About this product

The Jam’s fourth album, Setting Sons, consolidated the band’s positionamongst music’s most-effective social commentators. Complete with furious attacks on upper-class privilege rubbing shoulders with heartfelt anti-war anthems, this brilliantly-remastered version of the 1979 album reveals Paul Weller and the band at their most political, ferocious and inspired.

Its arrival heralded by the band’s first Top Five single, ‘The Eton Rifles’, Setting Sons was initially planned as a concept album, following three childhood friends who grow apart over time.

However, little of that theme made the album’s final cut, with political concern colouring many of its songs instead.

‘The Eton Rifles’ is Paul Weller scathing view of a skirmish between demonstrators for the Socialist Workers Party and boys from Eton College, while ‘Little Boy Soldiers’ provides an anti-war message that’s just as unbearably poignant today.

In addition, ‘Smithers-Jones’ is memorable for both its sneering take on the nine to five, and for being Bruce Foxton’s finest song-writing hour.