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

This is The Jam’s finest moment. I don’t mean by this that they went downhill from here but this is the point where The Jam stepped up from being the New Wave also rans they were in early 1978 to become the most important band in the UK. This is the point at which Paul Weller introduced himself as our generations spokesman (whether he liked that or not), or our Ray Davis, a razor sharp interpreter of ordinary peoples lives, hopes and fears. When “All Mod Cons” was released Paul Weller was 20 years old !

It wasn’t easy getting to this point. Following the release of “This Is The Modern World” The Jam were packed off to the USA to tour supporting Blue Öyster Cult (who the fuck thought that was a good idea !!!), unsurprisingly it did not go well and left the band with a huge distrust of the USA for the rest of their time. Polydor were applying pressure for new material, they wanted hit singles. Paul Weller by all reports was feeling the pressure and suffering writers block. The three singles released between “This Is The Modern World” and “All Mod Cons” featured eight songs, just 3 by Weller and only one of those was an A-side  (although that was “Down In the Tube Station At Midnight” so…). 

Original Producer Chris Parry (replaced by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven after he told Bruce Foxton he wasn’t a songwriter and should forget it and wait for Paul to come up with something) rejected most of the first batch of songs Weller offered up (rumoured titles like “I Want To Paint” and “On Sunday Morning” have never turned up in the Polydor vaults, even when A&R man Dennis Munday scoured them for the “Direction, Reaction, Creation” box set) and he had to go away and write more…thankfully it transpired. The songs he came back with make up one of my top five all-time favourite albums.

It's a record full of great characters. The rock star on the slide in “To Be Someone…”, “Mr Clean” in his suburban idyll, the daydreamer “Billy Hunt”, a guy and his girlfriend in trouble at the Vortex on Wardour Street, and the tragic hero of Weller's first truly magnificent moment, "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight"waiting for a tube to get back to his wife with a curry and a bottle of plonk but having his life smashed by drunken right-wing thugs. They even threw in 2 ballads ("English Rose”, mine and Deb’s wedding song, and "Fly") something unheard of in these angry young man, post-'77 days.

"Down In the Tube Station At Midnight" and "A Bomb In Wardour Street" (the reason to this day I don’t have to think about how to spell apocalypse) describe what a scary and violent place Britain could be back in the late ’70’s “I’m standing on the Vortex floor, My heads been kicked in and blood’s starting to pour”. They are both songs that give you a vivid picture of the times, Weller brilliantly writing in a very British, “Play For Today” 22" black and white TV style. How great and vivid an opening line is “The distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains”.

To temper that violence Weller gives us the daydreamer "Billy Hunt”, which was originally slated as a single (introduced as such on a BBC “In Concert” broadcast in June ’78) possibly until Polydor discovered what Weller meant by Billy Hunt (you can work it out I’m sure !), “Billy Hunt's is a magical world, Full of strippers and long-legged girls”; the ever hopeful "The Place I Love”, where he's "making a stand against the world" in the imaginary place he goes where everything is right with the world but there are still “those who would hurt us if they heard”; "In The Crowd" addresses consumerism “When I'm in the crowd, I can't remember my name, And my only link is pots of Walls ice cream”; “Mr Clean" is a sharp pointed stick jabbed at the British class system “You miss page 3, but the Times is right for you, And mum and dad are very proud of you”.

Then, as you were listening, again,there was the artwork to drink in. It told of Sta-prest, monkey boots, targets, scooters and there was that title, which Weller has since admitted was just an excuse to get the word Mod on an album cover.

Mod ? What's that ?

And some of us started following up on what Mod was and discovered he was dripping us a bit of Brit Psychedelia with “In The Crowd” and its backwards guitars, giving us a Ray Davies song and almost leading us to The Kinks in case we hadn’t already found our way there. Weller was/is a Mod and as much as he didn’t like the tribalism and uniform of the Mod Revival it’s undeniable that it was he (and the release of The Wo’s movie “Quadrophenia”), either via albums like “All Mod Cons” or his support of a raft of bands that would form the musical arm of the Mod Revival (New Hearts/Secret Affair, the Purple Hearts, The Chords), that led us there. It's something that has left a mark on me.

Because of what Paul Weller gave us on this record, which was much more than just the music in the grooves, I found soul music and The Small Faces, 501's with 1" turn ups, Ska/Blue Beat and the thrilling sound of a Hammond B3. So there is much, much more that I owe to him and this band than just this record...but just this record would have been more than enough.

In The Crowd - https://youtu.be/B_j0HjSidIk?si=vQUEoPoyuEPKFKIB

That difficult second album, or so the music press would have you believe. “This Is The Modern World” is admittedly no timeless classic but it gets a very bad rap when spoken about these days and it’s not nearly as weak as some would tell you.

The fact that Bruce Foxton gets to write two songs on here, that the lyrics for “In The Street Today” were pretty much a verbatim lift from a poem written by Weller’s school friend Dave Waller, that “Tonight at Noon” was hugely influenced by another poem by Liverpool poet Adrian Henri (https://rolandsragbag.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/adrian-henri-tonight-at-noon/) and that the final song is a cover version, means it is probably fair to say that Paul Weller was struggling in the songwriting department. Let’s get those 2 Foxton songs out of the way first, “London Traffic” (it’s literally about there being too many cars in central London “Drive ‘round London in a car, Don’t really wanna go far” yeuuch !) and “Don’t Tell Them You’re Sane” are as poor as anything The Jam ever released (there wasn’t much but there were a couple of later album tracks and a few hidden away on B-sides, usually written by Bruce). The cover of “In The Midnight Hour” is something I’m sure they’d been playing for years at those working men’s club gigs and when they needed something to round the album out cos they didn’t have enough songs of their own it’s easy for them to bang this one to tape…Stick it on a B-side, fair enough, but it shouldn’t be here.

But there is light among the darkness. Title song “The Modern World” is the perfect bridge between “In The City” and what is to come, with Weller taking a swipe at that “older generation of gnarly, jealous (?) journo’s” we talked about yesterday with the lyrical jab “Don’t have to explain myself to you,I don’t give two fucks about your review”. That Adrian Henri influenced song “Tonight At Noon” alongside “Life From A Window” are both great songs and actually damn good goes at 60’s psychedelia, but these were the angry days of ’77, no-one was thinking about psychedelia. However both point toward later songs like “Tales From the Riverbank”, “The Butterfly Collector” and “Dreamtime”.

“Standards” is very of it’s time concerned with the faceless “them” that control everything; “London Girl” is a tale of a provincial kid enticed by the bright lights of the big city and getting swallowed up by it; “The Combine” looks at some of the same things Weller was concerned with in “Away from the Numbers”, individuality and not getting lost “in the crowd” (“Look, life is very intricate, when you're in the crowd, Life becomes the movies, And everyone has a role”).

Some of the best is saved toward the end. “I Need You (For Someone)” is one that hits home to me. If you know me at all just read the lyrics and you’ll know why (“I need you keep me straight, When the world don't seem so great, And it’s hard enough you know”). “Here Comes The Weekend” is fantastic, a huge favourite of mine. It’s a classic teenage/Mod anthem “From Monday morning I work for Friday nights” and “Here comes the weekend, I get to see the girls, Long live the weekend, the weekend is here”…file it next to The Easybeats “Friday On My Mind' and Eddie Cochran’s “Weekend”.

The cover art I always thought was significant too. The picture of the three of them under an elevated road (The Westway ?) ticks the urban wasteland/Punk box. But Weller has had those Modernist/Pop Art arrows stuck on to his sweater with electrical tape, Rick and Bruce are in button down shirts and there’s a Union flag button badge. The Mod(ern) in Weller is beginning to bubble to the surface more openly and will burst into the open on their next album. And let’s not forget those brilliant label and inner sleeve illustrations by artist Conny Jude, very Egon Schiele in style I’ve come to realise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Schiele).

“This Is The Modern World” was released just 6 months after “In The City”. Given their touring commitments and pressure being applied by Polydor for another record it’s probably not a surprise that (still 19 year old) Paul Weller was struggling to write sufficient and suitable songs. It’s something that carried on into the preparations for their 3rd album. “This Is The Modern World” has its faults, undoubtedly, but it’s not the forgettable difficult second album that certain people have painted it as over the years.

Here Comes The Weekend - https://youtu.be/4EpHlP-yjlM?si=7NiV8VvC7mI-Bdxr