The Jam: Sounds From the Street: The Story of The Jam

by Albert Jack, Graham Willmott

‘It’s great to finally have such an accurate record of what I was actually doing back then – It’s pretty much exactly how I remember it.’ Bruce Foxton

The Jam emerged from the punk explosion of 1977, combining the energy of that movement and the musical values and styles of the previous generations mod icons. The Sounds From The Street is the inside story of Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler’s rise from school classroom to worldwide fame, their brief but momentous reign and the shocking decision to quit at the peak of their success.

This authoritative chronology of the band’s career weaves around an in-depth study of their entire musical legacy, including songs from their time as a four-piece and all the other tracks that comprised the pre-Polydor set list.

Featuring exclusive contributions from Bruce Foxton, this is the definitive account of one of Britain’s best loved rock groups.

Albert Jack is a bestselling English author

Genres: Music

372 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 2012

About the author

Albert Jack, pen name for Graham Willmott, is an international best-selling author and historian. He is an expert in explaining the unexplained and has appeared on live television shows and has made thousands of radio appearances worldwide.

Reviews

[Lynda Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yet another book that could have been so much better if an editor had taken even a cursory glance at it !! It harks back to my youth so I'd expected to really enjoy it and maybe would have if it had been checked.
I ended up so worn down by it in the early hours I just skimmed through the rest from 58% onwards in order to be done with it. Hardly the pleasurable experience it could have been.
Whole chunks of it were repeated over and over ad nauseum. There were a lot of missing fullstops, missing words, starting morphed into stating, there were missed apostrophes, complement became compliment, Start ! suddenly lots its exclamation mark, Tracie's name was misspelt and horribly Buckler suddenly ended up as Bucker !!!
There were some interesting trivial bits 'n' pieces I'd not heard of before and maybe there were more if I'd carried on persevering. You'd need to be a massive fan to want to wade through it, though. I'm shocked the authors were so disparaging of The Bitterest Pill too. It charted way higher than some of the tracks they chose to extol.
Paul Weller didn't really come out of this very well, either. He seemed a stroppy, petulant arse throughout a lot of it, I'm afraid. However, his dad seemed a similar personality too from the way he was described throughout.

[Lisa-Jaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this a bit of a slog and I am a hardcore Jam fan. I think Buckler's talent seems to be brushed over, Foxton's mentioned at every available opportunity and parts repeated. I also was incredulous that the author slated "The Bitterest Pill", its got a great hook and I personally like it a lot.

[Dave Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though the book could have used some editing, as a huge fan of The Jam's music, I really enjoyed the author's approach of stitching together the history and evolution of the band through the writing, recording, and release of each and every single and album. It provided a lot of insight into the band's synergy and process, which I found very fascinating. Readers should appreciate the vast amount of research the author invested in this book.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting history of one of my favorite bands, The Jam. The story is told song by song with effective integration of background information. Great read.