100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #21 The Jam – Down In The Tube Station At Midnight

Released: 1978

It’s one of the most enduring – if unwritten – rules about gaining popularity for your art; the more people it gets in front of, the more they feel they own both it and you. By the time The Jam released All Mod Cons towards the end of 1978 it was their third album in eighteen months, but more significantly it marked Paul Weller as a writer developing potentially faster than the trio’s audience. Still seeded by rhythm and blues, it also featured English Rose, a song which might well have been hailed as the ballad of a generation had it been recorded by someone else, and to an extent therein lay the problem.

All Mod Cons was both a triumph for Weller and the commercial success which the band’s label bosses had wanted, the singer thoughtfully channeling Ray Davies and The Who, both it shouldn’t be forgotten heretical choices when judged against the prevailing ideals of the time. Not everyone was impressed, Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh describing it scornfully as ‘nearly catastrophic, weak at the surface and almost rotten underneath’, but the retort had already been prepared earlier on the title track of album’s predecessor This Is The Modern World with ‘Don’t have to explain myself to you/Don’t care two shits about your review.’

Weller freely admitted to being attracted to punk’s supposed confrontation of the establishment, but became disillusioned quickly. Down In The Tube Station At Midnight retained some of the movement’s latent energy, a song which in it’s tale of fear and casual after hours violence was essentially he said a mini-play set down to music. Creative ambition like that and the tightening knot of audience expectation were some of the tensions that would eventually cause their break up. But for now The Jam remained mere public property, spokespeople for many, some of whom weren’t listening anyway.