It's Different for Girls

Jackson started from a phrase he thought of as a cliché and turned it around. The song stages a conversation between a man and a woman in which the roles you would expect are reversed: he wants to talk about feelings, and she tells him not to be so serious. The record is quieter than most of the band's work, with Sanford's chiming guitar and close harmonies from Maby and Houghton, and on stage Jackson leaves the piano to sing it at the front microphone.

Released as a single at the end of November 1979, with Friday on the B-side in Britain, it reached number five in January 1980, his highest UK chart placing, and number four in Ireland. In America it stalled just outside the Hot 100. Jackson said he was surprised by its success. Derek Burbidge directed the video.

Afterlife

He has kept reworking it: as a duet with Joy Askew in 1991, with Mindy Jostyn on the Laughter & Lust tour, and on Live 1980/86 and Summer in the City. setlist.fm logs more than seven hundred performances, which makes it the third most played song of his career. It has drawn covers from Siskin and The Feeling in 2008, from Trevor Horn with Marillion's Steve Hogarth in 2019, and, most unexpectedly, from The Smile, who played it at two of their first London shows in January 2022.