“And now for those of you watchingin black and white, this one is in Technicolour…”

All good things must come to an end. “The Gift” was released on 12th March 1982, on 30th October Paul Weller made the announcement that the Jam would split up on the completion of a short tour. Following the release of their final single “Beat Surrender” and that short December 1982 tour, they were gone. The decision to split was solely Weller’s, he said “I wanted to end it to see what else I was capable of, and I'm still sure we stopped at the right time. I'm proud of what we did but I didn't want to dilute it, or for us to get embarrassing by trying to go on forever. We finished at our peak.”.

“The Gift” has its moments, it also has some (to my ears) fairly deep lows. “Precious” is the only Jam track I routinely skip over, just can’t be doing with it. Weller had been listening to different things including Wire, the Gang Of Four and Pigbag, well for “Precious” he just lifted the bassline from Pigbag’s biggest hit (“Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag”) and wrote some words to it. The calypso styled “The Planner’s Dream Gone Wrong” and the instrumental “Circus” are utterly forgettable. Side ones finale “Trans Global Express” is better but at its heart is just a very unsubtle reworking of World Column’s Northern Soul floorshaker “So Is The Sun” (https://youtu.be/Le7B63pA17c?si=RtXfoGflsdMcUpaf).

Other parts of this album are as good as anything they’d ever done. Both sides opening songs, “Happy Together” and “Running On The Spot” (“We’re running on the spot, Always have always will, We’re just the next generation of the emotionally crippled”), are A1 classic Jam. The two slower songs, “Ghosts” and “Carnation”, are stunningly good. And last but not in anyone’s world anything like least there is “Town Called Malice”, a surgical evisceration of the effects of Thatcher-ism on ordinary people, while at the same time being a superb pop song and dance tune. Lyrically it’s astonishing  

“Rows and rows of disused milk floats stand dying in the dairy yard
And a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts
Hanging out their old love letters, on the line to dry
It's enough to make you stop believing when tears come fast and furious
In a town called malice”

That sense of hopelessness tempered just a few lines later by the positivity of 

“Playground kids and creaking swings lost laughter in the breeze
I could go on for hours and I probably will
But I'd sooner put some joy back in to this town called malice”

It gave The Jam their 3rd #1 single, this one debuting on the charts at #1 in February 1982, and you can still drop it in a DJ set in the right venue to this day and have a packed dancefloor singing along, not many political protest songs can get that reaction.

I didn’t see them on that final tour in December 1982, don’t know why and it’s still something I regret. The Jam were special, a pivotal part of my teenage years, I found them at age 14 and they split when I was 19. As I type this I’m listening to “Beat Surrender”. Thanx Paul, but I’m still not sure I’ve ever forgiven you…

Ghosts - https://youtu.be/CjFUpyLT_xo?si=XuBwZcnW3PhSxLPk

The Jam’s sound moved on a lot between “Setting Sons” and Sound Affects”. Weller had been listening to different music than he normally would, including the angular Post Punk of the Gang Of Four and Wire, along with the mutant Funk of bands like Pigbag and it was beginning to show in his writing. Paul Weller has said that “Sound Affects” is The Jam’s best album.

Can we first talk about the artwork ? It’s a pastiche of the BBC’s “Sound Effects” series of albums Volumes 1-8 (https://www.discogs.com/label/521396-BBC-Sound-Effects). I have, for a long time, thought I should acquire all 8 as they would make a striking 3x3 wall display with “Sound Affects” sitting right in the middle…one day…

We went to see them on the tour to promote “Sound Affects”, at Birmingham Bingley Hall on 11th November 1980 (supported by The Pirahnas trivia fans). My memory tells me they opened the show with this albums first song, “Pretty Green”, to us something we’d not heard before. The crowd all joined in shouting “OI!” on Rick Bucklers snare beats in the intro but then as  Weller began singing something I’d never heard before happened, people around me were singing along “I've got a pocket full of pretty green, I'm going to put it in the fruit machine, I'm going to put it in the jukebox, It's going to play all the records in the hit parade”. This is November 11th, the album wasn’t to be released until the 28th…this is a new song, how could they know the words ? Maybe they’re friends of the band, but there’s so many people singing they can’t all be their mates. That was the day that I realised some people didn’t just go to the gigs in their own town, they travelled around and followed the band. It was a bit mind-blowing at the time. 

“Pretty Green” is a strong start and that start is backed up by “Monday” with Weller once again not afraid to write a love song “But a sunshine girl like you, It's worth going through, I will never be embarrassed about love again”. “But I’m Different Now” covers much the same subject (“But I’m different now and I’m glad they you’re my girl”) but in a more classic Jam style. “Set The House Ablaze” does just that, an absolute barnstormer, driven by some exceptional drumming by Rick Buckler (the evidence of his book points to him being one of the dullest men alive but what a drummer !) with Weller expressing his disappointment in a friend who has bought into right-wing lies “Yeah the leather belt looks manly, The black boots butch, But oh what a bars-tard to get off”.

And then we reach one of the reasons I would disagree with Weller about this being The Jam’s best album, there are a couple of stinkers on here and, controversially perhaps, I think “Start!” is one of them. I remember first hearing it on the radio and thinking “hmmm that’s different”. Then I started reading about the similarities to a Beatles song I’d never heard called “Taxman”. Remember kids this was 1980, you couldn’t just go online and listen to anything at anytime, I had to find someone I knew who had a copy of “Revolver” and ask to have a listen. Now I know Paul Weller has never been averse to “tributing” or perhaps “quoting” other people’s songs within his own (some may call it plagiarism but let’s not go there). “It’s Too Bad” from “All Mod Cons” features a guitar line that “echoes” the “Yeah, yeah, yeah”s from The Beatles “She Loves You” and on The Jam’s next album he does it twice with Pigbag and World Column (did he always have difficulty with writing new songs ?) but, c’mon Paul, “Start!” lifts the entire bass line from “Taxman” and as a self confessed Beatle-nut you can’t use the excuse that you didn’t know it (unlike a few years later when you claimed never to have heard ELO’s “10538 Overture” after lifting most of it and calling it “The Changingman” !). Upshot is I don’t really like “Start!”.

Thankfully Weller ends Side 1 with not just one of the best songs he ever wrote but one of the greatest songs written by anybody…anywhere…ever. I do really like “That’s Entertainment” which, to paraphrase a Country Music idiom, is a perfect example of four chords and the truth. Weller has said it took as long to write it as it took to play it, if so, that was the most productive 3 minutes and 34 seconds any musician has ever spent writing. As with “…Tubestation…” Weller is writing in that 22" black and white TV “Play For Today” style (that’s not a criticism BTW, that’s the way I “see” his writing whereas with, for instance, Bruce Springsteen I “see” it in a more cinematic, Panavision in technicolour style) and we’ve all been in many of the situations he shows us. We’ve (almost) all cuddled a warm girl and smelt the stale perfume, we’ve all read the graffiti while sitting on slashed bus seats, all felt the meh of a boring Wednesday. It’s a song for us all that paints a picture of how things were then but even though it wasn’t all sweetness and light Weller plucks the beauty out of ordinary, everyday things. Most writers would be happy with one that good, Weller’s genius is that it’s not even the only one on this album.

“Dreamtime” starts Side 2 off all psychedelic like and then bursts into a classic Jam song that became a big live favourite. After that comes a song that, for me, is right up there with Paul Weller’s very best. Take three men, a factory worker, a shop keeper and a factory owner and write about their hopes, dreams and fears but never set the story outside of the corner shop. Doesn’t sound too promising huh ? But “Man In The Corner Shop” is one of Weller and The Jam’s greatest moments and one that seems to me to be somewhat overlooked. The shopkeeper knows it’s a hard life but he likes being his own boss. The factory worker is jealous of the shop keeper being his own boss and the factory owner is jealous of the shopkeeper while the shop keeper is jealous of the factory owner having others to do the work for him. But they all meet up in church together to be assured that “God created all men equal”, so that’s OK then. It’s a magnificent song and one that seemingly doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

The succeeding “Music For The Last Couple” is an enormous let down after that, an almost instrumental that I’d have felt cheated by had it been a B-side. “Boy About Town” is the Mod in Weller coming back to the surface and “Scrape Away” takes you out on angular, scratchy guitar riffs and streams of consciousness, rambling  lyrics “Your twisted cynicism makes me feel sick, Your open disgust for 'idealistic naive', You've given up hope you're jaded and ill, The trouble is your thoughts a catching disease”.

Despite one or two reservations of mine “Sound Affects” IS a great album, how could a record featuring “That’s Entertainment” and “Man In The Corner Shop” be regarded as anything but ?

Man In The Corner Shop - https://youtu.be/mgreXSO3PqY?si=V5nS_IKUDsvV0BhR

With just one more song this could have been The Jam’s best album but “Setting Sons” kinda peters out on a half-arsed cover of Martha & The Vandellas “Heatwave” (another song previously covered by The Who) when if they’d included, maybe, “The Butterfly Collector” instead of hiding it on a b-side then this album would easily rival “All Mod Cons”. 

There was a  suggestion upon release that “Setting Sons” was a concept album, based on the lives of 3 old school friends who meet up again after a war (is that them on the cover ?). Part of that story remains in some of the songs, “Thick As Thieves”, “Burning Sky”, “Little Boy Soldiers” and “Smithers-Jones” (written by Bruce Foxton) particularly, but I’d be hard pushed to see the whole album as a concept. The artwork features Benjamin Clemens' bronze sculpture “The St John's Ambulance Bearers” from 1919. It shows a wounded soldier being carried by two St John’s Ambulance men. The back has a bulldog on a beach next to a deck chair emblazoned with a Union flag. The inner sleeve shows an army uniform and paraphernalia in the dirt and the labels feature scenes of Empire, so maybe the concept album idea was there but not carried through entirely. 

It should also be noted that with “Smithers-Jones” having been previously released (on the B-side of the mighty “When You’re Young”) and with the inclusion of another cover version, that there are only 8 brand new songs on “Setting Sons”, writing was still not easy it seems.

“Girl On The Phone” starts us off with a stalker story, the girl that keeps calling who knows too much about you. “Thick As Thieves” introduces us to the three friends who the overall story was to be about, “Thick as thieves us, We’d stick together for all time”, youthful dreams that never work out that way as you get older. It’s the song that sets the tone for the album, puts it into perspective.

“Private Hell” could be seen as The Jam’s “Mothers Little Helper”, the tale of a housewife trapped in a loveless marriage, wondering what her grown up children are doing “He don’t care, They don’t care, Cos they’re all going through their own private hell”, all set against a screeching, screaming guitar riff, until her mind finally cracks “Sanity at last inside your private hell”. It’s a fierce and brutal song.

That’s followed by the mini-opera that is “Little Boy Soldiers”. It’s split into 3 distinct parts and tells of our 3 friends and their involvement in a war. In the first part our narrator really doesn’t want “To pick up a gun and shoot a stranger, But I've got no choice so here I come…war games”. In the second section the recruits are told to “Think of honour, Queen and country, You’re a blessed son of the British Empire”. Finally we return to the opening theme and discover that one of our  participants was sent home “…in a pine overcoat, With a letter to your mum, Saying find enclosed one son, one medal and a note to say he won”. As that fades away it bleeds into the utterly beautiful “Wasteland”, driven along by a theme played on a recorder, yes you heard that right, a recorder “Meet me on the wastelands later this day, We'll sit and talk and hold hands maybe, For there's not much else to do in this drab and colourless place” the aftermath of war ?

“Burning Sky” finds one of the friends telling the others how great and successful his life is now and how the things they believed in “Thick As Thieves” were just teenage dreams that are now pie in the sky “Ideals are fine when you are young”. I always ask myself is that guy in “Burning Sky” actually “Smithers-Jones” whose world comes crashing down in the very next song, this time set within a string quartet rather than the band arrangement of the B-side version.

We next get two of Paul Weller’s finest songs. “Saturday’s Kids” is a Ray Davis-esque, perfect character study of ordinary suburban, working class kids and what they get up to, both the Saturday’s boys who “…live life with insults, Drink lots of beer and wait for half time results” and Saturday's girls who “…work in Tesco's and Woolworths, Wear cheap perfume 'cause its all they can afford”. It would have been an easy song to write in a sneering manner but it’s not done like that, it’s written with love and affection. This is Weller saying “these are my people, this is me”.

Finally (yes I know there’s another track after it but…) there’s “The Eton Rifle’s”, a magnificent beast of a song and The Jam’s first top 10 hit (reaching #3). The lyrics were inspired by seeing students from Eton College jeering at marchers on the Right To Work March that went the length of the country in 1978 to protest escalating unemployment. The opening line was, I’m sure, aimed at those Saturday’s boys in the previous song “Sup up your beer and collect your fags, There’s a row going on down near Slough”. Laughably Old Etonian and Tory Prime Minister David Cameron claimed in 2008 this was one of his favourite songs, ironic when you consider the lyric “What a catalyst you turned out to be, Loaded the guns then you run off home for your tea” exactly describes Cameron’s actions after dropping this country in the Brexit dumpster ! Weller responded to him with “Which part of it didn't he get? It wasn't intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps."

Trivia corner: Vic Coppersmith-Smith when interviewed said “The Eton Rifles” was really difficult to mix and he wound up making a lot of hand edits to the tape, for the un-initiated that’s cutting the tape with a razor blade and sticking it back together in order to move things about or bring in elements from other tapes, things that can easily be achieved with computers these days. “The Eton Rifles” master tape had 65 hand edits (that’s an average of an edit almost every 4 seconds). The tape was said to resemble a patchwork quilt !

We’ll forget the last track OK ? “Setting Sons” is a fantastic album that could have been better. Weller’s songwriting took a leap forward, the band sounded tight and tough. During 1979 and 1980 The Jam were unstoppable, the undisputed biggest band in the country.

Thick As Thieves - https://youtu.be/jLqr4iKwUO4?si=XYdIgCW8A7lTwyWA