Joe Jackson

Portsmouth

David Ian Jackson was born in Burton upon Trent on 11 August 1954 and grew up in Paulsgrove, a council estate on the edge of Portsmouth, later moving with his parents to Gosport. He started on violin at eleven, switched to piano, and by sixteen was playing in pubs. In 1972 he won a scholarship to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, while keeping one foot in the working world of Top 40 cover bands and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. At twenty he changed his first name to Joe.

The mid-1970s were an apprenticeship in the unglamorous end of the business. A band called Edward Bear became Arms and Legs, signed to MAM and put out three singles in 1976 and 1977 that went nowhere. Jackson played the Playboy Club in Southsea and was musical director for a cabaret act, Koffee'n'Kreme, saving the money to make a demo of his own songs. In January 1978 he moved to London. The demo reached the American producer David Kershenbaum, who got him signed to A&M that August.

The band years: 1979 and 1980

The Joe Jackson Band was a lean quartet: Jackson on piano and vocals, Gary Sanford on guitar, Graham Maby on bass and David Houghton on drums. Look Sharp! came out on 29 January 1979, recorded fast at Eden Studios in London with many first takes and no overdubs. Its single "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" took a while to catch, but when it did, Jackson was filed alongside Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Ian Dury as one of the sharp-suited, sharp-tongued songwriters of British new wave. The album went gold in the United States, and Brian Griffin's cover photograph of a pair of white shoes on London's South Bank became one of the period's best-known sleeves.

He worked at speed. I'm the Man, which he called part two of Look Sharp!, followed the same October and gave him his biggest British hit, It's Different for Girls, at number five. Beat Crazy in 1980 was the last record by the original four. The band played its final show in Utrecht on 15 December 1980, and Houghton left.

Changing the subject

What came next set the pattern for the rest of his career. Ill in early 1981 and tired of rock, Jackson went back to the jump blues and swing of the 1940s, the music of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway. With Maby, a horn section and the big-band-minded drummer Larry Tolfree, he cut Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive at Basing Street Studios in May 1981 and toured it through the summer. It was an all-covers record from a writer who had just made his name with his own songs, and it reached number fourteen in Britain. Critics later heard it as a forerunner of the 1990s swing revival.

In 1982 he moved to New York, and the city remade his sound. Night and Day, recorded at Blue Rock Studio in SoHo early that year, dropped the guitar altogether in favor of piano, synthesizers, strings and a percussion section steeped in the Latin music he was hearing around him. It was named for Cole Porter, sequenced as a Night Side and a Day Side, and became his only top-five album on both sides of the Atlantic. Steppin' Out went to number six in America and earned two Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year.

Beyond the pop charts

The 1980s ran on instinct rather than formula. Body and Soul (1984) leaned harder into horns and New York jazz and gave him another American hit in "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)". Big World (1986) was recorded live to two-track in front of an audience at the Roundabout Theatre, who were asked to stay silent. Will Power (1987) was instrumental. There were film scores for Mike's Murder (1983) and Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker (1988). Blaze of Glory (1989) closed his A&M decade.

He moved to Virgin for Laughter & Lust (1991) and Night Music (1994), then to Sony Classical for Heaven & Hell (1997) and Symphony No. 1, which won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album in February 2001. In 1999 he published A Cure for Gravity, which he described as a book about music thinly disguised as a memoir, covering his life up to the age of twenty-four. Night and Day II (2000) returned to New York as a subject.

In 2002 the original quartet reunited for Volume 4 and a tour, captured on the live album Afterlife (2004). In 2006 he gave up his New York apartment, partly in protest at the city's smoking ban, which he had argued against in print, and moved to Berlin. The later records keep changing shape: Rain (2008), a trio album; The Duke (2012), a reworking of Duke Ellington; Fast Forward (2015), cut in four cities; Fool (2019); What a Racket! (2023), credited to a fictional music-hall performer called Max Champion; and Hope and Fury (2026), recorded between Berlin and New York with Maby still on bass.

On stage

Jackson has played well over sixteen hundred logged shows since the late 1970s, and his live sets are rarely straight replays of the records. He reharmonizes and rearranges old songs for each new band, so Sunday Papers has been a reggae-inflected rocker, a big-band swing number introduced as a song about bad news, and a piece of theater in which he read the day's headlines aloud and tore up the paper as he played. A Slow Song has closed his concerts since 1982.

A lot of this is documented. The BBC filmed him at Hatfield Polytechnic in 1979 for Rock Goes to College and at Hitchin in 1983; German television's Rockpalast filmed him in Cologne in 1980 and in Hamburg and Essen in 1983; both sets are now on official live albums. He has been less fond of the arena: of a 1984 show at Madison Square Garden he later said, simply, "I hated it."

Standing

Jackson's reputation rests on the fact that his songs were more harmonically ambitious than the three-chord rock around him, and on a stubborn refusal to repeat a success. He has five Grammy nominations and one win. His songs keep turning up in other people's hands across very different generations: Tori Amos sang Real Men on Strange Little Girls in 2001, Mandy Moore covered Breaking Us in Two in 2003, Trevor Horn has recorded him twice, and in January 2022 Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's band The Smile played It's Different for Girls at its first London shows.

Rock 'n' roll is too narrow and limiting.

Joe Jackson, quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock