The Jam

[Bermuda Iron]

Jam Top 5

1. Girl On The Phone
2. Little Boy Soldiers
3. Saturday's Kids
4. Pretty Green
5. All Mod Cons

[WOM]

I should clarify, I don't rate Style Council poorly independently. They're fine. It's in comparison with The Jam that I find them lacking.
Same way I find New Order are fine on their own, but a bit 'meh' when compared to Joy Division.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I liked early Jam a lot. In great part because it takes a particular kind of skill to be so obviously "influenced" without actually being plagaristic. Bob Dylan has the same ability.

[Toby Gymshorts]

1. The Modern World
2. Start
3. Down In The Tube Station At Midnight
4. Smithers-Jones
5. A Town Called Malice

Subject to short-notice change and in some cases, flat-out denial.

[Bored Of Education]

I love the Jam and only realised recently how much an influence on my bass-playing Bruce Foxton was. That said, we learnt "Start" for my 50th and that bassline is almost as hard as the one for "Substitute" by the Who that we also learnt.

I went with my wife to the Jam exhibition at Somerset House and it was brilliant; we both thought better, indeed, than the Bowie exhibition we saw a year earlier - odd considering Mrs Bored is a bit of a Bowie obsessive and had never shown huge love for the Jam before. What I love about exhibitions like this is the memorabilia that show stuff that were personal to the artist (I was thrilled to see Elvis' AmEx card once with his signature on the back). Although Bowie's exhibition was visually and conceptually more ambitious, there was much more of this personal ephemera at the Jame exhibition. This included Weller's hand-written lyrics and own drawings from when he was a 14 year old of a - four piece - Jam with the same logo and white ties and black clothes. As I used to draw similar as a kid, it was great to see that Weller managed to get his to reality. They also had a recreation of the Marquee stage with all their equipment set-up and their wardrobe flight cases with all their clothes - Foxton's, of course, being the best. The "About the young idea" film was shown then as well and it was great. Might have to get a copy of it.

Anyway, my top 5:

1. That's Entertainment (which should be the English national anthem)
2. Start!
3. Funeral Pyre
4. Going Underground
5. Eton Rifles.

[Gerontophile]

Yeah, thanks mr band-member.

Bruce Foxton has been playing for Stiff Little Fingers, on and off, for 30 years. They (SLF) were pretty good live to begin with...

In fact, all they are waiting for is Jake Burns to die, and then they will have a proper band. (hehehehe I happen to know that at least one of SLF is a lurker, here)

[Bored Of Education]

Bruce Foxton did play for SLF but only for 15 years and left over a decade ago. However, I think he was SLF's longest serving bassist and was in them for 5 years longer than he was in the Jam.

Saw SLF last month (with their original bassist) and, while not as energetic, perhaps, as before, it was a great show. At the end of the day, they have brilliant songs - probably as many as the Jam.

[Gerontophile]

Maybe so... and Ali McMordie was always my focal POV when I saw them. (Possibly a topic for a thread: why is the singer on the side of the stage? And OK, not everyone is Mick Karn.)

10 years? My memory is now officially shocking.

[ale]

The Jam then. Among the fervour and chaos of 1976-77 it was difficult to warm to them. 60's influence through and through but while riding the Years Zero they never came across as the opportunists like some of their peers. Undoubtedly though they benefited. And there were the pro Tory comments ahead of the 1979 election that no later association with Red Wedge can dilute.

[Sits]

Well my political inclinations have changed a bit since I was 21 too.

[Gerontophile]

I couldn't give a fuck to their political inclinations. At their best, they were magnificent.

[Gerontophile]

1. Butterfly Collector
2. Thick as Thieves
3. A Town Called Malice
4. Down in the Tube Station At Midnight
5. Smithers-Jones.

All of this is subject to change.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Well my political inclinations have changed a bit since I was 21 too.

Innit. A stick still used to beat Neil Peart 40 years later.

People get weird about music.

[delicatemoth]

They were huge. At my middle school there were 9-11 year old boys going around claiming to be mods, sporting Lonsdale sweatshirts and those green mod coats, lusting after boxing boots (I think). It was the first time in my life I saw that kind of fandom as such. I was somewhat baffled as I liked their records but didn't understand the point of all the trappings.

They made more good records than the Style Council but the SC's best stuff is better. 'Come To Milton Keynes' is an absolute masterpiece. It was excellent work for someone known as the leader of a 'laddish' group to change direction that abruptly.

Weller Top 5

1. Come To Milton Keynes
2. Long Hot Summer
3. Shout To The Top
4. Funeral Pyre
5. Going Underground

[Gerontophile]

and those green mod coats

Parka's, and I think "Chart Music" got this spot on. You were either a Mod, or you were into ska (Specials etc), but the Jam were an outlier. Some of us hated them for the nasty things that Paul Weller had to say about Nick Heyward. But talent is talent, and whilst Weller can be insufferable, The Jam were as tight as a drum, musically.

And I loved "Come To Milton Keynes".

[tee rex]

Setting Sons was my teenage touchstone.

"Find enclosed one son, one medal and a note to say he won". I've quoted this in every argument about every war since, somehow failing to persuade anyone under 40, the ignorant fools.

[Sits]

Yes that's a great line to end the song. Listening to it yesterday, Little Boy Soldiers gets very close to being an epic, but doesn't quite pull it off. In my opinion.

[G-Man]

I'd be quite happy to accept the Style Council in their own right, without them having to be in the same room as the Jam. Both were rather hit-and-miss, but when they hit, both did so well.

[Beatle Simon]

Putting The Beatles to one side, The Jam and The Style Council, along with The Cure, have probably been the biggest influence on me musically & clothes-wise.
Following on from AdC's post on how Weller took influences and made them his own, I've always admired how Weller adopted an already established youth cult, Mod, and made it his own. Richard Barnes' 'Mods' (1979) was the first proper book about the cult (Barnes was a flat-mate of Pete Townsend and they attended art college together, although Barnes was never a Mod himself), and the book was a big influence on Weller if you look at the era from late '81 (Absolute Beginners) right through to late '84 (Shout To The Top).

Top 5 Style Council songs:

1.Down In The Seine
2.Party Chambers
3.The Paris Match (album version)
4.My Ever Changing Moods (single version)
5.Solid Bond In Your Heart

Top 5 Jam songs:

1.Shopping
2.Tales From The Riverbank
3.Absolute Beginners
4.The Butterfly Collector
5.Man In The Corner Shop

Top 5 Paul Weller songs:

1.Friday Street
2.Whirlpool's End
3.The Changing Man
4.Uh Huh, Oh Yeah
5.Into Tomorrow

[Jah Womble]

Well my political inclinations have changed a bit since I was 21 too.

True, but you perhaps haven't chosen to build a highly-public profile around said political inclinations?

(I could well be wrong about that, of course.)

[Bored Of Education]

They didn't though, did they?

This was a quote in 1978, a year after he made the original statement in one interview in 77.

"What about your famous quote of “We’ll all be voting Conservative at the next election”, what prompted you to say that?
Well that... it was more like a private joke. I mean it’s easy for me to justify myself, now, but I suppose at the time it was... We was on The Clash tour at the time and everything was like left wing and socialist maaan, and all that crap. I just thought I’d, you know...
-Get yourself hated?
Well in a way. I was just trying to make the point that we’re not into whatever they want to do. We’re just our own band and that’s that. It was a stupid quote anyway, and I regret it now, but there you go...
-Would you vote in The next election?
I dunno, maybe I’ll vote for Labour. I don’t really wanna talk about politics, I’m not clever enough."

Mind you, a couple of years ago, he said he would vote for Russel Brand so he has made a lot of political mistakes.

[elguapo4]

One of the great urban myths that refuses to die in Ireland is that the Jam burned a tricolour on stage in Belfast during the late 70s, I still know people who hate Weller and the Jam for something he didn't do ,Billy Bragg's six weeks in the army has also turned him into a NF supporter with at least one person I used to work with

[WOM]

Haha. There are people here who still won't countenance Madness because they didn't throw some skinheads out of their second gig in the autumn of '78.

As TG says...

[WOM]

... The Style Council, along with The Cure, have probably been the biggest influence on me ... clothes-wise.

That would be quite the outfit.

[danielmak]

I'd rate the Jam high up there among my favorite bands. I liked Style Council a lot but there records seemed to get worse and by the end it was difficult to distinguish between a Style Council record and a Sade record (I'd probably go with Sade). Weller's solo stuff never really spoke to me but perhaps revisiting some of those solo records might lead me to a different conclusion. Of course, given the amount of new music that is released every day and reissues with extra tracks from that I want to hear, I'm unlikely to actually revisit those solo records.

I have a hard time ranking top 5 songs. Other than the live records, I'd say that every Jam studio album has way more songs on it that I like than songs I don't like. My biggest complaint is that they seem to have enrolled in the Elvis Costello school of reissues: reissue the album every other year with new material that wasn't on the last reissue. Elvis and the Jam have helped me shed any interest in being a completist when it comes to music and I turned to Spotify to hear stuff from these reissues rather than buying the albums yet again.