» Listings for 2023

1. 2023 Albums Thing 190 - The Jam “Sound Affects”

   Posted on 9:40am Saturday 7th Oct 2023

   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

2. 2023 Albums Thing 189 - The Jam “Setting Sons”

   Posted on 10:20am Friday 6th Oct 2023

   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

3. 2023 Albums Thing 188 - The Jam “All Mod Cons”

   Posted on 9:05am Thursday 5th Oct 2023

   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