(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Anefo)
Setting Sons, the 1979 album from The Jam, marked a step away from the more pop-adjacent sounds heard on their previous effort, All Mod Cons. But its upbeat opening track, which told the story of a woman stalking someone on the phone, was shaped by a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, himself one of the most prominent pop artists of the 1960s.
Lichtenstein’s tongue-in-cheek style was a good fit for the song and its lighthearted assessment of constant harassment: “Girl on the phone keeps a-ringing back / Knows where I get my shirts and where I get my pants / Where I get my trousers where I get socks / My leg measurements and the size of my cock.”
The song came about when Paul Weller was pushed for two more songs for the album. Sat in a Sheperd’s Bush office, he came up with ‘Private Hell’ and ‘Girl On The Phone’, the latter taking its title from the Lichtenstein painting by the same name. Women on the phone was a recurring motif for Lichtenstein, featuring elsewhere in Ohhh…Alright…, with the often distressed or weeping woman clutching the phone being another consistent feature of his work. Likewise, Lichtenstein’s women were always described as girls: Girl with Ball, Crying Girl, or Drowning Girl.
The anonymity he imbued his subjects with worked well with the song itself, which follows a mysterious and persistent caller. It could be based on Whitney Walton, who, in the 1970s and ’80s, somehow managed to make calling celebrities and musicians a full-time hobby.
Going by Miranda Grosvenor, her voice was said to be so enticing she could make men fall in love over the phone, and a few were said to have proposed marriage. Her late-night phone call roster read like a list of the highest-profile artists of the ’70s: Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Art Garfunkel, and Billy Joel. While Weller never appeared to make the list, he may well have been inspired by Walton’s uncanny ability to charm over the phone.
Lichstein’s knack for capturing beautiful, if slightly emotionally unhinged, women in his signature pop art style was the perfect inspiration for Weller’s writing. Influenced by Picasso’s own weeping women, by the mid-1960s, Lichenstein was wheeling out his own pop art psychodramas. Often, his paintings would depict women in love with cruel men who made them miserable and drove them to spend increasing amounts of time crying on the phone.
These women were often archetypal blonde bombshells, and Walton, while posing as Grosvenor, assured the men on the other end of the phone she was, too. There was a sense of parody in the comic strip style, highlighting the emotional precarity involved when insecure women poured themselves into withholding men, which shrewdly emphasised how social expectations at the time affected women.
