The Jam: All Mod Cons - 1978
"Class issues were very important to me at that time" - Paul Weller
The previous album to this one, This Is The Modern World, saw main singer-songwriter Paul Weller supposedly suffer from "writer's block". I am not sure about that. The album had sounded pretty good to me. Nevertheless, he has admitted himself that he was struggling for creativity before it all suddenly came together with, this, The Jam's finest album.
The punk pretensions and 60s r'n'b stylings of the first album and, to a lesser extent, the next one, were gone by now. The songs became increasingly sophisticated, intelligently structured and lyrically surprisingly observant and mature for someone in Weller who had only recently turned twenty-one. There was a bit of youthful naïveté hanging around, but that was forgivable. The band still was a three-piece, Weller on lead guitar, Bruce Foxton on bass and Rick Buckler on drums and it had never sounded as tight or as accomplished as here.
Down to the tube station then....
On Mr. Clean, Weller spits out invective against a seemingly uncaring middle class professional type, the like of which Weller would have seen regularly while growing up in stockbroker belt Woking. "I hate you, and your wife, and if I get the chance, I'll fuck up your life", he aggressively states. Immature? Maybe. Inappropriate? Hell, no.
English Rose was the "surprise" unannounced track from the original album. A tender, acoustic guitar-based love song with accompanying wave noises, wind swirls and tugboat horns. Maybe it was not mentioned on the track list because Weller was genuinely embarrassed to include a love song on the album. A soppy love song? On a "punk" album? Are they punks or what? There's an establishment to rail at. In fact, in the song Monday on 1980s Sound Affects, he claims "I will never be embarrassed about love again". Maybe he genuinely was coy about it, as he looked down and spat on the ground between his teeth after dragging on his fag, as so many "lads" did.
In The Crowd is a somewhat rambling song (despite its atmospheric and subtle bassline) where Weller expresses his feelings when swept along in a crowd of people, his disconnection, his alienation, maybe even traces of self-loathing. It was quite a mature song for one so young, but musically it is a little bit uninspiring and never really gets going. Look, it's ok, but nowhere near the album's best. It does, however, convincingly highlight Weller's increasing "far from the madding crowd" outlook.
Billy Hunt is a song about a working class lad who works on a building site and dreams of something better. It sounds a little like a cast off from the previous album, slightly punky in its guitar attack and pace and just a little lyrically clumsy - if I didn't know that it was a Weller creation, I'd swear it was a Bruce Foxton song.
Now, the thoroughly beguiling Fly is one of the album's most intricate and adventurous songs. Weller goes a bit "stream of consciousness" with lyrics about being in the "demi-monde" - all a bit sixth-form philosophy, to be honest, but certainly a brave effort, both lyrically and musically. "Dreams it seems are weightless as sand" is an adventurous lyric for a twenty-one year old. It betrayed Weller's sensitive - even romantic - side to his nature once again, however, although he was happy to acknowledge this one.
The bucolic ambience was continued on the slightly whimsical, dreamy, sixties-ish The Place I Love, inspired by the Surrey countryside that influenced many of Paul Weller's songs. Again, there is a notable Beatles influence in the music but simultaneously finding room for Weller to stick with his contemporary anger and say that he is "making a stand against the world". Here, however, he does so very melodiously. "The place I love is a million miles from here, not within a yard of the trendy do's" and "only animals around me" showed Weller already rejecting the city and its nightlife that he had previously championed. Was this the first of the "pastoral" songs that would so dominate much of his later solo career? I believe it was. He was a "changing man" at twenty-one.
Finally, the album's A Day In The Life - Down In the Tube Station At Midnight - a nearly five minute masterpiece of violent, grimy, urban imagery dealing with a man being mugged in the bleak underground setting of one of London's tube stations. Underpinned by Bruce Foxton's magnificent, rumbling bass, it is musically excellent, but, as with so much of this album, it was the evocative, image-laden and almost filmic lyrics that took centre stage.
In conclusion regarding All Mod Cons - yes, it is a musically most impressive album, but it is the words to the songs that everyone still remembers. I can still sing them all, just as I could after a few listens back in 1978.
The non-album material from this album's period included several excellent tracks. So Sad About Us was on the b side of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight and was a cover of The Who's song from the mid-sixties, recorded in tribute to the recent-deceased Keith Moon (pictured on the singles' rear cover). It was played pretty straight, with the same jangly guitar riff and The Jam do it justice, for sure.
Also on that 'b' side was Bruce Foxton's The Night, which was, in my opinion, his best song so far. It is short and frantic with more in common with the material from the first two albums than that of All Mod Cons and it is no work of lyrical genius, once again, but, for some reason, I have always quite liked it.
In March 1979, an excellent stand alone single was released in Strange Town, a fine Weller song packed full of hooks and catchy changes of tune and pace.
It was backed with another corker - the beguiling The Butterfly Collector, with its slow verse build ups and punchy chorus.
