The 1978 album by The Jam Paul Weller was finally proud of: “I found my feet”
Having been a stalwart of British songwriting for nearly 50 years at this point, it is fair to say that Paul Weller knows his way around creating a masterpiece album, but it wasn’t until The Jam struck upon their 1978 LP that the ‘Modfather’ himself felt truly confident in his output.
Spending much of the early 1970s performing Beatles covers in local social clubs in their native Woking, it was the emergence of punk rock that acted as the catalyst for The Jam’s emergence into the mainstream airwaves. Adopting the defiant attitude of that revolutionary scene, and injecting it with the 1960s-styled mod revival sound that Weller adored, The Jam immediately established themselves as an individualistic and incredible outfit on their 1977 debut, In The City.
By anybody’s standards, that LP was among the finest to arise from London’s punk explosion, but Weller and the gang were still only young lads, figuring things out as they went along. Such a fact became evident in the follow-up, This Is The Modern World, which took the group in an entirely different direction. It was panned upon its release, and although, in hindsight, it is a far better album than it was ever given credit for, Paul Weller knew it wasn’t his greatest achievement as a songwriter.
Still, he wasted no time in moving on to the next effort: All Mods Cons. Released in the winter of 1978, the album marked the pinnacle of The Jam’s sound and, by extension, Weller’s songwriting power.
Stretching from mod revivalist classics like ‘To Be Someone’ and the band’s cover of The Kinks’ ‘David Watts’, to far more vulnerable, acoustic efforts in ‘English Rose’, and the kitchen sink realism of ‘Down In The Tube Station at Midnight’, All Mods Cons was the album that saw The Jam cement their legendary reputation.
“I’d found my feet,” Weller said of the album during a 1998 interview with Uncut, “After This Is the Modern World, I thought, ‘Am I going to let this slide or fight against it?’ My back was against the wall. It was a matter of self-pride”. Not only did All Mod Cons establish The Jam as one of the definitive groups of that era then, but it also apparently saved the trio from the brink of a break-up.
Expectedly, that 1978 record triumphed over both of The Jam’s previous efforts, both in terms of how it was received upon release, its commercial success, peaking at number six in the album charts, and in how it defined the sound of the band going forward. There is no doubt that the beloved masterpieces which were to follow, in Setting Sons and Sound Affects, would not have sounded the same, or even existed at all, without that 1978 record.
You could go even further with that argument, in fact. If Weller’s affirmation that This Is The Modern World nearly spelt the end of The Jam, there is no guarantee that he would have had the motivation to establish The Style Council in the years that followed, never mind embarking upon the extensive and illustrious solo career that still prevails to this day.
In a very real sense, then, All Mod Cons is the most important album Paul Weller ever created.
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