The Jam
All Mod Cons

THE REVIEW

The good old Paul Weller has always had a natural gift for melody. He has demonstrated this in all his incarnations, even in the rather affected 80s guise of the Style Council.
However, it is with the Jam, and especially with this album (somewhat unjustly forgotten), that he earned the merit of being considered one of the fathers of Brit Pop.
Because let's face it: the 90s Britpoppers referred, even explicitly, to a long and honored school of English pop that saw the Beatles as the most prestigious name, but also drew from Bowie's "Hunky Dory" (a masterpiece of ante litteram Brit-pop) and especially from the Jam/Kinks lineage.
Paul Weller indeed explicitly pays homage to the brilliant band of the Davies brothers with a cover of "David Watts": by speeding up the delightful original, he brings it in line with the typical speed and essentiality anxiety of the punk era.

Like every album released in the 77/78 biennium, "All Mod Cons" also offered the obligatory homage to punk sounds, present here in the short and intense assaults of "All Mod Cons" and "A Bomb In Wardour Street".
But it's the melodic soul that gives identity and makes the album still current and thoroughly enjoyable today. Because the writing quality is very high, starting with "To Be Someone (Didn't We Have A Nice Time)", passing through "In The Crowd" and "The Place I Love" to the final little gem "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight", where a story of urban violence is told with anger and delicacy.

If we have to compare the musical sensibility present in the work of the Jam to someone, it is certainly to that of the Clash and the aforementioned Kinks. It is a music that is direct, evocative, and popular at the same time.
And so getting lost in the supermarket of consumerism of the Clash's "Lost In The Supermarket" mirrors getting lost in the crowd of "In The Crowd", and the fierce social criticism of "Mr.Clean" echoes the numerous bourgeois targets of the Kinks ("Mr Pleasant", "A Well Respected Man", "Shangri-la" etc.), and it's an attitude that will be picked up by Blur in "Parklife" and "Charmless Man".
Certainly "All Mod Cons" cannot be counted among the masterpieces of rock history. However, it will always retain a place, not as the progenitor of a genre but as an important milestone within the history of the British pop tradition.