The Jam's 1979 single "The Eton Rifles" became one of the band's most celebrated songs for capturing the era's class tensions, reaching number three in the charts and helping cement Paul Weller's reputation as a politically engaged songwriter. Unlike many of their punk contemporaries, who favoured nihilistic sloganeering, The Jam channelled their anger into more pointed social commentary, and the track's origins lay in a real news report about a Right to Work march being jeered by pupils at Eton College.

Weller wrote the song as a response to that class divide, imagining a confrontation between Eton's privileged schoolboys and pupils from an ordinary state comprehensive. Producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven recalled that the band struggled for days to record the track at London's Townhouse studio until Weller smuggled around 30 fans in from outside, whose chanting was recorded in a second studio and used for the song's chorus, giving the track its riotous, communal energy and cementing it as one of The Jam's defining anthems.