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Always go out when you’re on top – that seemed to be the maxim Paul Weller applied to The Jam in 1982. Whereas some bands fall apart when their star begins to fade, The Jam were, by the time of their sixth and final long-player, as big a deal as they’d ever been. Both of The Gift’s 45s – the chart-topping Town Called Malice and No.8 hit Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock Hero? – were major successes. The album itself, meanwhile, would be their first No.1. Weller and The Jam, it seemed, had the world at their feet at the time of The Gift’s release in March 1982, and yet the singer would sensationally split the band just seven months later. “I wanted to end it to see what else I was capable of,” the Modfather reflected in 2015 to the Daily Mirror. “I’m proud of what we did but I didn’t want to dilute it, or for us to get embarrassing by trying to go on forever. We finished at our peak.”
In many ways, though, The Gift is as much the first Style Council album as it is the final Jam LP. There was little on that last record that sounded much like the singles that had made their name – the brutal, tightly-wound approach of In The City and The Modern World had morphed, by this time, into something that was much more Northern Soul-influenced than a simple three-chord attack.
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