The Jam: The Singles, 1977–82

THE JAM
The Singles 1977–79/1980–82
POLYDOR

Relative to the Mississippi Delta, the docksides of the Mersey or New York’s Lower East Side, Woking seems an unlikely rock’n’roll wellspring. True, the sprawl of Outer London — Dartford, Richmond, Ealing — had once been the source of one of Britain’s most significant musical upsurges, but this corner of Surrey was a little too far out. Small wonder that, on 1977’s Sounds From The Street, Paul Weller made a point of kicking off his career with what bordered on an apology. “I know I come from Woking,” he implored, “and you say I’m a fraud/But my heart is in the city, where it belongs.”

That was more notice of an aspiration than a fact. Though Weller quickly became a resident of the capital, and often saw fit to root his lyrics there, his trump card remained his knack of nailing the mindset of the UK’s semi-urban backwaters. His territory was somewhere distinct from the picket-fenced idyll of suburbia; instead, he wrote of that proletarian demi-monde where the caff tables were always sticky, the journey into the smoke just that little bit too long, and reckless youth stopped short of one’s early twenties. Even his London lyrics were coloured by all that — within Jam-land, the capital tended to be viewed as either a bright-lights place of escape or deeply alien rat’s nest.

For all his self-consciousness about his origins, such subject matter gave Weller key advantage over many of the punks: it brought him a constituency. The Clash may still be the class of ‘76’s most critically-favoured sons, but their proposition perhaps bordered on the elitist: what use was all that Ladbroke Grovery when you were mouldering in Barrow-In-Furness? The Jam, by contrast, spoke to and for Britain-at-large: that endless expanse of Five O’Clock Heroes, Saturday’s Kids, and Towns Called Malice. By 1979, their songs were a national soundtrack; their regularly-released singles as pivotal a part of some provincial lives as the fortnightly trip to the city.

Going through these two box sets — each containing CD miniatures of the original 7-inchers — it all comes hurtling back. The singles’ outward aesthetic frequently seems as far-flung as some of the songs’ concerns: each main feature accompanied by a B-side that was at least serviceable, so that 75p was adequately rewarded; the fact that nine of them were artefacts-in-themselves rather than trailers for an album. The boxes’ artwork, taken from the cover of 1980’s Start!, features an old-school BSR turntable. In terms of its distance from anything remotely post-millennial, the image is perfect.

The sense of connecting to a long-lost universe is only heightened by the opening blast: In The City, the charging paean to London that could only have been written by someone dazzled from a distance. Both its music and lyrics have qualities that British musicians have long since lost — a sense of frantic empowerment that is equal parts euphoria and anger, and a standpoint untouched by either irony or cynicism. Indeed, Weller was so convinced of the beauty of “the young idea”, that he could scythe out two-thirds of the population at the start of verse two: “In the city there’s a thousand faces all shining bright/And those golden faces are under twenty-five.” There’s the door, Dad.

You hear the same burning zeal in All Around The World — Weller snarling against the dying of the punk light — before things take a momentarily rum turn. The Modern World is blustery and self-conscious when it should be righteously streamlined; two 1000mph versions of soul chestnuts (Sweet Soul Music and The Supremes’ Back In My Arms Again) on the B-side do not exactly help. Then Weller dries up, we get Foxton’s awful News Of The World — a third-form essay on the tabloid press — and The Jam sit at the bottom of a very deep trough.

Soon after, the group decisively discover their guiding aesthetic, and therefore their audience. By the time of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight and Strange Town, Weller’s view of London has been poisoned, and he speaks to that part of Britain that will always timidly keep its distance. In articulating the capital’s more dystopian aspects, he also begins to speak a startling kind of poetry: “They smelt of pubs, and Wormwood scrubs/And too many right-wing meetings”; “I look in the mirror, but I can’t be seen/Just a thin green layer of Mr Sheen/Looking back at me.”

And so we reach The Eton Rifles, for which no garlands are glorious enough. “Sup up your beer and collect your fags/There’s a row going on, down near Slough” — have class warfare, the ringing of the time bell and England’s drizzly expanse ever been condensed into two more perfect lines? The wonderment only goes on, both in the fusion of march-time bass and scabrous guitar, and more of those lyrics: “All that rugby puts hairs on your chest/What chance of you got against a tie and a crest?” At this point, The Jam’s chart positions leapt up from the mid-teens to the top five; if they were aiming at addressing middle Britain, it surely helped that it was now tuned in.

By the summer of 1979, moreover, the UK was under the command of the woman who would give Weller’s grasp of provincial British mores a sharply political edge. Thatcherism, after all, was the revolt of the people who recurrently appeared in his lyrics — Mr Clean (1978), the Man In The Corner Shop (1980); the harried, emotionally pinched occupants of Private Hell and Burning Sky (both from 1979’s Setting Sons). Thus, Weller squared up to a regime as well as a society, and the result was some of the most brilliant music he has ever produced.

The secret — which so many agitators never grasp — lay in his diligent avoidance of the blank cliches of sloganeering. You hear the first stirrings in Going Underground, launched with one of the most head-turning riffs ever penned, and seemingly full of ridicule at the idea that, now Mrs T was here, everything was going to be alright: “Some people might say my life is in a rut/I’m quite happy with what I’ve got/Some people might say that I should strive for more/But I’m so happy, I can’t see the point”. In The Dreams Of Children, Weller sounds a sincere note of disquiet at what’s looming: “I caught a passion from the dreams of children/But woke up sweating to this modern nightmare”. And on 1981’s Funeral Pyre, a song even its chief author has long underrated, the revolt of the Tory shires becomes all but apocalyptic. “Their mad eyes bulged, their flushed faces said/The weak get crushed as the strong grow stronger.”

It was in The Jam’s last year, however, that his grasp of very British images reached its peak. A Town Called Malice, arguably the most bang-on portrait of Thatcher’s England that anyone ever produced, barely needs mentioning. In addition, the box set allows light to fall on an oft-ignored song: The Great Depression, stuck on the B-side of Just Who Is The Five O’Clock Hero?. The production — by the group themselves — is sparse and reedy, but it’s the perfect setting for what follows: Weller pleading with the everyman to stop scrapping over his ever-smaller chunk of the rock and turn his attention to the string-pullers: “No sense of purpose in your fussing and fighting and your violent obsession/Who’s ever really left feeling fine after the great depression?” The almost desperate tone of his voice suggests that he knows that precious few people are actually listening.

Such was one factor in Paul Weller’s decision to call time on one of the few British institutions to have been commanded by a 24 year-old. Tellingly, in the wake of The Jam’s demise, each and every one of these singles re-charted, as a new generation of provincialites tuned in, and the music continued to echo — around car parks, threadbare Fun Pubs and the local Lite-A-Bite. One hesitates to use a term like Folk Music, but it surely fits.