One thing The Jam were, and I cannot and maybe haven’t stressed this enough, was an incredible live force. They are the greatest live band I’ve ever seen and I find it hard to believe I’ll ever see anything that good again. Three fellas should never have been able to produce a sound that powerful and that big…but these three did.

“Dig The New Breed” is a compilation of live performances by The Jam, the earliest being “In The City” from London’s 100 Club in 1977 through to those from Glasgow Apollo in April 1982 finishing with “Private Hell”. In between there’s all the live favourite’s you’d expect plus a cover of Eddie Floyd’s tribute to Otis Redding, “Big Bird”. It’s often thought of as a posthumous release but The Jam played their final show in Brighton on 11th December 1982 and “Dig The New Breed” was released on the 10th.

If you saw The Jam live you’ll know. If you didn’t this, and their other live albums, are as close as you’ll ever get. 

“Put your hands together for the best band in the fucking world…THE JAM !“ Thanx John…

The Jam, Bingley Hall, Birmingham 21st March 1982 - https://youtu.be/5E4njUD5ayU?si=cFEPhP-pTA1vk4nO 

“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