That's Entertainment (song)

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For the 1952 song by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz featured in the musical film The Band Wagon, see That's Entertainment! (song).

That's Entertainment is a 1980 song by British punk/New Wave group The Jam off their fifth album, Sound Affects. It is probably The Jam's best known and most acclaimed song (although Town Called Malice is the next closest); it is the group's lone entry on famed American rock magazine Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all-time, at #306. It consistently makes similar British lists of all-time great songs, such as BBC Radio 2's Sold On Song 2004 Top 100, at #43. [1]

It was never released as a domestic single in the UK, but incredibly it made the charts as an import, backed by a live version of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight, peaking at #21.

It remains one of the two all-time biggest selling import singles in the UK, alongside The Jam's own Just Who Is the 5 O'Clock Hero?, which would hit the charts at #8 as an import in 1982. The group's appearance on the Rolling Stone list was surprising, given their lack of visibility in America and their lack of appearance on such American lists in the past.

Though it remains perhaps The Jam's most famous effort, it is ironically one of the least "distinctively Jam" songs of their career, venturing far from the driving rhythms and chiming electric guitars that dominate most of the group's oeuvre. The song uses an almost entirely acoustic arrangement with only very light percussion, not even using a snare drum. Like much of Sound Affects, the song has strong undercurrents of pop-psychedelia. The only electric guitar part in the song is played backwards over one of the verses, a hallmark of psychedelia. Moreover, the entire song's swirling aesthetic is very evocative of '60s British pop.

The minimalist, slice-of-life lyrics only list various conditions of British working class life. Consider the first verse:

A police car and a screaming siren
Pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete
A baby wailing, stray dog howling
The screech of brakes and lamp light blinking

...culminating in the laconic, ironic chorus of "That's entertainment, that's entertainment!"

The most frequent interpretation is that the song is a rejection of the romanticism often afforded the British working class lifestyle (such as in television programmes), although there are some other interpretations as well. Either way, it is The Jam's most frequently covered song, with numerous subsequent renditions by British (Morrissey, The Wonderstuff) and American (Face to Face, Velocity Girl) artists alike. The song is frequently used in a more shallow sense ("That's entertainment!") by television companies (notably ITV, who launched their 2002 new look with it).

An earlier, alternate version was first released on the Snap! compilation and later on the Direction Reaction Creation boxed set. This version featured a fuller arrangement, including drums, but lacked the flourishes of the final released version. The demo version of the song was used in the soundtrack to the film Stranger Than Fiction. The song is number 43 of the BBC's top 100 of all time. You can hear the song and discuss it on their website