Beat Crazy

Beat Crazy was meant as a departure from the first two records, but the band had no clear direction while making it. Jackson wrote it, arranged it and produced it himself, with Norman Mighell engineering at Basing Street Studios in London. Graham Maby sings lead on the title track, and Anton Corbijn took the sleeve photographs.

Jackson later called it the stereotypical difficult third album, in which the band tried to change the formula without quite knowing how. It is darker than the first two, he said, with a stronger reggae influence, and he still liked the title track and Biology. Reggae and ska colour songs such as In Every Dream Home, Mad at You and Pretty Boys. It peaked outside the top forty in both Britain and the United States and its singles missed the charts. The group did not tour it in America. When Andy Gill reviewed it for the NME he called it a pretty lame apology for an album. After a final concert in Utrecht in December 1980 the original line-up split, and it did not make another studio album until Volume 4 in 2003.