Taken from the group’s 1980 Sound Affects album and clocking in a very brief 2 minutes and 30 seconds, ‘Start!’ gave Paul Weller’s trio their second UK number one single (‘Going Underground’ had been their first chart topper). The song begins with a note-for-note reproduction of George Harrison’s riff from The Beatles’ 1966 song ‘Taxman’. While The Fab Four’s recording features the riff on a static D7 chord, ‘Start!’ involves the pattern being transposed to imply several different chords.
The prechorus abandons the ‘Taxman’ riff in favour of a scalar line featuring repeated notes played in constant quavers, which provides a contrast to the syncopated rhythm and wider intervals of the main riff. The bass line at this point is very similar to the prechorus of The Jam’s hit ‘Down At The Tube Station At Midnight’.
The bridge section uses another approach to create variety – here Bruce Foxton outlines the harmony (Bm7 to C major 7) using chord tones. As with the verse, the bass line maintains the same rhythmic and intervallic pattern when transposed to a new chord.
During the guitar solo, Bruce Foxton varies the original riff, including a high Bb to imply Gm7 – he had already hinted at this briefly in the second chorus, but here the idea is repeated throughout the section.
Tonally speaking, the bass sound on ‘Start!’ is a departure from Bruce Foxton’s usual picked Rickenbacker growl that anchors songs such as ‘A Town Called Malice’ and ‘Eton Rifles’- here the bass sound has much less of an edge but still has a degree of clarity. In the video for ‘Start!’, Foxton can be seen using a hollowbody Epiphone Rivoli bass; although it’s not clear if he used it on the recording, it would explain the additional warmth that isn’t usually present on his other classic Jam lines.