It’s funny how I didn’t really think of the The Jam as a Seventies band – because of their tight association with Mod culture, in my head I lumped them with The Kinks and The Who, even though I was there when tracks like Eton Rifles and Going Underground (neither of those tracks on this album) were first released. It’s strange the tricks your mind plays.
Talking of The Kinks, there’s a robust cover of David Watts (with Jam bassist Bruce Foxton on vocals rather than Paul Weller) that highlights the difference in sound production between 1967 and 1978, with the Jam’s rhythm section coming across as a lot meatier. Foxton’s vocals are more rounded than Ray Davies’ rather thin voice and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it wasn’t Weller singing.
The sense of envy against those who lead a seemingly charmed life, at class division and entitlement, is evident in quite a few of Weller’s own tracks on the album. Mr Clean, for example, rages against an unaware office worker in “A smart blue suit, and you went to Cambridge too”, seen as smug in their easy life by the narrator who provides a sense of lurking menace that “Please don't forget me, or any of my kind. Cause I'll make you think again when I stick your face in the grind”.
In Billy Hunt, Weller takes the persona of the eponymous Billy Hunt (replace the first letters with S and C), a man seething with anger at the world who rails at his bossy foreman and claims that “No one pushes Billy Hunt around. Well, they do, but not for long”. These are like some of the characters from Ian Dury's songs, but grittier and more violent.
The final track visits this sense of violence from the other side, with a track that’s devastating in its lyrics and remorseless in its music. The narrator is waiting to catch an Underground train, taking a curry home to his wife when he is assaulted by a gang of men who “smell of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many right-wing meetings”, beaten, kicked, robbed and left for dead – we don’t know if he survives and the song leaves us with a dreadful sense of unresolved tension. What a way to end an album.
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