Sunday Papers

Sunday Papers is the second track on Look Sharp! and was the album's second British single, released in February 1979 with the title track on the B-side. The song began as an R&B riff that the band played with reggae syncopation, and it ends by speeding up and getting louder. Jackson plays the harmonica solo himself. The target is the British tabloid press: its moral panics, its gossip and the people who believe every word of it.

Jackson has always said he was never famous enough to be a tabloid victim himself. When Songfacts asked him in 2012, in the middle of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, whether the song had come true, he said that what applied then still applied, and that he was not a big fan of the British media in general.

On stage

It never charted in Britain, but on stage it became a fixture. setlist.fm logs more than five hundred performances, from a show at the John Peel pub in Gosport in December 1978 to the 2026 Hope and Fury tour. Jackson often read out that day's headlines in a mocking voice before starting, then tore up the paper as he played. On the 1984 Body and Soul tour it was rearranged as a big-band swing number and introduced as a song about bad news, a version preserved on Live 1980/86. The BBC filmed it at Hatfield Polytechnic in November 1979 and German television's Rockpalast filmed it in 1980 and 1983.