It's Only Ground Chalk

The Jam : To Be Someone (Didn't We Have a Nice Time)

[Purchase]

On November 3, 1978 The Jam released All Mod Cons, one of the band's finest albums. The critics hadn't been kind about the second album, This is the Modern World, and Paul Weller had been struggling with writer's block. A US tour with Blue Oyster Cult did nothing for The Jam's confidence and by the time  they returned to the U.K. to start album number three, they were miserable. Finally, when Polydor's A+R man Chris Parry heard the new demos he declared "This is shit".

That may have been a bit hard to swallow, but in retrospect the band members say it was justified. Weller returned home and studied the music he loved the most, mostly The Kinks. "I was always inspired by Ray Davies,"Weller says. "He's not only a master songwriter but I loved the fact that he wrote about very English things and, even more than that, very lovely things as well.

  The next Jam single would even feature a Kinks cover of "David Watts" along with  "A" Bomb in Wardour Street". That was followed in October, by the classic "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight". Weller was clearly over his writers block. "To Be Someone" is another classic from the album All Mod Cons.

"'To Be Someone' is basically, I suppose,  a song about us," says Bruce Foxton, "In terms of having success and enjoying it while it lasts".

To be someone must be a wonderful thing
 A famous footballer a rock singer
or a big film star, yes I think I would like that
To be rich and have lots of fans
have lots of girls to prove that I'm a man
And be No. 1 - and liked by everyone

 "I think we were being realistic about our own situation," says drummer Rick Buckler. " We knew none of these things were going to last forever".

Perhaps the most surprising tracks were the two acoustic love ballads "Fly" and "English Rose".

In his review for NME, Charles Shaar Murray said that the album was "not only several light years ahead of anything they've done before but also the album that's going to catapult the Jam right into the front rank of international rock and roll; one of the handful of truly essential rock albums of the last few years."

From Robert Christgau, who gave the album a grade of B:

Far from the posers cynics believe them to be, these guys are almost painfully sincere, and on this album their desire to write commercial songs that say something is palpable and winning. Unfortunately, their success is mixed at best, and the music is so tentative that I was surprised by how hard they made a set of new material rock in concert. But last year's set rocked even harder. And though I can overlook the record's gaffes and forced lines and faint playing in the aftermath of the show, I'm too much of a cynic to believe the glow will last.

The album reached UK#6 in the charts. And the glow would last.  Everything they would do would be bought up by fans.

The album made an immediate impact on me by the time I heard it in the early 1980's, making a list I've already printed of the My Top Ten albums.