1. Girl on the Phone
2. Thick as Thieves
3. Private Hell
4. Little Boy Soldiers
5. Wasteland
6. Burning Sky
7. Smithers-Jones
8. Saturday’s Kids
9. The Eton Rifles
10. Heatwave
Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood; born and bred Brummie, practising Muslim, cooker of Kashmiri cuisine, weight-training addict, recovering Netflix-holic and lover of all things Marvel.
Oh the pressure of a list with the words Top and Ever. After (too) much deliberation, a fair amount of stress, and feelings of guilt and disloyalty that are totally unbecoming for a thirty-five-year-old adult, I finally settled on:
A Northern Soul – The Verve
50 Greatest Hits – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Everything Must Go – Manic Street Preachers
‘Hello Richard.’
‘Oh, hiya Martin, you all right?’
‘Yeah, great thanks. What you up to?’
‘I’ve just got a new job haven’t I.’
‘I don’t know, have you?’
‘Yeah, I’m working on that Large Hadron Collider aren’t I.’
‘I don’t know, are you?’
‘Yeah, I start on Monday.’
‘Oh aye, what’s all that about then?’
‘Well, basically we fire a load of particles together.’
‘What for?’
‘So we can try and understand more about the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and relativity.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Anyway, what you up to?’
‘I’m writing an article that will try and reclaim Paul Weller from his haircut and convince people that he used to be really cool.’
‘Fucking hell mate, good luck with that.’
Here’s my 11 reasons why The Jam are one of the best bands ever.
In the mid-seventies, The Jam were a terrible band that wore black shirts, black and white brogues and huge white kipper ties. Basically, imagine a version of Bugsy Malone that’s set in Woking and everyone sings Small Faces songs instead of that one about wanting to be a boxer.
This is how they originally lined up:
Steve Brookes – Guitar
Bruce Foxton – Guitar
Rick Buckler – Drums
And playing a Hofner bass, just like his hero, was a seventeen-year-old Paul McCartney fanatic called John Weller. In fact, he idolised McCartney so much that he called himself Paul.
Anyway, one day there was a big fight in the back of the van and Bruce Foxton sat on Weller’s bass and snapped the neck in two. Weller responded by saying ‘Right, you can play bass now, I’m on guitar.’
Shortly after, he bought a Rickenbacker 330, a copy of The Who’s My Generation, and off they went.
That’s right everyone. Paul Weller’s entire career comes down to a fight in the back of a van because someone sat on his bass.
As pivotal moments in rock history go, it’s definitely up there.
Oh yeah, they got rid of that Steve Brookes fella too and, crucially, stopped wearing kipper ties.
After gatecrashing the London punk scene, The Jam released their first album, In the City, in May 1977.
Over the next four years and ten months, the band released six studio albums, of which three are brilliant (All Mod Cons, Setting Sons, Sound Affects), two are very good (In the City and The Gift) and one is just good (This is the Modern World).
To make this even more impressive, they also released nineteen hit singles – nine of which they couldn’t even be bothered to put on the albums.
So yeah, the complete discography takes place in less than five years and sees them dabble with punk, mod, new wave and soul in the process.
The secret to this?
Well, other than an incredibly pushy record company, they treated the band as if it was a job – they worked ten to six in the studio so Weller could get home to watch Coronation Street, and they even had a Christmas party every year.
The Jam – what a great place to work.
Paul Weller was only twenty-three when The Jam recorded their final album. If you really think about it, about everything The Jam did, it’s mad to have all that ticked off at such a young age.
The only other band I can think of that broke up at such a young age were Bros and they don’t count because they wrote the following lyric:
‘I read Karl Marx and taught myself to dance.’
I’ll be honest, this is one of the most ridiculous songs I’ve ever heard and it actually keeps me up at night.
The story is basically this – Paul Weller is in a tube station at midnight when a couple of dodgy fellas approach him and ask him if he has any money.
Weller replies:
‘I’ve a little money and a takeaway curry, I’m on my way home to the wife. She’ll be lining up the cutlery, you know she’s expecting me, polishing the glasses and pulling out the cork.’
First, if someone approaches you late at night and asks if you have any money, the answer is always, ‘No mate.’
Second, what’s going on in the Weller household?
Why does the poor Mrs Weller have to stay up till past midnight before she can have her meal? It’s not really fair, and if I’m being honest, I’ve spent the best part of thirty-seven years feeling sorry for her and hoping that she finds someone else – someone who lets her eat her tea earlier in the evening.
And why is she opening a bottle of wine? And setting the table? For a curry?
I could understand all of this if the song was called ‘Down in the Tube Station at about 7 p.m.’ but it isn’t.
Anyway, back to the story.
The two fellas proceed to mug the witless Weller before leaving him beaten on the floor. As he lies there, no doubt regretting his entire approach to this incident, he says:
‘I’m down in the tube station at midnight. The wine will be flat and the curry’s gone cold.’
Paul, I hate to break this to you mate, but wine IS flat!
Before anyone makes a case that Mrs Weller might have opened a bottle of Babycham, or any other fizzy wine, let me point you to a lyric in The Jam’s ‘Saturday’s Kids’:
‘Saturday’s girls work in Tescos and Woolworths, wear cheap perfume ’cause it’s all they can afford, go to discos, they drink BABYCHAM . . .’
There you go, Paul Weller is quite capable of specifying Babycham if he wants to.
Notwithstanding all of this, ‘Tube Station’ is a brilliant song, and it gave their career a kick-start after they’d been written off as punk has-beens.
What’s really remarkable, though, is that it nearly didn’t happen.
By all accounts Weller had thrown the handwritten lyrics in the bin where they were found by their producer – Vic Coppersmith-Heaven. It was Coppersmith-Heaven who then convinced the band to record it.
‘But Vic, it doesn’t make any sense. The whole wife thing, it’s crazy. And the time contradiction too. Basically, I’ve set a scene in the house that’s definitely early evening but the scene in the tube station is at midnight. Oh, and it IS Babycham that she’s opened. Me and the wife, we love a bit of Babycham with our curry, but I couldn’t get the lyrics to scan because it has too many syllables. So I used “wine” instead, even though I know wine is obviously flat. That’s why the song doesn’t really work and I threw it in the bin.’
‘Don’t worry Paul, no one will pick up on that.’
‘Ok, let’s record it tomorrow. Coronation Street starts in an hour.’
In 1980 The Jam were on tour in America when their label phoned them with the news that ‘Going Underground’ had entered the charts at number one.
They immediately cancelled the rest of the tour, flew back to England and appeared on Top of the Pops where Paul Weller wore an apron.
I don’t know what other evidence you’d need to convince you that, along with Robert De Niro and Björn Borg, Paul Weller was the coolest man on the planet between 1980 and 1982.
I’d always assumed that Rick Buckler, the drummer in The Jam, was a no-nonsense sort of fella – a bit like Terry in Minder.
Then I read his autobiography and discovered that he’s actually more like Alan Bennett.
Consider this paragraph about his dad’s life as a postman:
‘My dad, along with a lot of others from his generation, smoked cigarettes. Smoking was the norm and he would get into trouble when he lit up in the sorting office. Postmen weren’t allowed to do that in case they set fire to the mail, but he was always sneaking a fag here and there though. Players Number Six was his brand of choice and they came with coupons that could be saved up and eventually swapped for something like a new teapot.’
I didn’t think anything could happen that could increase my love for The Jam, but imagining Rick Buckler as a frustrated Alan Bennett made me like them even more.
I also imagined Alan Bennett trying to play the drums on ‘Funeral Pyre’ but, to be honest, that didn’t really work.
That’s an understatement actually, I hate mods. There’s no excuse for that haircut and anyone that does their top button up without wearing a tie is obviously mad. I wish they’d all just have a day off, by which I don’t mean have a day off and go to the seaside with your other mod mates and do mod stuff. I literally mean – have a day off.
Every time I see a mod in the twenty-first century I think about a TV show that I haven’t written yet called Brit Pops.
‘So what’s the idea behind Brit Pops then?’
‘Well, it’s about those mods who persist with that haircut while struggling with the responsibility of fatherhood. In the first episode, two of the dads meet at the school gates to discuss how many mirrors on a scooter constitutes too many mirrors. They’re so absorbed in their conversation that their children get kidnapped and the dads end up having to sell their original pressing of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake to pay the ransom.’
‘Is it a comedy?’
‘Not really.’
Look, I get it, every generation watches Quadrophenia and thinks it might be a good idea to be a mod. And don’t get me wrong, I love Quadrophenia – I used to have it on VHS and watch it all the time.
But I also loved The Blues Brothers and you don’t see me driving around in an old police car ordering four fried chickens and a Coke every five minutes do you?
No, you don’t.
So, look, it’s testament to how brilliant The Jam are that I can get past the mod thing.
Bruce Foxton wrote an average song called ‘News of the World’ and then Paul Weller decided to make it brilliant by adding a great solo.
Off the top of my head, the only other solo that he does in The Jam is the one on ‘Start’. I imagine his thought process there was:
‘Everyone’s going to say I took the chords from “Taxman”, so just to shut them up, I’m going to show Paul McCartney how he should have done the solo.’
Paul Weller’s guitar style then – helping out his mates and starting fights with The Beatles.
What a great bloke.
Most bands adopt the following song structure:
Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Middle Eight, Chorus.
The Jam, though, sometimes did this:
Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Middle Eight, Chorus, Bonus Ending.
Often these ‘bonus endings’ were entirely different from the rest of the song but always brilliant. See ‘Smithers Jones’, ‘Strange Town’, ‘When You’re Young’ and, best of all, ‘Little Boy Soldiers’.
Paul Weller has continued the ‘bonus ending’ theme in his solo career too, but with a slight variation – i.e. it’s a bonus when any of his songs end.
Fair play to him.
Possibly the strangest four minutes of film I’ve ever seen. From what I can work out, Paul Weller has broken up with his partner and she decides to go out with the other two members of the band – probably because they’ll let her eat before midnight.
At one point, Paul Weller looks through a window and sees his lost love having a great time in front of the fire with Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler.
You can see why The Jam broke up shortly afterwards.
The second-best decision Paul Weller ever made was to break up The Jam at their absolute peak. Their last single, ‘Beat Surrender’, had entered at number one and, having sold out five nights at Wembley Arena, they had to plead with the promoter to stop adding any more.
And his reasons were impeccable – he didn’t want to damage the legacy, to drag it out and become a middle-aged man singing songs that were written by an angry young man. He wanted to create a time capsule, a body of work that was preserved forever and would never fade.
The best decision he ever made, the one he makes every single day, is to never reform The Jam and ruin that.
Bonus ending:
‘Hello Richard.’
‘Oh hiya Martin, you all right?’
‘Yeah, good thanks. How’s that job at the Large Hadron Collider going?’
‘It’s mad you know. Sometimes I have to marvel at the scope of what we’re trying to achieve, y’know, trying to recreate the circumstances of the Big Bang and all that.’
‘It does sound mad.’
‘One of the fellas there has this theory that we’re all in a Large Hadron Collider.’
‘You what?’
‘Yeah, he reckons that we’re living out a previous experiment where some other scientists had created the big bang and our whole world is being monitored in another Large Hadron Collider somewhere else.’
‘Bloody hell. I don’t think I can cope with this, Richard. My head’s starting to hurt.’
‘That’s quantum physics for you, Martin. Anyway, how did that Paul Weller article go?’
‘All right. I did this whole bit about “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”.’
‘I LOVE that song. It was mine and Julie’s first dance when we got married.’
‘Your first dance was “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”?’
‘Yeah. We met in Tottenham Court Road tube station, at around midnight, and there aren’t many songs that cover that. It just seemed appropriate and we both really love the song. We listen to it all the time and it reminds us of when we first met and, of course, our wedding.’
‘Oh.’
‘Anyway, what did you say about it?’
‘Not much. I just pointed out the internal contradiction within the heart of the song – namely the time inconsistency between the two places, the issue with the wine, and the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. But then you probably knew all that anyway.
Richard? You knew all that, right?
Richard?’
Well I really wish I could lay claim to some irrational prejudice against The Jam in order to answer your question but I don’t have one. I had definitely heard of them, because there seemed to be a time (during my peak Oasis obsession) where you couldn’t read a Noel Gallagher interview without him talking about how much he loves Paul Weller.
I wonder if he still does that?
I definitely remember being reliably informed, I believe by Heat magazine, that the whole mod thing was a thing. But me actually listen to their music? It just never happened.
And the reasons for that? Well it’s a bit complicated.
‘English’ or ‘Western’ music did not feature much in my house when I was growing up. Both my parents are first-generation immigrants who came to this country from Pakistan – my dad in the sixties and my mum in the late seventies. The soundtrack to my early childhood therefore has a very deep ‘sub-continent’ flavour; qawwali, naats and ghazals. Lots of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (hence his inclusion in my top three ever list). I absolutely loved this music even though most of the time I hadn’t a clue what was actually being said because a) I am appalling with music lyrics, which I often get wrong, and b) I didn’t learn Urdu or Punjabi until my very late teens.
So for a long time I just didn’t have other music on my radar. But part way through secondary school, when I was about thirteen, I knew this had to change. My ‘major swot’ status, which I secretly revelled in, already made me massively uncool. Retaining ‘total music loser’ on my charge sheet didn’t seem very smart as it was something I could actually change. And so it came to pass that my first proper and concerted foray into non-Asian music, at the tender age of about thirteen, was East 17.
I fully realise this probably puts me firmly back into the ‘total music loser’ box, perhaps forever, but in my defence it was what my friends were into, and though this is a very low bar, they were much cooler than me. And my deeply religious, strict parents definitely didn’t approve. And I, their deeply religious, strict daughter also didn’t entirely approve, so that had to be a win, right? And East 17 were way better than the pretty boys of Take That. Even I knew that.
After that, most of the music I got into was through my friends, and all the staples of the nineties and noughties featured – Oasis, Radiohead, Nirvana, Manics, Kings of Leon, The White Stripes, Eminem (even Coldplay, for mention of which I sincerely apologise), interspersed with the pop music which we all publicly derided but secretly loved (Britney, Sugababes, Backstreet Boys, Kylie).
There were some random obsessions along the way too which I seemed to have conjured up all by myself, for which I blame MTV (does MTV still exist?) – Linkin Park and Staind to name but two. I have no idea how these happened and they are not things I actually admitted to at the time. But my abiding obsession is the first proper band I discovered for myself and not through someone else – The Verve.
Being a tech-know-nothing I seem to have bypassed most of the turning points in the way in which music is consumed. I have gone from cassettes to CDs straight to injecting Spotify directly into my bloodstream with nothing in between. The only constant is Heart FM, which basically means I have spent twenty years listening to ‘Careless Whisper’ on repeat.
So in a nutshell I haven’t listened to The Jam before (not just Setting Sons, but no Jam at all, ever) because I got into non-Asian music quite late (it’s my parents’ fault), none of my friends ever suggested them to me (it’s all their fault), I didn’t discover them for myself in that haphazard and random way in which people like me come across new/old music, Heart FM never seem to have them on, the Spotify algorithm obviously doesn’t think I would like them and they’re not The Verve.
And lastly, because this album was released in 1979 and I was born in 1980. I’m just not that good with music from before my time. Even the stuff I have heard of and listened to I usually don’t like or get. I am afraid this includes some biggies like The Beatles. And The Rolling Stones.
So I approach this task with some trepidation, especially given the fervour with which fans of The Jam have been filling up my Twitter timeline, and cause these days I am a politician and seeking approval is a thing, indeed a professional requirement in this line of work…
It’s a bit complicated.
The first listen was awful. I barely understood most of the lyrics. I told you I am appalling with music lyrics. And before anyone wisecracks about me needing to refer myself to one of David Cameron’s English classes for Muslim women, let me assure you English is my first and only fluently spoken language. And there really isn’t anything wrong with my hearing, I’ve had it checked. I’m just bad with music lyrics. So partway through the first listen I barely understood it and started feeling all defensive. But without getting all of the words, the music on its own was not enough to hold my attention, which wandered straight to ‘why do people think this is A Classic?’, ‘what degree of music loser does this make me?’ and a fervent prayer that none of The Jam fans reading this live in my constituency.
And the brutal truth, dear reader, is this: if I wasn’t listening to this album for the purposes of this blog, I would have gone straight back to my current Spotify list of Florence + The Machine and the soundtrack to Rocky IV.
But the listen to it three times rule is a good one. So for my second listen I armed myself with the lyrics and gave it another go. The slight downside of this though was that knowing I had to listen to the music, read the flipping lyrics and write this, meant that by this time the whole experience felt like my weekly essay crisis at uni minus the 2 a.m. trip to Hassan’s kebab van to buy chips.
So, still not enjoyable.
It took me another five listens before I had enough familiarity to start to work out what I think. And I still don’t understand why it’s A Classic. It’s too confusing to be A Classic surely?? ‘Girl on the Phone’ and ‘Heatwave’ are both incongruous and feel out of place. That they are placed at the beginning and end of the album just messed with my head. I know every song doesn’t have to ‘fit’ for an album to make sense and hang together but these two songs feel out of step in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s deliberate. Or if it is I’m afraid I just don’t get it. And ‘Girl on the Phone’ is a stalker song, which might have been OK in 1979 but feels a bit creepy in 2016.
I thought the songs about friendship (‘Thick as Thieves’, ‘Burning Sky’) were OK, sort of sad but not memorable.
The bit of the album that reflects on ordinary lives (‘Private Hell’, ‘Wasteland’, ‘Smithers-Jones’, ‘Saturday’s Kids’) was good, with its critique of society, and honesty about boredom, but in my world that’s what the Manics are for. I realise that middle-aged men and women who love The Jam reading this will be thinking something along the lines of ‘bloody kids these days know nothing’ but there you have it. If I’m looking for leftist politics and culture in my music it’s James Dean Bradfield not Paul Weller for me.
But I did love ‘The Eton Rifles’. I thought it was powerful, I got it straight away. There was no need to check the lyrics, not because I could make them all out (I couldn’t, but he definitely mumbles some of them I’m sure) but because I didn’t need to in order to get the song. It was just ace, A Classic even. I sincerely hope I don’t now discover that this is the one song on this album considered Not A Classic.
But on its own is it enough to carry the whole album? As good as I think it is, the answer is no.
I’d listen to ‘The Eton Rifles’, but probably not the rest of it.
The Eton Rifles – 10/10.
The album as a whole – 4/10.