And What You Give Is What You Get (22/6/13)

Well, it's the final of The Voice tonight as Team Tom faces off against Team Jessie against Team Will.I.Am against Team somebody else with a special musical guest in the form of Michael Buble.

Which leaves one question.

Just how fucking great were The Jam?

We were watching Sky Arts' Isle Of Wight Festival coverage last night - for The Roses doing 'Fool's Gold' basically, ten minutes of quite wonderfully indulgent guitar soloing over a brilliantly locked in groove - and the closing credit sequence was soundtracked by a track that we hadn't seen; Paul Weller in full on Modfather flow, looking sharper than any 50+ man who's been doing the same job for 35 years has any right to, performing 'Start'.

It's 33 years old, it's the most blatant Beatles homage you could imagine (Taxman bass line if you were wondering. You weren't, you all have immaculate taste, it's why you're here) and if it was released tomorrow it would still sound better than anything that you've heard in the last decade.

Consider The Jam then. The first album is okay. Redolent of its time, a band with its roots in R&B and Motown covers allying itself to the punk movement. The second is a disappointment, rushed out to capitalise on the sales of the first. The third nearly didn't happen; the band put the album in, the record company told them it wasn't good enough and sent them back to make it again.

Best thing that could have happened to them. 'All Mod Cons', suddenly the band's massive, suddenly they're the single most important band of their generation, the mod revival embracing them, Weller declaring his modernist leanings, the sharpest dressed man of the late 70s/early 80s. Album 4, 'Setting Sons' consolidated them, rockier by the second, harder, edgier, slashing Townsend chords. Number 5, 'Sound Affects' is the classic, Weller discovering Psychedelia, moving from Who-isms to Acid tinged Beatles-isms.

And the singles? The singles were immense, the B Sides were as good, sometimes better.

Album 6 saw everything pull together, soul, pop, Motown, calypso, funk, Weller (and it was always Weller really) pulling together all his influences in one go. And then they announced the split. The idea was to announce that the band was over on the first ever edition of The Tube but somebody leaked the story to the NME. The Tube appearance became a valediction, a summation of their career, a victory.

There was one last single, Beat Surrender. A statement "All the things that I care about (are packed into one punch) All the things that I'm not sure about (are sorted out at once) and as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end, that bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names"

And they were gone. Six albums, three of them utterly brilliant, one excellent, two that were basically warm ups. A string of singles that constitute as good a run of 45rpm releases as anybody has ever released and I mean anybody, The Kinks, The Who, The Stones, The Beatles themselves (okay, maybe we'll pull back on The Beatles, they live in a different universe to everybody else, but anybody else) and all of them released between 1977 and 1982.

An entire career in five years. Paul Weller broke up the biggest, most important, most loved band of his generation at the height of its success because he felt that it was time to do something else.

He was 24 years old.

Somewhere out there, NOW, there is an 18 year old who is capable of putting out 6 albums that will change the world in the space of five years, somebody who understands the purity and importance of pop, somebody who has something to say and that somebody will not be on TV on a Saturday night diluting their dream.

We need the bloody minded dreamers now more than ever.