2000 Great Songs #1423: It's Too Bad

With so many great albums from The Jam, it feels like overkill to be paying our third visit to 1978's All Mod Cons. But, damn, what a record! "It's Too Bad" finds Paul Weller in full-on Beatles mode. And, sure, his borrowing of the "She Loves You" riff chords the bridge has a lot to do with it (far from the only instance where Weller found himself cutting-and-pasting a Beatles hook into one of his tunes). But the whole song--all two and a half minutes of it--is unabashedly British Invasion pop only barely repurposed for the UK punk era. Much like the previously-referenced "To Be Someone," the band are practically overflowing with musical ideas, squeezing them all into a single brief track where other bands might have stretched them out across multiple songs. 

Live 1979:

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