I'm the Man

Jackson thought of this as the second half of Look Sharp!, and the band, producer and method are the same: the quartet of Jackson, Sanford, Maby and Houghton, recorded in March 1979 at TW Studios in Fulham with Alan Winstanley engineering. He later called it the best of his first three albums. The cover casts him as a spiv, the flash wide boy of British postwar slang, and the songs share the character's swagger and unease in equal measure.

It reached twelve in Britain, his best placing there until Night and Day, and twenty-two in America, and went gold in Britain and Canada. It's Different for Girls went to number five in the UK at the turn of 1980. Christgau gave it a C-plus; AllMusic later rated it four and a half stars out of five.