Welcome to the 500th review in this blog. I had thought long and hard about which album should mark this milestone, but made my mind up after a trawl through Music Magpie, with a parcel of old favourites arriving last week.
And what a favourite this album was! Released in 1979, it practically soundtracked my final year in Durham, and listening to it brings back so many happy memories.
It was always going to be difficult for the Jam to follow 1978's breakthrough album All Mod Cons, and Paul Weller's intention was for a concept album about three childhood friends reuniting after a war. Whether the idea was shelved, or time pressures for release curtailed that, might never be known, but the cover photograph (Benjamin Clemens' bronze sculpture The St John's Ambulance Bearers, from the Imperial War Museum), and several of the songs feed into this theme. Perhaps it was a rushed release; of the ten songs, two had already surfaced and one was a Motown cover, and the whole thing weighs in at just 33 minutes.
But it's quality, not quantity that counts. I've frequently said that the introduction of CD, with the potential for up to 80 minutes of music, did many artists no favours whatsoever, as the pressure to give 'value for money' meant things which should have been left unreleased surfaced. I'm no vinyl champion, but the merit it did have was limiting a single album to under 50 minutes (unless you weren't worried about sound quality).
But back to these songs. Opening with an old fashioned telephone bell, we're straight in with Girl On The Phone, a lively number with echoes of 1984 and stalking, and it's a strong start which feels more like a starter than the main course. But Thick As Thieves, which follows, is much more substantial (and was my prediction as a New Year no 1 hit single for the band - they went and released Going Underground just to prove me wrong), and is classic Jam. Private Hell, a tale of boredom in suburbia, comes next, equally powerful, and equally wonderful. Little Boy Soldiers is for me, the weak point in the album. It feels like an attempt to do everything in three and a half minutes, with a plodding opening, a two-part middle section (with some underrated cannon drumming from Rick Buckler), before returning to the original theme. It's an ambitious song on the futility of war, which might have become something stunning with further development. Or might have become a rambling mess, we'll never know. Wasteland is a gentle comedown after this, a simple love song of the mundane, and for me, a much overlooked gem in Weller's songbook.
The second half opens with the mysterious Burning Sky, a letter to an old friend (from the original concept), and it's a stunning narrative and a fine song. Smithers-Jones is the sole Bruce Foxton composition on the album, and it had previously been released as the B-side of When You're Young. The string accompaniment feels somewhat incongruous, but it's a gentle interlude in the traditional low spot of an album - halfway through the second side. It breaks up a run of high energy songs, so leaves the listener ready for the assault of the engaging Saturday's Kids, a tale of working class youngsters, I like to think much more affectionate than patronising, others might disagree. Whatever, it's a really good song, only waiting to be upstaged by the only single from the album (released a month before and the band's first top ten hit single), Eton Rifles. It still hits you like a brick, Foxton's classic bassline, Weller's clanging chords, all held together by the rock solid drumming of Buckler. It's a wonderful tale inspired by the juxtaposition of a 'Right To Work' march with Eton schoolboys in Windsor. No prizes for guessing which side I'm on, and decades on, it's still a fine and powerful song. This would be a fitting end to the album, but there's a fantastic wind down with a 100 mph cover of Martha and the Vandellas' Heat Wave, with some great piano tinkling underneath from Mick Heaton.
Forty plus years on, this album has lost none of its magic, and I'm just amazed I hadn't replaced it on CD before now.
Is it as good as All Mod Cons? It's certainly a contender.
Did they do a better album subsequently? I don't think so.
5* - an influential album from my youth, perhaps overlooked within The Jam's discography
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