Setting Sons

Weller first planned a concept album about three boyhood friends who reunite after an unspecified war and find they have grown apart. The idea was never fully developed. His lyrics were increasingly written from a socialist viewpoint, shaped by Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. The production is harder than that of All Mod Cons, though melody stays central.

Smithers-Jones, written by Foxton, had been a B-side three months earlier and was re-recorded here with a string score by Peter Solley, played by session musicians credited as the Jam Philharmonic Orchestra. Wasteland features a recorder, and the album closes on a cover of Martha and the Vandellas' Heat Wave. Coppersmith-Heaven said Polydor wanted the record out in time for the band's next tour, which left him feeling enormously pressurised. The cover photograph is of Benjamin Clemens' bronze sculpture The St John's Ambulance Bearers, now held by the Imperial War Museum.

It reached number 4 in Britain and 137 in the United States. AllMusic's Chris Woodstra wrote that it often reaches brilliance, and the NME ranked it the fourth best album of 1979, with The Eton Rifles and Strange Town first and fifth among the year's tracks.