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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes. Photo / Supplied

Graham Reid reconsiders two classic and expanded albums from three decades ago.

Rating: 4/5
Who: The Jam
What: Album, Sound Affects Deluxe Edition

Rating: 5/5
Who: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
What: Damn the Torpedoes Deluxe Edition

Verdict: Two bands separated by an ocean and culture deliver messages from their frontlines

By the fag-end of the 70s, the punk explosion in Britain was fading and furious anger was displaced by more intellectual, less heated bands like Magazine, Wire and Joy Division. Across the Atlantic there was a similar return to tightly crafted songs with Talking Heads, Blondie and Television.

The Jam were never punk: their 1977 debut album, In the City, bristled with pop hooks and they released four increasingly sophisticated albums in two years. As the 80s dawned the Jam enjoyed chart success, critical acclaim and songwriter Paul Weller was being hailed in the lineage of Ray Davies and Pete Townshend.

Their Sound Affects (1980) was akin to the Beatles' Revolver, an album of different moods and observations, memorable songs, and a confident band at ease with itself, if not the world around it.

The Revolver reference was bannered by the first single Start! which hijacked Paul McCartney's bassline and George Harrison's guitar part from Taxman off Revolver. But it was That's Entertainment - a bitterly poetic, acoustic-driven attack on ordinary life in Britain - which garnered the most attention and became their most covered song.

Yet Sound Affects had a lukewarm reception at the time: Patrick Humphries in Melody Maker admired it but didn't like it; Paul du Noyer in the NME said there was filler but where "[it] is good it's great, and where it's not so good it's still good".

That's fair: 11 songs, three classics (that includes the stabbing riffery of Pretty Green), the insightful Man in the Corner Shop, the brittle But I'm Different Now and incendiary Set the House Ablaze ... and some lesser moments.

Sound Affects rewards rediscovery, and the deluxe edition has - alongside the customary booklet - an extra disc of 22 songs which includes demos of the Beatles' Rain and And Your Bird Can Sing, the Kinks' Dead End Street and Waterloo Sunset, and various album tracks. Pop Art Poem anticipates The Streets. Sound Affects was very British, and a blueprint for Blur a decade later.

Across the ocean Tom Petty was, like the Jam, also wielding a Rickenbacker - the early guitars of choice of the Beatles. But he and his Heartbreakers were refining their distinctively American sound - grounded in the Byrds and US garage band pop-rock - for Damn the Torpedoes in 1979, their third album. But Petty's career had faltered: litigation, bankruptcy and a refusal to record unless he had complete control meant the stakes were high for Torpedoes. But the album was packed with sharp, fat-free songs - Refugee, Here Comes My Girl, Even the Losers, Shadow of a Doubt, Don't Do Me Like That - alongside the menacing You Tell Me and the delightful, country-framed Louisiana Rain which anticipated his time as a Traveling Wilbury.

The Torpedoes deluxe edition - an extra disc of nine songs - doesn't add much to a perfect power pop-rock album but the five live tracks should direct you to their excellent, career-embracing four-CD Live Anthology.

Damn the Torpedoes vindicated Petty's self-belief: it went to No. 2 in the US, though it didn't make the British top 50.

Then again, the Jam's Sound Affects only made 72 in the US the following year. Down here we embraced both these albums at the time. Now they're back, and wider.

-TimeOut