Laughter & Lust

Jackson left A&M in 1990, and the label then issued Stepping Out: The Very Best of Joe Jackson, which became a top ten hit in Britain. He signed to Virgin and tested the new songs on a five-week American tour in September and October 1990 billed as Joe Jackson's Workshop. The album was recorded that October and November at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hurley, New York, and mixed at Electric Lady Studios.

The band was Joy Askew and Jackson on keyboards, Tom Teeley on guitars, Graham Maby on bass, Sue Hadjopoulos on percussion and Dan Hickey on drums, with Tony Aiello, Annie Whitehead, Michael Morreale and Charles McCracken added. Jackson told one paper in 1991 that most of the songs were about sex and other romantic entanglements. The writer Martin C. Strong called it Jackson's most direct, accessible material in years, while the NME's Stephen Dalton found Jackson not even interestingly bitter. Jackson himself later said it was the closest he could get to a commercial pop record, that it was not very successful in the United States, and that it did okay in Europe.

The world tour ran from Munster on 18 May 1991 to Sydney on 20 September 1991, and the Sydney show was filmed and released in 1992 as Laughter & Lust Live. It was his last non-classical studio album until Night and Day II in 2000. Jackson said that after the tour he had bad writer's block.