How The Jam Never Recorded One of Their Biggest Hits

Times of discover News: Down in the Tube Station at Midnight was almost "thrown in the dustbin" during the recording of the band's All Mod Cons album. The Jam's All Mod Cons is one of the classic albums of the late 1970s. A defining moment in the "mod revival", it's a classic example of post-punk and the first big leap forward in Paul Weller's songwriting career.

But one of the latest songs from The Jam's new set of songs almost didn't make it onto the album: Down in the Tube Station at Midnight. In fact, as bassist Bruce Foxton recalled, "Paul actually threw up the songs and threw them in the dustbin in the studio."

All Mod Cons, released on 3 October 1978, was the Woking band's third full-length album and contained several big moments: the 'A' bomb rally call on Wardour Street, the frenetic Billy Hunt and the soft English Rose.... and their live cover of The Kinks' David Watts.

However, making the album was not easy for The Jam. The trio had received poor reviews for their second album This Is the Modern World (1977) and frontman and lead singer Paul Weller was feeling uninspired.

After a disastrous US tour with heavy rock act Blue Öyster Cult, Weller and bandmates Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums) found themselves turned down by fellow producer and A&R man Chris Parry for his third album.

"At first we were angry and upset that our songs were poorly received by the label," Foxton told Mojo magazine in 2013. "On reflection it seemed like having an objective view from 'outside the bubble' was a healthy thing. It made us rethink our approach and raise the bar."

Returning to his hometown of Woking, Weller began working on songs that reflected his new outlook. While the main criticism of This Is the Modern World was that it didn't capture the energy of the band's beginnings, Weller was looking beyond the isolated world of punk and began writing songs with deeper meaning.

"Class issues were very important to me at the time," Weller told The Guardian in 2009. "There's something like purse belts on the outskirts of Woking. That's why I have those images in my mind - people catching the train to Waterloo to get into the city."

The English Rose were very different from the angry punk thrash that made their name, and To Be Someone (Didn't We Have a Nice Time) reflects how precarious success it could be, musing: "The bread I experienced - like my fame - waned quickly".

However, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight is a song that Weller almost rejects. In fact, it was only through producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven's powers of persuasion that The Jam recorded it.

The song is a vivid account of a robbery at a London Underground station late in the evening. The protagonist is on his way home to get takeout when he is accosted by a group of thugs who "smell of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs / And a lot of right-wing meetings."

A suburbanite's worst nightmare in the big city is given urgency by Weller's tense vocals, Foxton's pounding bass and Buckler's busy drums. "It's really from Paul's point of view about how volatile the streets of the big city can be sometimes," said Foxton.

But Weller wasn't convinced the song had any potential. When he first presented the song to Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, it was nothing more than a poem. "I performed that song in a very poor state," Weller recalls in the documentary The Making of All Mod Cons, "and pretty much made a living doing it."

"They rejected it mainly because the arrangement hadn't been developed during the recording sessions," Coppersmith-Heaven told Sound on Sound in 2007. "I said, 'Hold on, I haven't even read the lyrics yet!'

When the producer saw what Weller was working on, he encouraged the young singer - then only 20 - to think again: "I pushed him to revive it, and when the band came in and we developed the sound it turned out to be an absolutely brilliant track, a classic."

With Foxton and Buckler, the trio have been hard at work on the music at RAK Studios in London. "We might have agreed to record it later in the project, but it got to the point of 'this isn't working, this is rubbish,'" says Coppersmith-Heaven.