The Jam's first two LPs, In the City and This Is The Modern World, were full of powerful street images, fire and skill, but the group were celebrating the images, not the streets. They are a reactionary group in that their musical dreams lie in a golden rock past—schoolboy dreams….

The peculiarities of the Jam are Paul Weller's. He's a prickly auto-didact…. [He] still hears the great era of rock lyric writing as the 60's, Pete Townshend and Ray Davies, social relevance wth Mod nonchalance. (p. 43)

I ask Paul Weller if he will run out of things to say, exhaust the experience—dreary youth—that still informs his songs, but he takes himself seriously, doesn't value spontaneity anyway. All Mod Cons, the Jam's third LP, is a wonderfully clever record, particularly when you hear through its Mod artifacts and references, scattered about like debris from a party...