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What really grabs attention in this belated companion piece to The Jam’s penultimate single The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow), is just how little they have in common. In late 1982 as The Jam’s closing chapter saw them feted as real deal pop stars for the only time, an acrid sarcastic dirge was license for Woking’s incredible sulk to confess how shortsighted he had been in matters of the heart ”The love I gave/Hangs in sad coloured/Mocking shadows”

As for The Style Council, well frankly, they’ve never really competed with any vigor against the mythological might of the modtastic trio. Granted, their early material did carry with it a generous brew of mid 70s blue eyed soul weaving around tales of downtrodden coalminers, but Weller and Talbot’s Matthew Arnold fused crusades never really shook off an icky surface where Jeff Banks was on hand to blindfold the youthful British psyche. Even more alarming for The Cappuccino Kid’s defence team was the inflated pomp of 1988’s Confessions Of A Pop Group, a nauseous spurt of Weller’s egomania leaving him in the creaky old dock with Mr. Keith Emerson and his cohorts of whom Weller played the J’accuse card against in his Woking bedroom back in the fury of his adolescence. Not looking too good for the defence is it, M’lud?

If one thing can be salvaged, preventing the album from being a complete narcissistic implosion, it’s How She Threw It All Away, an act of liberty unbound as Weller finally reconnects the missing segments between the drab doldrums of 1982 to an avalanche of words ballasted by the colours of atonement “She threw it all away/I played both parts/In the fool and I”

Forgive the cliché, but time is a healer does have the right to feature here, if very briefly. As the brass bounces off the synth bass giving a lesson in how do late 80s production with elegance, the bitter Falklands winter of “But now I watch smoke leave my lips/And fill an empty room” is something Paul Weller may have considered to be a show of agency in the final hurrahs of The Jam, but with the cutting of that neurotic spectre he exorcised in a short burst of glory on The Style Council’s descent into schlock, he managed to set himself free from both the personal neuroticisms that plagued his laboured love ballads, and press in-jokes that presented him as the as the Ivan Lendl of pop/rock.

Neither song may stand out as finite proof of genius in the songwriter’s slightly overrated repertoire, they do provide an often amusing, and certainly engaging game of cat and mouse from both ends of the chase, showing that what Weller lacks in the song and dance department, he replenishes with interest when it comes to keeping all of his lovers on their toes.

It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week  - that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia issued a fatwa against him). 

News of her death pushed me to listen, with a slight sense of guilt, more attentively. There’s a host of factors at play whenever we discover new music - and guilt isn’t necessarily a bad motivation.  

And what music Makeba made.

Forget the fashionista’s need to wear their t-shirts and proclaim themselves fans, forget that you can now buy nearly as much tat bearing the famous lightning bolt insignia as you’d find adorned with Elvis’s mug, forget all that and remember when AC/DC became as the anti-dote to rock’s ascent up its own backside.

 In the period known as the “Bon Scott Era” AC/DC were well on their way to the heights they still enjoy to this day. Despite both Highway to Hell (the last Bon Scott album) and Back in Black bringing them true international acclaim, the album Let There Be Rock had already established a massive following for the band and no song sums up their own almost roguish adolescent perception on the world and rock and roll than their most recognisable song “Whole Lotta Rosie”.

 Yet it’s the song that for their critics and detractors also sums up everything that’s wrong with AC/DC: it’s juvenile, it’s cocky, it’s sexist and it only has one riff! Of course they’re right, but that’s also why the song is great.

 Before certain criticism is rightly levelled where sexism is used to defend a song, there has to be some context. Not the context often used of “it was a different time then”, that doesn’t wash. British comedy of the time was overtly racist and it is no defence of the attempt at comedy to say that it was just different back then. Even though times were different in the early and mid Seventies, the main historical context is one around the state of Rock at the time. AC/DC have always been the antidote to the slightly more pretentious ramblings dominant at the time from the likes of Page and Plant. Using the same influences, AC/DC took their working class - and in Bon Scott’s case, petty criminal roots - and turned Rock back into simple riffs and simple lyrics. Not a word was to be found about Hobbits or druids.

 The main defence though is that the kind of Rock presented by AC/DC and how they lived their lives (though Angus Young was and always has been teetotal) is of the partying, late nights, heavy riffs and as much casual sex as it is possible to get with an access all areas pass kind. Inherent in partaking, wanting and talking about casual sex is an element of sexism and disrespect for the opposite sex, whether on the part of men or women. The thing is, it’s not only a feature of life, it’s a feature of the imagination of every young bloke on the planet and this was AC/DC’s market. Just as Sex And The City projects an image of how some women may wish their lives to be, AC/DC projected what blokes wanted, the only difference is there isn’t as much about designer shoes in AC/DC’s stuff.

 Lyrically, the song isn’t Bon Scott at his best, but they didn’t have to be. The message was clear and about as subtle as an anvil falling on your head, there was no need to fill it full of innuendo or allegory, Rosie is a friend of the band, a big lady, she enjoys sex and he enjoys having sex with her. We could all write a few verses around that one. What makes the song instantly recognisable is Angus Young’s guitar work. Recognisable as the guy in the school uniform doing Chuck Berry impressions, what makes Young so great is because he kind of is just a guy in a school uniform doing Chuck Berry impressions.

 AC/DC are famed for their simple hard, dirty power chords and riffs, but angus stripped it back even further on Rosie and had the verses stamped out around one chord, with the chorus providing the change and element of complexity. More importantly, it meant that if you had access to a guitar and a simple chord guide you could sit in your room and thrash out the song all night long yourself.

 But all of this is fairly standard for an AC/DC tune, complexity of lyrics and riffs never featured, what makes Rosie stand out is that when Young lets loose, he can leave the best behind. Scott rightly steps aside after the second verse to let Young do his stuff and what stuff it is. This is pure air guitar territory, when Scott comes back into the song you hardly even notice as Young continues his demolition of his fret board.

 AC/DC were one of the first bands to strip Rock of its pretentions, as a band they stopped it taking itself too seriously as it threatened to do. In effect, they took it back to the cheeky origins of Chuck Berry except for a new crowd and new era. Even today, we lack that real sense of just playing hard and heavy for the sheer hell of it, image meant nothing, hairstyle meant nothing, it was just basic rock and roll.

 The band went on to do technically better songs than Rosie, but after Let There Be Rock, they had started to appeal to a wider audience. Highway to Hell remains a classic, but it lacks that ultimate grit, cheek and bravado that Let There Be Rock had in spades, as it was now clear they were producing albums that would sell in the millions rather than thousands. We’ll never know if Bon Scott would have ever been able to recapture that sentiment following Highway To Hell due to his early death, but as a band they have never really ever topped that moment, however the song remains as relevant, important and fun today as it did back then.