The Jam – ‘The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)’

This is the sweet spot between the end of The Jam and the beginning of The Style Council, which is the ideal blend between the raw and the (over) cooked. Part of the attraction for me, unconsciously I expect, was that Paul Weller still did not know how evolved an observer of human frailty and intelligent a lyricist he was, and so was not fully in control of, or aware of his outrageous gift. With a singing voice that still sounds like someone shouting to you in a crowd, the onus for me was in how many great lyrics could be crammed into a verse, the song’s chorus a jacket of battered and bulletproof pride. Although I had to go back to them in real time, ‘Thick As Thieves’ and ‘The Burning Sky’ said more to me about my life than ‘Pill’ did, dealing as they do with male friendship (which if not everyone’s cup of tea, was probably the most profound experience in Weller, and my own life, at the time), self-fulfilling prophesies that corrode the soul, and the way a certain kind of person can only move forward by dismissing the value of the past. But ‘Pill’ was about the future, one in which I could aspire to having my heart broken and write something brilliant about it too; an experience I was looking forward to.

Even if ‘Going Underground’ was more rousing, ‘Ghosts’ more charming and ‘Carnation’ more touching, I understood with the splinter of ice at the heart of every budding writer, that close study of ‘The Bitterest Pill’ would be good to me, and indeed, it is the only song I have ever used a line from to name a novel, twenty-seven years later: “(you looked) The Picture Of Contented New Wealth”…