Trivia / The Jam

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• The Pete Best: They had about five of these before releasing In the City, but the most notable was Steven Brookes, who founded the group with Paul Weller back in 1972 as guitarist (Weller was the bassist back then). Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton were soon added (with Foxton taking bass duties while Weller became rhythm guitarist), and then in 1975 Brookes chose to leave the band. About a year and a half later, City was released and the group made it big.
• Referenced by...:
  • Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love" features the line "kick out the Style, bring back the Jam," written as a plea to Paul Weller to quit the Style Council and reform the Jam.
  • The Stand of Kei Nijimura from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion was initially called Going Underground during serialization, after the song of the same name from The Jam, though later publications would rename it to Born This Way.
• Revival by Commercialization: The once relatively obscure early single "News of the World" has become much better known as the Real Song Theme Tune for the panel show Mock the Week.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Supposedly, following Steven Brookes' departure in 1975, a then-unknown Gary Numan unsuccessfully auditioned to take his place.
  • Paul Weller initially conceived Setting Sons as a Rock Opera about three schoolboys who grow apart as they grow older, and they wind up on opposite sides of a devastating class-based civil war. Weller wrote several songs for this plot—"Thick as Thieves", "Burning Sky", "The Eton Rifles", "Wasteland", and "Little Boy Soldiers"—but couldn't come up with enough for a full album. So the band worked in some unrelated material, and the "concept" songs wound up out of order on the finished album.
  • The Style Council's fifth and final studio album, Modernism: A New Decade, was ditched by the record label and ultimately led to the band splitting up. Finished in 1989, the New Sound Album was a drastic stylistic shift from Sophisti-Pop towards the emerging Deep House, which entered the mainstream during the early 1990s. The album was eventually released in 1998, as part of The Complete Adventures of The Style Council box set and then as a standalone in 2001, when Deep House fell well by the wayside in the charts.

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