"The Jam were the Beatles of our generation, and thank heaven they aren't going to be the Rolling Stones"

- letter to the NME after the Jam's break-up was announced

Hurtling straight out of Woking on to the burgeoning London punk scene of the late 1970s, the Jam were the first to combine the visceral energy of punk with a stylish mod sensibility. In their early days, they stood out amid the Do-It-Yourself style of the time - their stage gear of matching black mohair suits and ties was a little smarter than your average bin-liner T-shirt and tartan bondage trousers. Later on they would start a Mod revival, become the most popular band of their era, and in the case of their singer Paul Weller, be regarded as the spokesman for their generation. But let's start at the beginning.

When You're Young

Sheerwater Comprehensive, Steve Brookes, how the band came to be named. Early line-ups, the stage when they were called Paul Weller and the Jam. Weller's early obsession with the mod look and the Who. Talent contests, the residency at Michael's, playing Motown covers plus one or two of their own.

In The City There's A Thousand Things I Want To Say To You

Quote from Weller about saying 'I want to tape London'. Going up to play gigs in London crammed in the back of his Dad's Austin A40 van. Bruce Foxton switching from guitar to bass, and only being brought on for the last few songs initially 'cos he wasn't that confident. Steve Brookes leaving the band. Playing in Soho Market and being signed up by Chris Parry at Polydor. Initial release of 'In the City' (explain truncated title) charting at no. 40, being rejected by the punk elite and burning a copy of Sniffin' Glue on stage saying 'this is your f***ing bible' after they'd been accused of being 'tighter than the LSO'.

Standards

After their next single 'All Around The World' charted at number 11, the Jam were encouraged by Polydor to get another album out there, sharpish. 'This Is The Modern World' found the band treading water - Paul Weller said later that the band were caught somewhere between the punk thing and the mod thing, somehow falling between two stools. The title track was the only single released from the album, charting at a disappointing number 36. Bruce starting to write, with limited degrees of success. 'News of the World' was released in February 1978 and although it gained the band an improved chart placing of 27, Foxton's lyrics are somewhat simplistic and it's regarded as the band's weakest single, although this researcher does have something of a soft spot for it.

Strange Town

Like so many quintessentially British bands before and since¹, the Jam tried to break America and nearly broke themselves in the process. It didn't help that Polydor America didn't know what they were doing and had them supporting bands like the Blue Oyster Cult in 30,000 capacity arenas and going down like a lead balloon every night. If they'd had the right kind of backup, and started at grass-roots level playing college radio and gigs in small clubs where the raw, energetic style they had at the time would have been much more effective, well, things might have been different. And there was no getting away from the fact that the Jam's main creative force was a 19 year-old kid from Woking who was feeling like a fish out of water in a huge and unfamiliar country and missing Gill Price, his first serious girlfriend.

So the Jam went back to London with their tails between their legs, and started work on a new album. 1978 was very much a crossroads for the band. The energy of the punk scene was fizzling out, 2-Tone was yet to give popular culture the shot in the arm that it needed, and while the Jam held true to their 1960s mod image they weren't popular enough to start a Mod revival going. Yet.

All Mod Cons

"Chris Parry came down to the studio and his actual words were, this is s***"

- Paul Weller

By mid-1978, The Jam were going nowhere - the material for the new album was half-baked, everyone had lost interest, and in an interview at the time Bruce Foxton was musing about opening up a small hotel after the band's presumably imminent demise - and Polydor's A&R man gave them the kick up the backside that they needed. It was the first time someone had turned round to Paul Weller and told him that he needed to do better. With his back against the wall, Weller responded with his most mature and lyrically intelligent set of songs to date².

The Double A-sided single that came out in August 1978 showed just how far the band had come. Although it only made number 25 in the charts, just two places better than 'News of the World', the Jam had put far more distance between themselves and where they'd been earlier in the year. 'David Watts' was a sparkling cover of a mid-period Kinks song, and 'A-Bomb in Wardour Street' recaptured their earlier, focused energy. Most importantly, what came to be known as the 'Jam sound' was there for the first time - clean and tight; hard and shiny like a diamond. Chris Parry had realised that while he was co-producing the band, there were too many ideas flying around pulling the band in to many directions, so he stepped down and left things in the hands of engineer Vic Smith (who later renamed himself Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, apparently inspired by his girlfriend³) who focused on capturing energy the band generated while playing live as cleanly as possible.

The single that followed two months later, 'Down In The Tube Station at Midnight', was the first time Paul Weller showed what he was really capable of. The song is like a short TV play, telling the story of a man who gets mugged while taking a curry back home to his wife on the London Underground and somehow managing to pull all that off in the context of a three-minute pop song. It signalled the start of the Jam's renaissance, breaking into the Top Twenty for the second time, peaking at number 15 and setting the scene for the release of the album 'All Mod Cons' a month later. It also featured a wonderful version of the Who's 'So Sad About Us' on the B-side, included as a mark of respect for legendary drummer Keith Moon who'd died a couple of months earlier.

To Be Someone

'All Mod Cons' was hailed as the Jam coming of age, their first 'proper' fully-formed album. The title was a more-than-subtle clue to the direction the band were going in, printed in the typeface used by Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate Records label⁴ and the inner sleeve of the album featured a line diagram of a Vespa scooter. It was also a very English record, the Jam somehow managing to capture something of the essence of the world around them with songs like 'A-Bomb', and 'Tube Station' with Paul Weller's lyrical range extending to inventing characters in songs (as Ray Davies of the Kinks had done before him) like the stereotypical commuter 'Mr Clean', the dreamer 'Billy Hunt' who was going to get fit and grow bionic arms and make the world wish it weren't born, and the failed rock star portrayed in 'To Be Someone'. The last, of course, wasn't a million miles away from the band's own experience that year. And the album also contained the Jam's softest moment so far - the acoustic number 'English Rose', wonderfully sentimental and written by Weller for and about Gill Price. Sweet.