The Jam released Setting Sons through Polydor in the UK on November 16, 1979. Their fourth studio album followed All Mod Cons with a bigger storytelling ambition: Paul Weller had begun imagining a record about childhood friends whose lives took them in different directions. The finished album abandoned the complete narrative, but kept its interest in friendship, work, class and war.
Weller’s proposed story brought three friends back together after a war, when they discovered how far they had grown apart. Connections between “Thick as Thieves,” “Wasteland” and “Burning Sky” preserved traces of that plan, although the finished record didn’t tell a continuous story. The final ten-song UK running order also included a previously released Bruce Foxton composition and a Motown cover, giving it a more varied shape than the original concept suggested.
The recording process left plenty to be worked out in the studio. In a 2019 interview with Essentially Pop, Foxton explained that The Jam would normally spend a week or two rehearsing material before recording. For Setting Sons, Weller recorded the basic ideas during the day, then Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler developed their parts through the night. When Weller returned, they could record together. Foxton recalled playing as much as possible live, with producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven making edits on two-inch tape to accommodate changes within the songs. The arrangements were taking shape as the album was being made.
Those arrangements could stretch well beyond a straightforward guitar, bass and drums performance. “Little Boy Soldiers” unfolded in three parts, turning an anti-war song into something with distinct movements, while “Wasteland” featured recorder. Foxton’s “Smithers-Jones” made an especially clear departure. It had already appeared as the B-side of “When You’re Young,” but returned on the album in a version built around strings. Its subject was less grand than a battlefield and just as unforgiving: a worker discovers that his loyalty offers no protection when his employer no longer needs him. “It’s like what happened to my dad,” Foxton told CultureSonar in 2020. He also remembered the practical difficulty of adding strings: without a click track, the recording accelerated slightly toward the end, leaving the players to follow its changing pace.
The closing “Heat Wave” came from the band’s live repertoire. Foxton told Pennyblackmusic in 2019 that the cover had been popular with their audiences, which was why they put it on the album. It gave a record full of troubled characters and fractured relationships a familiar Motown finish.
“The Eton Rifles” carried the social conflict into the singles chart. Released ahead of the album, it drew on a 1978 clash involving Right to Work marchers and Eton pupils. Weller turned that encounter into a song about the advantages attached to class and privilege, putting the confrontation inside a chorus built for singing along. The subject connected with the album’s wider concerns even though the original concept had fallen away.
“The Eton Rifles” became The Jam’s first UK Top 10 single and peaked at No. 3. Setting Sons reached No. 4 on the UK album chart and spent 19 weeks there, taking them above the No. 6 peak of All Mod Cons.
