— Kelly Pike
As groups coming out of punk go, The Jam were old school. Paul Weller was barely nineteen when they first hit the charts and had already made the infamous claim that everyone should vote Conservative. This may or may not have been a joke but it seemed to hark back to the days of John Lennon speaking out against injustice yet still voting Tory because there'd be less tax for him to pay. And this was far from their own connection to sixties pop. Weller was openly professing his love for the likes of The Kinks and The Who at the same time The Clash were proclaiming there was no place for The Beatles, Elvis and The Stones in the world of punk. While everyone else wore ripped clothes and safety pins, Weller, Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton wore suits and no one seemed to mind that the latter sported a mullet.
They even released records the way bands used to. With blockbuster albums such as Rumours, Hotel California and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack spawning multiple hit singles, The Jam would generally pluck only one LP cut for release on 45. Of their eighteen (brilliant) singles, nine of them never appeared on a studio album, giving them a remarkable percentage of one offs — and, if anything, the numbers are skewered when you consider that two of their hits taken from albums ("That's Entertainment" and "Just Who Is the 5 O'Clock Hero?") only came out in Britain as imports. Two of their number one singles may only be found on compilations, something that would be unthinkable a decade later when the stand alone single became a thing of the past.
The Jam's chart fortunes had been steadily improving over the past three years and the top five success of "The Eton Rifles" near the end of 1979 suggested they were really about to break through. Anticipation for their first single of the eighties was high and they didn't disappoint: it entered the charts at number one, which was still a relatively rare feat. "Going Underground" was such a massive success and it has been an enduring fan favourite ever since yet it was a double A-side, a fact often overlooked. Indeed, so taken is she with the anthemic tune that Kelly Pike neglects to even mention "Dreams of Children" in her review (and this was at a time when it was still fairly common for Smash Hits critics to comment on B's. And she's far from alone in that regard. While The Jam are renowned for some superb B-sides ("English Rose", "Smithers-Jones", "Liza Radley" and "Tales from the Riverbank" are among their most popular numbers), the flip side of their biggest hit is seldom cited and isn't always included on comps.
"Going Underground" is beloved while "Dreams of Childrean" has largely been ignored but the two make a perfect single pairing. The tenth part of a continuum of singles stretching back to "In the City", the former is as pounding and driven as anything they'd ever done and gives a sense of completion to the narrative of Weller going from cynical, know-it-all youth to a young man growing comfortable with himself. I had never heard The Jam until the summer of 1991 when I got a copy of Greatest Hits on cassette. Side one had been a rush of numbers that I found exciting but didn't quite know what to do with; flipping the tape over, I was bowled over by the thrilling song with lines about how "you've made your bed, you better lie in it" and "we talk and we talk until my head explodes" (Weller's frantic wordplay and cottonmouth vocal made very little of it intelligible to me at the time and it still didn't matter) had me locked in as a fan for life. The explosive song ushers in The Jam's era of aggressive psychedelic rock and soul revivalism to close out Greatest Hits: a sign of what's not to come.
Yet that sign was right there on the other side. Weller admitted that he had been getting into post-punk acts like Gang of Four and Joy Division and this was the direction he ended up taking the band on their fifth album Sound Affects. He was also tripping on The Beatles' Revolver (to the extent that the single "Start!" brazenly nicked its bass line from the George Harrison classic "Taxman") and Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. These disparate influences may all be found on "Dreams of Children", with its mix of sparse instrumentation and production, horns, organ and backwards acid rockery and infectious R&B grooves. The same Jam that went along for the ride with punk and had molded themselves into part of the next generation of rock classicists was now beginning to shed what had made their name in the first place.
"Going Underground" / "Dreams of Children" ought to be ranked alongside Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" / "Don't Be Cruel", The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" and Bomb the Bass' "Megablast" / "Don't Make Me Wait" as the finest double A-sides of all time. (One of them is not like the others but I'll be making my case for it soon enough) Having two potential hits on both sides of a 7" record only tells part of the tale: the two songs ought to compliment one another in a way not required of the traditional A-side/B-side dynamic. With their zeitgeist chart topping single, welcome to the past, present and future of The Jam.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Genesis: "Turn It on Again"
Growing up in the eighties, there seemed little difference between Genesis and Phil Collins' solo career and it was difficult to tell just what was his day job. Others weren't so coy: The Police broke up, Sting went solo and that's the way it was supposed to be. Not yet a solo artist and not quite established as frontman of increasingly regressive prog rockers, Collins seems to be laying the groundwork for both the future of his band and his status as an unlikely pop superstar in his own right. "Turn It on Again" seems like Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford are trying to figure out how this mainstream pop stuff works, not aware that the chorus doesn't need to be saved for the last thirty or forty seconds. There's a hook but it ends up getting frittered away by some unnecessary busyness. Traces of a good song. They had a lot to work out if this pop caper was going to fly,
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