on, but you didn't take a peek in their artillery room. All that rugby puts hairs on your chest...

The song's lyrics, in common with many Jam tracks, contain colloquial references to life in Britain, including:

"Sup up your beer and collect your fags, There's a row going on down near Slough"

Literally, the first part of the line means "drink up your beer and collect your cigarettes", though in this case it is likely a double entendre referring both to a group of friends hurriedly leaving a pub, and to the British boarding school practice of fagging; a hierarchical authority structure in which younger students acted as personal servants to those in higher forms.

With regard to the latter part, Slough is a town near to Eton. The two districts have a history of class conflict, with Slough in particular as a result of being used for various sociological experiments by urban planners and politicians throughout the 1960s through to the 1990s (a common target in Paul Weller's lyrics in The Jam).

"What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?" is a reference to school uniform and badges, particularly the influence of the "old school tie".

"There was a lot of class hatred in my songs at the time," said Weller. "'Eton Rifles' would be the obvious example of that. We used to go on Sunday drives with my uncle and we'd drive through Eton, and I remember seeing the young chaps."