Sound Affects was
one of the last Jam albums I bought, this one second-hand, from a school
friend. (I suspect that it came from his Mum and Dad’s vinyl collection, and,
in retrospect, I’m dubious that he had a proper right to sell it to me.) But
ever since, it has been my favourite Jam lp, from the ‘Mask of Anarchy’
quotation on the back cover, to the dawn photo on the inner sleeve, to the
hard, tight, spare music locked into the black grooves.
In some ways, the sound of Sound Affects is very un-like the sound of the preceding
single, ‘Going Underground’ (though it has more affinities with the double-a
side, ‘Dreams of Children). ‘Going Underground’ starts with a thudding Foxton riff,
which is then doubled an octave higher by Weller’s guitar: this is the
signature ‘underground’ sound, thick, bassy, compressed, and airless. It’s an
extension and completion of the sound of 1979’s Setting Sons, and the lyrics are an urgent and punkish kiss-off: ‘I
want nothing this society’s got’. The expressed desire to escape, to go
underground, signposts the unfinished pastoral or psychedelic musical road that
led, ultimately, to the failed rave-up renewal of The Gift. ‘Dreams of Children’ more overtly turns to psychedelia,
with its backwards intro, a motif repeated in Sound Affects’ side 2 opener, ‘Dreamtime’; the language of dreams,
and the psychedelic style, is repeated in ‘Tales from the Riverbank’, with its
chorus ‘True, it’s a dream, mixed with nostalgia/ But it’s a dream that I’ll
always hang on to, that I’ll always run to’, but by then it’s more wistful.
Sound Affects
begins, like ‘Going Underground’, with a Foxton riff, a five-pulse figure on
one note that ends in a pause, a pause that will be filled on the second time
round with Buckler’s crisp, reverbed snare snap. This introduces sixteenths on
the hi-hat and Weller’s swooping, trebly guitar stabs: ‘I’ve got a pocket full
of pretty green.’ Pretty, a word repeated in ‘Dreamtime’, signifies delusive
appearances in Sound Affects: here,
money glisters but is not gold. The tight, funky sound of the verse is
interrupted by an ascending riff in the chorus with a chiming guitar solo in
the bridge, but the marker ‘Pretty Green’ lays down is the angular New Wave
sound of XTC or Gang of Four (or, conceivably, early Talking Heads, taking the
prominence of the Foxton/ Weymouth bass). Instrumentation is sparse, the guitar
works in arpeggios or tight, circular figures rather than power-chords. Repetition
is key. It’s a long way from Setting Sons.
The crucial idea ‘Pretty Green’ introduces, that will recur
throughout the album, is power. Weller sings: ‘They didn’t teach me this is
school/ It’s something that I learnt on my own/ That power is measured by the
pound or the fist/ It’s as clear as this’. Power as money; power as violence.
Power inflicted upon the everyday lives of ordinary people. At its most powerful
expression, in ‘Set the House Ablaze’, power is almost like Orwell’s boot
stamping upon the human face forever, and indeed the rhythm of the verses in
that song is martial, the sound of marching feet. I’ve read reviews of the lp which
suggest that ‘Set the House Ablaze’ is out of place, such as in this BBCreview; that it sounds like something from Setting
Sons. I disagree. While its chorus is expansive, more so than other tracks
(though others do use a tight/ expansive dynamic, including ‘Pretty Green’), it’s
a thematically central song. Lyrically, it begins with a report that a mutual
friend has ‘seen you in the uniform’ and the leather belt and black boots
suggests not the Armey, but the police or Nazi stormtroopers. The lyric then
explores a theme of self-betrayal, of buckling under to power, of becoming an
instrument of ‘indoctrination’. The final word is ‘mechanical’, and the
construction of the song enforces this through its coiling guitar figure and
tight rhythm section. The album closer, ‘Scrape Away’, a companion piece, is
built in similar fashion, and also indicts giving in to cynicism and despair: ‘Your
twisted cynicism makes me feel sick/ Your open disgust for “Idealistic naive”/
You’ve given up hope, you’re jaded and ill/ The problem is you’ve got a
catching disease’. ‘Scrape Away’, with its machinic hardness, seems a bitter
note on which to end the album, but its message is of resolute realism: ‘you’re
saying power’s all, but it’s power you need!’ The revolutionary aspect of this
is more overt in the upbeat, expansive chorus of ‘Set the House Ablaze’, which
is literally incendiary.
Opposed to power is vision. In ‘Set the House Ablaze’,
a consistent use is made of metaphors of vision: the uniformed friend is as if ‘by
someone blinded’, and a middle section makes the idea overt: ‘I think we’ve
lost our perception/ I think we’ve lost sight of the goals we should be working
for/ I think we’ve lost our reason/ We stumble blindly and that vision must be
restored!’. There’s no collapse to cynicism. Instead, the lyrical keynote, reflecting
Shelley’s call for lions to awaken from slumber and to cast off their chains, is
a kind of Romantic revolution, one in which vision is crucial. Although several
times the lyrics assert that absence of power is dispossession – ‘You’ve
got nothing unless it’s in the pocket’ (‘Pretty Green’) – vision is in itself a
power, in a metaphysical sense. For although Sound Affects is a very material album, solid and physical and
dynamic rather than airy or mythic, it is in its songs of personal change,
including the mid-tempo ‘Monday’ and the uptempo rocker ‘But I’m Different Now’,
that the album suggest a possible agency at odds with the cynicism identified in
‘Scrape Away’. In ‘Boy About Town’, Weller sings about strolling the streets ‘like
paper blown in wind/ I fly up street, I fly down street’, but it’s the
centrality of hope and love (for humanity) that informs the album as a whole. In
‘Monday’, he sings ‘I will never be embarrassed about love again’ (as Weller
had been about ‘English Rose’ on All Mod
Cons, left off of the track listing and lyric sheet, omitted because he
felt the sentiments were ‘too personal’); in Sound Affects, the personal becomes political, either negatively (‘Set
the House Ablaze’) or positively (‘But I’m Different Now’). Love, and hope for
change, counteract cynicism and despair.
The importance of the personal songs isn’t to say that Sound Affects is devoid of the
observational song-writing that characterises many of Weller’s best work in The
Jam (a mode he was largely to abandon in The Style Council). Here, both ‘Man in
the Corner Shop’ and ‘That’s Entertainment’, regarded as two of the very best
Jam songs, are at the heart of the lp, second on side 2 and closing side 1
respectively. Both demonstrate Weller’s straightforward sympathy for and
engagement with commonplace lives, but also demonstrate a lyricism that avoids
sentimentality in concrete details (‘Lights going out and a kick in the balls’).
‘That’s Entertainment’ is a simple, strummed guitar song, verse-chorus, piling up
material details of everyday life, good and bad: ‘Cuddling a warm girl, and
smelling stale perfume ... a freezing cold flat, and damp on the walls’. That simplicity
is hard-won, however. Apparently the band weren’t happy with the track as it
appears on Sound Affects, though it
charted when released as an import single. On the post-break-up collection Snap!, the album version was replaced by
the demo, which feature drums; in a later collection, Gold, the version omits Foxton’s bass. I like the album version
best, in retrospect: its clear, ringing acoustic guitars are the perfect counterpoint
to Weller’s vocal. ‘Man in the Corner Shop’, reportedly written by Weller on the
spot in the studio, with a lilting and melodic vocal line, itself offers a
countermanding vision of Albion to one of mechanical ‘indoctrination’. The
first verse takes the point of view of a corner-shop owner, the second a
customer, the third a factory boss: all yearn for something else in their
lives. In the fourth verse, the people come together to pray, where they ‘are
all one’. While the community gathered in church might seem a conservative
image of society, in truth it’s a romantic vision of socialism, all ‘men’ not
only ‘created’ equal, but equal in material fact. (I should say that Sound Affects is a very masculine album
and The Jam a very masculine band.)
The community of spirit signified by the church scene points
towards Weller’s later interest in black American music, I feel. While The Gift isn’t exactly flavoured with
gospel, the sense of positivity and
communal transcendence (through music) offered by the church roots of soul and
R’n’B seems crucial to this period of Weller’s politics. It’s little wonder
that Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’ is such an effective cover come 1982, with its
imprecation to ‘Remember your dreams/ are your only schemes’ and to ‘keep on
pushing’. ‘Move’ and ‘up’ become leitmotifs of early-80s Weller: the song ‘The
Gift’ repeats ‘move’ as an encouragement to dance, but to become active, to
embrace ‘the gift of life’, to ‘shout from the mountain top’ (The Style Council’s
seventh single was ‘Shout to the Top’). The sense of willed uplift and
positivity becomes the overriding tenor of the period 1981-3 for Weller’s songs.
Though still New Wave and very
English, Sound Affects demonstrates a
considerable imaginative advance in ‘Man in the Corner Shop’, where the
black-and-white understanding of arbitrary power vs. the common people of ‘Standards’
or the curio ‘Planner’s Dream Goes Wrong’ is replaced by a more perceptive
understanding that all social classes are (de-)formed by power and
ideology. The fanfare brass of ‘Boy About Town’, and the use of a horn section on the single version of ‘Start!’ and on ‘Dreamtime’ also suggests a musical
advance, pointing the way towards ‘Absolute Beginners’ and The Gift. In Sound Affects,
Weller counterposes hope and love against despair, hate and cynicism; vision
against blindness; humanity against the mechanical; and the need for change
against the stultifying Thatcher's Britain of 1980, not ‘going underground’ but actively working for a
better life for all. Weller is cast as a Romantic revolutionary, and the
lyrical and musical consistency of the album in pursuit of this vision of
Albion makes this the best Jam long-player.
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