60 ALBUMS @ 60 : #1

The Jam – All Mod Cons (1978)

It’s my 60th birthday today.  I’m gifting myself the words of Charles Shaar Murray from the NME of 22 October 1978.   I wish I was this talented.

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Third albums generally mean that it’s shut-up-or-get-cut-up time: when an act’s original momentum has drained away and they’ve got to cover the distance from a standing start, when you’ve got to cross “naive charm” off your list of assets.

For The Jam, it seemed as if the Third Album Syndrome hit with their second album. This Is The Modern World was dull and confused, lacking both the raging, one-dimensional attack of their first album and any kind of newly-won maturity. A couple of vaguely duff singles followed and, in the wake of a general disillusionment with the Brave New Wave World, it seemed as if Paul Weller and his team were about to be swept under the carpet.

Well, it just goes to show you never can tell. All Mod Cons is the third Jam album to be released (it’s actually the fourth Jam album to be recorded; the actual third Jam album was judged, found wanting and scrapped) and it’s not only several light years ahead of anything they’ve done before but also the album that’s going to catapult The Jam right into the front rank of international rock and roll; one of the handful of truly essential rock albums of the last few years.

The title is more than Grade B punning or a clever-clever linkup with the nostalgibuzz packaging (like the target design on the label, the Swinging London trinketry, the Lambretta diagram or the Immediate-style lettering); it’s a direct reference to both the broadening of musical idiom and Weller’s reaffirmation of a specific Mod consciousness.

Remember the Mod ideal: it was a lower-middle and working-class consciousness that stressed independence, fun and fashion without loss of integrity or descent into elitism or consumerism; unselfconscious solidarity and a dollop of non-sectarian concern for others. Weller has transcended his original naivety without becoming cynical about anything other than the music business.

Mod became hippies and we know that didn’t work; the more exploratory end of Mod rock became psychedelia. Just as Weller’s Mod ideal has abandoned the modern equivalent of beach-fighting and competitive posing, his Mod musical values have moved from ’65 to ’66: the intoxicating period between pilled-up guitar-strangling and Sergeant Pepper. Reference points: Rubber Soul and A Quick One rather than Small Faces and My Generation.

Still, though Weller’s blends of acoustic and electric 6 and 12-string guitars, sound effects, overdubs and more careful structuring and arranging of songs (not to mention a quantum leap in standard of composition) may cause frissons of delight over at the likes of Bomp, Trouser Press and other covens of aging Yankee Anglophiles, All Mod Cons is an album based firmly in 1978 and looking forward.

This is the modern world: ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’ is a fair indication of what Weller’s up to on this album, as was ‘A-Bomb In Wardour Street’ (I can’t help thinking that he’s given more hard clear-eyed consideration to the implications of the Sham Army than Jimmy Pursey has), but they don’t remotely tell the whole story. For one thing, Weller has the almost unique ability to write love songs that convince the listener that the singer is really in love. Whether he’s describing an affair that’s going well or badly, he writes with a penetrating, committed insight that rings perfectly, utterly true.

Weller writes lovingly and (choke on it) sensitively, without ever descending to the patented sentimentality that is the stock-in-trade of the emotionally bankrupt. That sentimentality is but the reverse side of the macho coin, and both sides spell lovelessness. The inclusion of ‘English Rose’ (a one-man pick’n’croon acoustic number backed only by a tape of the sea) is both a musical and emotional finger in the eye for everyone who still clings to the old punk tough-guy stereotype and is prepared to call The Jam out for not doing likewise.

Weller is – like Bruce Springsteen – tough enough not to feel he needs to prove it any more, strong enough to break down his own defences, secure enough to make himself vulnerable. The consciousness of All Mod Cons is the most admirable in all of British rock and roll, and one that most of his one-time peers could do well to study.

Through the album, then: the brief, brusque title track and its immediate successor (‘To Be Someone’) examine the rock business first in a tart V-sign to some entrepreneurial type who wishes to squeeze the singer dry and then throw him away, and second in a cuttingly ironic track about a superstar who lost touch with the kids and blew his career. Weller is, by implication, assuring his listeners that no way is that going to happen to him: but the song is so well thought out and so convincing that it chokes back the instinctive “Oh yeah?” that a less honest song in the same vein would elicit from a less honest band.

From there we’re into ‘Mr Clean’, an attack on the complacent middle-aged “professional classes.” The extreme violence of its language (the nearest this album comes to an orthodox punk stance, in fact) is matched with music that combines delicacy and aggression with an astonishing command of dynamics. This is as good a place as any to point out that bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler are more than equal to the new demands that Weller is making on them: the vitality, empathy and resourcefulness that they display throughout the album makes All Mod Cons a collective triumph for The Jam as well as a personal triumph for Weller.

‘David Watts’ follows (written by Ray Davies, sung by Foxton and a re-recorded improvement on the 45) with ‘English Rose’ in hot pursuit. The side ends with ‘In The Crowd’, which places Weller dazed and confused in the supermarket. It bears a superficial thematic resemblance to ‘The Combine’ (from the previous album) in that it places its protagonist in a crowd and examines his reactions to the situation, but its musical and lyrical sophistication smashes ‘The Combine’ straight back to the stone age. It ends with a lengthy, hallucinatory backward guitar solo which sounds as fresh and new as anything George Harrison or Pete Townshend did a dozen years ago, and a reference back to ‘Away From The Numbers’.

‘Billy Hunt’, whom we meet at the beginning of the second side, is not a visible envy-focus like Davies’ ‘David Watts’, but the protagonist’s faintly ludicrous all-powerful fantasy self: what he projects in the daydreams that see him through his crappy job. The deliberate naivety of this fantasy is caught and projected by Weller with a skill that is nothing short of marvellous.

A brace of love songs follow: ‘It’s Too Bad’ is a song of regret for a couple’s mutual inability to save a relationship which they both know is infinitely worth saving. Musically, it’s deliriously, wonderfully ’66 Beat Groupish in a way that represents exactly what all those tinpot powerpop bands were aiming for but couldn’t manage. Lyrically, even if this sort of song was Weller’s only lick, he’d still be giving Pete Shelley and all his New Romance fandangos a real run for his money.

‘Fly’ is an exquisite electric/acoustic construction, a real lovers’ song, but from there on in the mood changes for the “Doctor Marten’s Apocalypse” of ‘A-Bomb In Wardour Street’ and ‘Tube Station’. In both these songs, Weller depicts himself as the victim who doesn’t know why he’s getting trashed at the hands of people who don’t know why they feel they have to hand out the aggro.

We’ve heard a lot of stupid, destructive songs about the alleged joys of violence lately, and they all stink: if these songs are listened to in the spirit in which they were written then maybe we’ll see a few less pictures of kids getting carried off the terraces with darts in their skulls. And if these songs mean that one less meaningless street fight gets started, then we’ll all owe Paul Weller a favour.

The Jam brought us The Sound Of ’65 in 1976, and now in 1978 they bring us the sound of ’66. Again, they’ve done it such a way that even though you can still hear The Who here and there and a few distinct Beatleisms in those ornate decending 12-string chord sequences, it all sounds fresher and newer than anything else this year. All Mod Cons is the album that’ll make Bob Harris‘ ears bleed the next time he asks what has Britain produced lately; more important, it’ll be the album that makes The Jam real contenders for the crown.

Look out, all you rock and rollers: as of now, The Jam are the ones you have to beat.

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JC adds

Shaar Murray’s review just about captures everything I felt about this record back in the day, albeit I wasn’t fully up on his 60s era references, not being a fan of The Beatles or much that predated 1973.

I also remember reading this review thanks to the big brother of a friend who had heard me raving about ‘Tube Station’ and how it was by far the greatest song that anyone had ever written.  I didn’t buy the NME in 1978 – music was now an increasingly important part of my life, but it was still mainly football and my newly discovered hobby of golf, but being passed a copy of the paper specifically to read that review had a huge impact on the way I began to engage with and consume pop music.   I didn’t know it at the time, but I was just over six months away from seeing my first ever live gig, another seminal event in my development.

All Mod Cons is not the best album I have here in Villain Towers, but it is, and by some considerable distance, my all-time favourite.

And with that, the blog will return to the mundane and mediocre, beginning tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m off to find a bus driver to whom I can flash my newly acquired concessionary pass.

mp3:  The Jam – The Place I Love

Thanks for all your thoughts, views and opinions over the course of the rundown.

JC

The rundown in full:-

1. All Mod Cons – The Jam
2. After The Fact – Magazine
3. Sulk- Associates
4. The Midnight Organ Fight – Frightened Rabbit
5. Technique – New Order
6. The Orange Juice – Orange Juice
7. Closer – Joy Division
8. Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters – The Twilight Sad
9. Hatful of Hollow – The Smiths
10. Songs To Remember – Scritti Politti
11. Mezzanine – Massive Attack
12. New Adventures In Hi-Fi – R.E.M.
13. Standing On A Beach – The Cure
14. Singles Going Steady – Buzzcocks
15. Seamonsters – The Wedding Present
16. Let Love In – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
17. Rattlesnakes – Lloyd Cole & The Commotions
18. London Calling – The Clash
19. Parallel Lines – Blondie
20. High Land, Hard Rain – Aztec Camera
21. Philophobia – Arab Strap
22. Death To The Pixies – Pixies
23. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret – Soft Cell
24. Soul Mining – The The
25. Will I Ever Be Inside Of You? – Paul Quinn & The Independent Group
26. Different Class – Pulp
27. 30 Something – Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
28. Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury – The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
29. Heaven Up Here – Echo and The Bunnymen
30. Tindersticks (II) – Tindersticks
31. Steve McQueen – Prefab Sprout
32. Head Over Heels – Cocteau Twins
33. Pop Art – Pet Shop Boys
34. Boat To Bolivia – Martin Stephenson & The Daintees
35. Empires and Dance – Simple Minds
36. DAMN – Kendrick Lamar
37. Before Hollywood – The Go-Betweens
38. Surrender – The Chemical Brothers
39. The Great Eastern – The Delgados
40. You Had A Kind Face – Butcher Boy
41. Shag Times – The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
42. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – Arctic Monkeys
43. Into The Woods – Malcom Middleton
44. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes
45. Cafe Bleu – The Style Council
46. Trapped and Unwrapped – Friends Again
47. The Hurting – Tears For Fears
48. Debut – Bjork
49. Original Pirate Material – The Streets
50. Electronic – Electronic
51. Kilimanjiro – The Teardrop Explodes
52. A Certain Trigger – Maximo Park
53. Anthology : The Sounds of Science – Beastie Boys
54. Boxer – The National
55. Imaginary Walls Collapse – Adam Stafford
56. Beaucoup Fish – Underworld
57. Back In The D.H.S.S. – Half Man Half Biscuit
58. Love The Cup – Sons and Daughters
59. Talking With The Taxman About Poetry – Billy Bragg
60. A Secret Wish – Propaganda

(I’ve 51 of them on vinyl either as stand-alone LPs or as part of boxets.)