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    The Jam

    Recently my daughter bought me the DVD of About the Young Idea, the 2015 film about The Jam. I watched it this week, having completely missed it when it came out. Now I think of it I remember the exhibition at the same time. What an enjoyable hour and a half it was, and most of all it made me realise there's none of their music that I've heard which I don't like. I've had the Compact Snap hits compilation for ages and picked up Setting Sons on iTunes somewhere along the way.

    But watching and listening, and looking back now I realise how influential they were, before the Smiths, before the Stone Roses, before Britpop. And having been in my teens when it was happening I just enjoyed what I heard, without fully appreciating the musicianship, songwriting, melding of so many influences into something unique. And their youth! Weller was 19 when they broke in 1977, Foxton and Buckler about 22. And they'd already been playing together three years. The live footage looked electric; I'll bet a fair few OTFers saw them.

    The end was early and sudden, and clearly neither Foxton, or especially Buckler have got over it and the fact none of them appear together in the contemporary footage stands out like a sore thumb. Weller is and was clearly very driven and ambitious, and whilst I consider nothing he's done since holds a candle to The Jam, who's to say they would have kept the standard up if they'd stayed together? What we got was what we got.

    Suffice it to say I now have a pressing need to fill all the gaps in the collection, and picked up In The City and The Gift today, simply because they were what the shop had.

    A personal Top 5 to finish (pending those I've yet to hear):

    1. Town Called Malice
    2. In The City
    3. That's Entertainment
    4. English Rose
    5. Wasteland

    #2
    I saw them in June/July 1977 at Sheffield Top Rank. They totally depressed me and I realised that punk was dead...

    Still, they made some good singles...

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      #3
      I always though The Style Council were better.

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        #4
        Three consecutive singles with the word "world" in the title. What's not to like?

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          #5
          Considering how big they were at the time, The Jam are under-represented in music's rolling nostalgia fest compared to The Smiths, et al. By contrast, The Style Council being underrated has almost become the consensus opinion. I was twelve when they broke up and can still remember the words to most of the songs on Snap. Weller's puritan distaste for much of what he sees around him makes listening to them at length a bit of a slog though. The thing about public school alumni liking them and especially liking Eton Rifles was definitely the case when I was at university in the late '80s. Maybe it's a sense of them as something of a male pursuit that has tempered retrospective admiration.

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            #6
            Were the Jam really that big though? In the group's prime, every single seemed to enter the charts at number one and then completely drop out the next week. As though every Jam fan in the country, and I was one of them, went out and bought the latest offering on the same day and the rest of the pop-pickers couldn't give a stuff.

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              #7
              My mum once marked an O-Level paper where the candidate had written a biography of the Jam. It was a maths exam.

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                #8
                Brilliant.

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                  #9
                  I'll say it again, just for the record: the Style Council were as dull as fucking dust.

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                    #10
                    Away From The Numbers; good song, poor maths exam technique.

                    Originally posted by Aitch View Post
                    Were the Jam really that big though? In the group's prime, every single seemed to enter the charts at number one and then completely drop out the next week. As though every Jam fan in the country, and I was one of them, went out and bought the latest offering on the same day and the rest of the pop-pickers couldn't give a stuff.
                    I hadn't thought of that; it definitely felt like an event when they put out a single and, especially, the run in to the split. The idea of them as a proto-Westlife, gaming the charts with the assistance of their devoted fans, is quite appealing.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by Aitch View Post
                      Were the Jam really that big though? In the group's prime, every single seemed to enter the charts at number one and then completely drop out the next week. As though every Jam fan in the country, and I was one of them, went out and bought the latest offering on the same day and the rest of the pop-pickers couldn't give a stuff.
                      Of their four Number 1s Going Underground and Town Called Malice were top for three weeks, Beat Surrender for two. Only Start was a one week wonder. They were big enough.

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                        #12
                        Being the wrong age, I came to The Jam late. Town Called Malice was the first I heard; I suspect due to it being their most North America-friendy radio song. I'm a 'Jam's Greatest Hits' guy, for sure. I just went to iTunes to see if The Style Council had any more appeal today than they did in the '80s. Nope. Dull.

                        Shoo be do be, shoo be doo wap wap....

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by WOM View Post
                          I'll say it again, just for the record: the Style Council were as dull as fucking dust.
                          Rockist!

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                            #14
                            No matter what I do...no matter what I do...no matter what I do...no matter what I do...<up an octave>...no matter what I do...no matter what I do... no matter what I do....

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                              #15
                              Rush fan accuses Style Council of being dull. I bet they'll take that.

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                                #16
                                I've always thought the line in IN THE CITY "cause the kids know where it's at " sounds like something out of BLACKBOARD JUNGLE,it should have daddyo at the end

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                                  #17
                                  Top 5 (Jam, SC, PW solo)

                                  5 come to MK
                                  4 a Bomb
                                  3 Floorboards up
                                  2 Smithers Jones
                                  1 Thats Entertainment

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                                    #18
                                    Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                    Rush fan accuses Style Council of being dull. I bet they'll take that.
                                    Now see here....<adjusts glasses>...

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                                      #19
                                      There's a thing about the Jam, and the Clash and the Specials/ska, and the Smiths/Stone Roses/Britpop stuff, a huge amount of which I like and love, that they all form part of a core conservative heritage cunt rock scene in England (the UK?). Loads of times I'll go to a pub before or after a match, or be on an away coach or see an ad for a covers band, and it's all that stuff and nowt else. Which is bit of a shame, because they were all part of scenes that had loads of other interesting things going on, and I love loads of those things too, but they've fallen into the memory hole. And those musics/artists are usually the Black/arty ones. I'm putting some dub on the jukebox before the match tomorrow.

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                                        #20
                                        Actually, you would probably get a bit of Motown playing in that sort of scenario, but not P-Funk or James Brown.

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                                          #21
                                          And no chance with hip-hop, unless it's a particular mate of mine who is running the bus and got his ipod playing.

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                                            #22
                                            As I've said before, you really can never hear enough [fucking] Motown....

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                                              #23
                                              Mod, though, like (almost) all the other stuff, innit.

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                                                #24
                                                Anyway, I'm absolutely shattered so perhaps not expressed myself as well as I hoped, plus I'm on the honky-tonk for Maundy Thursday in a few minutes, so will be even more incoherent.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Originally posted by Walt Flanagans Dog View Post
                                                  Of their four Number 1s Going Underground and Town Called Malice were top for three weeks, Beat Surrender for two. Only Start was a one week wonder. They were big enough.
                                                  ...and Start took three weeks to make number one anyway - Bowie's Ashes to Ashes held it off the top for a fortnight. (The 'enter one week, drop like a stone the next'-phenomenon only really kicked in during the nineties, ie, way after The Jam's heyday.)

                                                  Sign me up as another that didn't rate The Style Council as worthy of tying The Jam's bootlaces. They weren't 'awful' as such, they just weren't very interesting by comparison: even when they did crank it up a little (Walls Come Tumbling Down*, etc), it all felt rather obvious and oh-so-worthy. And - unlike Weller's earlier guise - the SC now sound utterly of their time.

                                                  (Edit: *This song came on 6Music almost exactly as I typed, which is moderately frightening - if not exactly unexpected.)

                                                  Originally posted by elguapo4 View Post
                                                  I've always thought the line in IN THE CITY "cause the kids know where it's at " sounds like something out of BLACKBOARD JUNGLE,it should have daddyo at the end
                                                  If Weller had sung 'cats' instead of 'kids', I'd have been with you...
                                                  Last edited by Jah Womble; 29-03-2018, 15:12.

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