Heirs to The Jam: Paul Weller’s favourite songs of the 21st century
The Jam were not just a great band; they were vital. Paul Weller and his Mod pals arrived at a point where punk was screaming in a searing, short burst, and prog was rambling on in a highfalutin way about nothing much in particular. Meanwhile, the fascistic Nation Front were taking to the streets, The Troubles were reaching a fever pitch, and automation was making redundancies widespread.
In this whirlwind of chaos, it wasn’t easy for kids to see a viable path into the future. Punk was electric, but it was also daunting and destined to be short-lived. Enter: The Jam. The group came along with something pertinent, inviting, and timeless. They tapped into the rock ‘n’ roll’s knack of elucidating the zeitgeist with unerring pop and fizz.
Beyond words berating the blind inequity of Eton, scenes that exemplified the defiance of folks in towns beset by malice and protest songs aplenty, The Jam carried the joyous excitement of rock ‘n’ roll forward into a brand-new era. This was the crux of their outlook. Weller didn’t even think of the band as ”particularly political”. His focus was on the inherently fortified force of guitar music. In the 2000s, the Strokes would play the same hand.
For youngsters of the millennial age, the New Yorkers held many of the tenets and much of the promise of The Jam before them. The same sacred routine that transubstantiated the blessed buoyance of In The City from brutal vinyl to blistering music befell Is This It. You plucked the album from the shelf, marvelled briefly at the classy derriere, released the vinyl from a sheath more well-thumbed than Sir David Attenborough’s passport, laid the record down carefully like an infant in a cot, dropped the needle on the groove, and listened, enraptured by fuzzy rock ‘n’ roll.
Over the course of the next 36 minutes and 28 seconds, there wouldn’t be a single thought of skipping a beat of the sonic ecstasy unspooling from the spinning grooves. There would, however, be thoughts of skipping work, town, or country in a great come-up of musical liberation. For both Is This It and In The City, the same can still be said decades later. Both The Strokes and The Jam can sometimes be dubbed as revivalists—but revivalists of what? A spirit that the world was missing before they stirred it back up?
Perhaps ‘resurrectors’ would be a more fitting term for the sort of joyous alchemy they enacted. As Adam Ficek of The Babyshambles told us, “The Strokes shook us from the post-Britpop lull creeping in from 97. I had slowly moved my attention to the excitement of the London Breakbeat scene, but in 2001, my love of grit and guitars came back with laser-sharp focus. The Strokes, the look, that video! It kickstarted and reinvigorated band culture.”
Weller felt much the same way. And he, too, was excited—so excited, in fact, that he could barely stop saying the word when he spoke to DJ Danielle Perry and honoured ‘Last Night’ as the best song of the 2000s. “It was the first time for a long time that a guitar band sounded really exciting, something familiar to you, but also felt really new,“ he began.
Adding, “I thought it was a really exciting record. And there wasn’t too much else going on around before that time, you know. Exciting to hear some good guitar music again.“ It inspired the next generation as The Jam had done before, as Spinn would later tell us, in turn, “Is This It for me is possibly one the most important guitar records to be released in the 21st century.”
‘Last Night’ is its signature anthem, its rally-cry to revive rock ‘n’ roll, it’s ‘In The City’. But there was another side to The Jam, too. A poetic and slightly mystical side. Alongside their fierce rock ‘n’ roll, there were snippets and great imagery—strange and stirring.
In recent years, the zeitgeist has become more muddied. With the internet dispersing old tribes into wider spectrums, the days of Mod meetings and indie clubs are less prevalent in youth culture—the times are harder to snatch and bottle. So, it’s these stranger, mythical images that Weller seeks more of, and in his view, nobody has done that better than Villagers.
Highlighting ‘I Saw the Dead’ as the leading masterpiece of the 2010s, Weller explained, “I think ‘Conor O’Brien] a genius personally, and I’ve loved pretty much everything he’s done.”
He continued, “He just gets better and better for me, Conor O’Brien. He’s a really special artist, and hopefully, he gets that recognition as well. Again, I think what he’s doing sonically is really different, and he’s really pushing boundaries I think. I saw him in recent years, and he was amazing.”
