Setting Sons

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Slough (town folk) and Eton (gown folk) have a long history of class-related conflict, so the narrator’s response to the possibility of a punch-up is a product of cultural inheritance. Apparently, Foxton’s father still had his pride and decided to salvage some by opting for retirement over redundancy. The first is that the critics seem to hold Paul Weller accountable for the album’s “haphazard construction” instead of placing blame where it belongs: the production line mentality of the music business.

Setting Sons is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Jam, released on 16 November 1979 by Polydor Records. Though we are denied the experience of hearing the song in its intended context, the strength of the imagery and the band’s tight execution put “Thick As Thieves” into the plus column.

The band's first single of 1980 was intended to be " Dreams of Children", which combined bleak lyrics lamenting the loss of childhood optimism with hard-edged, psychedelic instrumental backing and production.

because they’re lazy, they read what other critics have said, change a word here and there and voila, you have “critical consensus.The final entry from the concept album is “Burning Sky,” the title symbolizing capitalist exploitation of resources no matter what the cost to the environment or the quality of human life. Let me give you one other important bit of context from Uncut: “Following the Conservative victory at May’s general election, a raft of new policies led to a swift rise in unemployment and a growing suspicion that was the nation was being divided along class lines. As you note, the propulsive string arrangement of Smithers-Jones gives the song greater merit than usual, since it’s often seen as an orchestrated space filler.