It’s One Night Only, edition 3: The Song Sommelier’s imagining of a special live evening with Mr Joe Jackson, a proudly eclectic, career-spanning retrospective played across a two-hour show. Well, we can dream. Something from almost every Jackson album.
Words & curation by Keith, ‘Look Sharp’ cover rendition by Alec Doppler, from the original photograph by Brian Griffin
I spent a lot of my university years listening to Joe Jackson. It wasn’t cool. It was the early 90s and the time of the acid house rave scene, Smiths parties and the early birth of Britpop: Blur, The Charlatans, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, Ride and other much cooler bands. I loved Britpop too, but my small collection of prized cassette tapes for heavy rotation contained Joe Jackson Live 80 / 86, Will Power (1987) and Jackson’s magnum opus, 1989’s Blaze of Glory. All of them were played to death - almost always in private. No fellow student was interested in a shared listening experience involving Joe Jackson and so my private study time, walks around Birmingham’s Bull Ring and long coach journeys was how I got my fix. Has Joe Jackson ever been cool? It’s probably a question he has been asked (by others and himself) far too many times. Perhaps, just maybe...he’s cool right now. After all, who could resist the timeless classic that is ‘Steppin’ Out’?
In 1990 I lived in London in a kitchen on the Tottenham Court Road (see, I was cool even if my music taste was not) and it was that year I which I bought a ticket to see Jackson and his expanded group play the ‘Hammersmith Odeon’ (Hammersmith Eventim Apollo in the modern vernacular) on the Blaze of Glory tour, where he played the whole record through from start to finish - something you’ll note, is returning to the live arena in these strange times of virtual shows, where bands can play stuff that ‘would never work live’, like entire new albums.
It was October 1989. I can barely remember the show but at the same time will never forget it. I hadn’t been to many ‘proper’ gigs and the evening was quite special. It had to be, because performing Blaze of Glory live required serious resources. The album is a hugely ambitious concept, about growing up (similar in ambition and variety as XTC’s Skylarking) with songs in all manner of musical styles, from Greek plate-smasher ‘Acropolis Now’, to Cole Porter style ballads (‘The Best I Can Do’) to 50s doo wop pastiche (‘Nineteen Forever’) and everything in-between, with many tracks featuring orchestral or chamber pop arrangements - all string sections, brass embellishments and extensive backing vocals. Jackson suited up for the occasion, with a shirt of shiny yellow silk and the glow of someone who had made his life’s best work and knew it (even if it turned out to be yet another in a string of commercial ‘understatements’). If Jackson toured it again now, nothing, but nothing - would come between me and a ticket.
Like most people my first experience of Joe Jackson was hearing his late 70s chart hits on the radio: the catchy ‘Different for Girls’ and the deliriously good ‘Is She Really Going Out with Him?’ However, a few years later I bought a copy of the soundtrack to the obscure 1983 American thriller Mike’s Murder. It was second hand vinyl from Regis Records, Holderness Road, Hull and I guess that’s really how I became a fan. From there, I bought his soundtrack to Tucker (the slightly less obscure 1988 biopic of the car mogul starring Jeff Bridges), his instrumental avant garde neo classical (i.e. pretentious) 1987 effort, Will Power and his live album Big World. Somehow, I missed Body & Soul completely.
But it was Joe Jackson Live 1980 / 86 and the expansive Blaze Of Glory that had Jackson occupying the precious ear-space of my formative years. What Joe lacked in trendiness, he made up for in eclecticism, and it was the variety of styles, occasional jazz leanings and lounge-music sophistication that appealed to my finer sensibilities at the time. I have a distinct feeling that it’s this proud eclecticism that influenced other major names to be ‘stubbornly’ free (i.e. despite the usual protestations from labels, music press and fans) with their musical styles including XTC, The Style Council and Prefab Sprout. As the 1980s progressed and the likes of Paul Weller and Sting were busy forging a path to redefine themselves through pivoting to more refined genres, Joe Jackson had preceded them many years before and many times over.
As for the modern habit of musicians attempting to sustain a career by way of staying in their lane, well that would never wash with Joe Jackson. He has always been his own man and Indeed in 2017 he told Alec Baldwin on the ‘Here’s the Thing’ podcast in 2017:
“we’re supposed to move on, to progress as artists and get better, otherwise what’s the point of doing it?”
No wonder that Jackson co-opted the latin movement into his music as early as 1982, turning it into his most commercially successful project: the album Night & Day. Since then he has made albums classified as jazz, soundtrack, classical and jive.
So just for you folks, here is ‘Joe Jackson: Proudly Eclectic’: The Song Sommelier’s imagining of a special live evening with Mr JJ, a career-spanning retrospective played across a two-hour 15 minute show. Well, we can dream - after all it’s not as if real live shows are really a thing anyhow these days. As ever, our setlist is a mix of the hits and some of the best misses, some personal choices and some forgotten gems, with something from almost every Jackson studio and live album (try as I might I could not pick out anything suitable from 1991’s Laughter & Lust).
Let’s put the show on at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, Portsmouth - Joe’s hometown and early stomping ground, and we wish them and other music venues well in re-opening after this pesky virus has ‘got back in its box’ as Boris would say.
There are some notable belters in the set, including the very recent ‘Night by Night’ which leads us on an early jazzy excursion taking in ‘You Can’t Get What You Want’ and ‘Another World’. From there, some classic early period Jackson at his best: ‘One More Time’, ‘Different For Girls’ and ‘Real Men’ (his best live version) included.
Mid-set, we go deep into the obscure and the eclectic: two numbers from Mikes Murder, tracks from his 1984 classic Body & Soul, a trip into avant garde with ‘No Parasan’ (from Will Power) and then ‘No Chance Blues’, from Tucker. The core of the set is a run of no less than four songs from Blaze Of Glory, before coming up to speed with some more recent catalogue in which Jackson reveals that he never really lost it (‘Still Alive’, ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Tough Tough’ are all late vintage Jackson (assisted as ever by the first rate bass of long-time collaborator Graham Maby) standing up well alongside his classic better known hits).
And if you think there was nothing left for an encore, think again, as of course ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him’ completes his modest trio of classic chart hits. Of late, Joe has closed his shows with the six and a half minute ‘Alchemy’ from 2019’s Fool album and we see no reason to change that here. After all, it’s a fitting description of Joe Jackson’s approach to music, a melting pot of styles and genres and his creative philosophy, the guiding principle of which is to simply “do whatever you want”.
Alec Doppler is French, buys too much music and does a lovely line in music-based illustrations - see more on Instagram
Professor Brian Griffin took the original new wave shoes photograph for Joe Jackson’s 1979 album Look Sharp LP - see more on Instagram
The Joe Jackson Archive project can be found on the web and Blaze of Glory is available on vinyl via Discogs