As a first-year student at the Royal Academy of Music, in the winter of 1973, the 19-year-old Joe Jackson responded to an advert on the common room notice board requesting the unpaid services of a pianist for a fringe play with the not entirely promising title Schoolgirl Slaves of Soho. Despite attracting an audience of just 10 people, most of whom were family and friends, on the opening night of a short run at the Dark and Light Theatre, in Brixton, a journalist from the London listings magazine Time Out also bought a ticket. When his write-up was published, Jackson received his first ever bad review.
“It’s a long-winded rambling piece supposedly about the pornographic exploitation of schoolgirls, performed by a company of three in full masks which soon become boring and expressionless,” the piece read. “Their limited vocal range and vocabulary of movement does little to patch up the inadequacies of the ‘comic-strip’ text.”
Jackson, who celebrates his 70th birthday on August 11, would later reflect on this experience in his memoir A Cure For Gravity. “It’s [best] to admit, when you get a bad review, that you’re just plain hurt, and that you’re hurt because you’re human,” he wrote. “It often surprises people to know that some very great artists have been devastated by criticism. Artists are very often less sure of themselves than they seem. Bizet was utterly destroyed – driven to his death, many believe – by the hostile reception to his opera Bizet. I bet his friends told him not to take it personally. But your work is your flesh and blood, and it feels personal, and what are you supposed to do with the hurt?”
Early Criticism and its Impact
It’s tempting to suggest that the shellacking in Time Out cast a shadow from which Jackson has yet to emerge. For decades now, his relationship with the press has been consistently uneasy. “Rock critics,” he once wrote in an article published on the Spiked website, “are some of the most pretentious and humourless people on the planet.” Certainly, at the time of early-day hits such as Is She Really Going Out With Him? (1978) and Got The Time, from 1979, journalists who hunted in packs moved fast to apportion him a role and a place in the scheme of things. He was labelled an “angry young man”. Worse still, they called him “new wave”.
Right from the start, though, Joe Jackson was interested only in the horizon; as soon as he reached a destination, without the merest hint of dilettantism, he packed his bags for somewhere new. Over the course of a 45-year recording career, his musical swerves have encompassed pop, rock, jazz, classical, Latin, swing, blues, and more.
Eclectic Musical Influences
As a council estate kid growing up in sixties Portsmouth, he was quite the oddball. “Beethoven [has] always been my greatest hero,” he told the writer Chris Salowicz in 1984. “At school, when the other kids were into Cream, I was completely into Beethoven.” Even as a teenager playing the hits of the day and a smattering of originals in sailors’ bars on the south coast with his first band, Edward Bear, he could both read and arrange music. His earliest songs took their cues from Steely Dan and Little Feat. Despite an evident love for the Sex Pistols and (particularly) The Clash, he would go on to describe punk as “arguably the dumbest, silliest, least subtle and most limited genre” of all.
Nonetheless, he emerged into a scene in which abstract qualities such as “energy” were prized higher than musical proficiency or technique with the kind of punkish devil-may-care bombast one rarely sees today. Sure, he was pleased that his early singles were gathering airplay in the United States, but not that they were “sandwiched between Foreigner and Kansas and the usual crap”.
He didn’t want to hang out with rock stars, he said, “because most of those people are f–king idiots”. He didn’t mellow much over time, either. Asked his opinion of New York speed metal group Anthrax’s otherwise well received 1990 version of his hit song Got The Time, he replied, “Lumpen – the way I feel about it is, ‘Thanks for the royalties, guys.’”
Unapologetic Honesty and Open Criticism
But for all the eye-catching quotes, there was no clever media strategy at play behind the scenes. Whereas Elvis Costello, the artist with whom he was most closely bracketed in those early days, created a damn-near iconic flint-hard persona on which unimaginative music journalists feasted for years – long past the point at which it had begun to suffocate him, in fact – Joe Jackson appeared to say whatever happened to be on his mind at the time. It was as if interviews were merely conversations in pubs. He liked talking about music, sure, and he’d happily offer up opinions on the work of other artists, but he seemed ill at ease discussing his own non-musical life.
“You have to make a conscious effort or else you end up with no privacy at all,” he opined in an interview with Q magazine in 1991. “Unfortunately, this business is set up in such a way that you can’t promote your music without promoting your face at the same time. What people forget is that me and all the other people who have records in the shops are all different kinds of people and we’re doing it for different reasons. Some are doing it because they want to be stars and they want to be recognised in the street, and they want to be chased by photographers and all that crap.
“I’m just not like that,” he said. “My ambitions are artistic as opposed to material ones. I want to be able to do better and more interesting and unique work over the years and hopefully have it appreciated by as large an audience as I can get without having to be something I’m not.”
The Success of 'Steppin' Out'
Even his biggest success might easily have eluded him. Haunted by doubts that the smooth sounds of the Night and Day album, from 1982, would die at the box office, Jackson fought with his producer, David Kershenbaum, about whether or not the utterly sublime Steppin’ Out would make a good single. Even after being persuaded that indeed it would, he was reluctant even to film a music video, claiming that “rock and roll is degenerating into a big circus, and videos and MTV are very much part of that”. Maybe, but aided by the then-nascent channel, upon release, the single cracked the US (and UK) Top 10, propelling its parent LP to sales of a million copies.
For the world’s most reluctant pop star, though, the idea of repeating a successful formula in perpetuity held no truck. Notwithstanding an appearance in the American Top 20 with the jazz and Latin-themed Body & Soul LP, from 1984, Joe Jackson embarked on an unpredictable trajectory of albums with which he absented himself from the higher reaches of the US chart for 39 years.
“I just think even one hit is more than most people have,” he told the writer David Burke. “The fact that a lot of people aren’t so interested in what I’m doing more recently, it happens to most of us, to most artists who stick around for a long time. There’s a few that become icons and everyone wants to know about them, no matter what. But most of us, the mere mortals, have to deal with that.”
'What a Racket!' and the Anti-Killjoy Culture
Not that the work wanted for brilliance. Clever to the point of genius, last year’s What A Racket! LP, a collection of songs written in the style of turn-of-the-century music hall, in particular, is a joy from first to last. The album features the song Health And Safety, in which Jackson’s fictional alter-ego Max Champion, a vaudevillian performer supposedly killed in the First World War, decries what he sees as an encroaching killjoy culture. “Put that pint down, stub the gasper out,” he sings. “Knock me down, lock me down, strewth and flippin’ ‘eck – it’s always the working man who gets it in the neck.”
Many a true word is sung in song, you might say. As a smoker with a five-a-day habit, in the real world, Joe Jackson lobbied noisily against the 21st Century ban on combustible materials in bars and restaurants in New York City and Britain. “The air in a pub ‘belongs’ neither to smokers nor non-smokers,” he wrote in 2010, “and certainly not to politicians, but to the publican. It’s the publican who should decide the smoking policy on his or her own premises.”
Elsewhere, he mourned the decline of pub culture in general, noting that, “The oppressive licensing laws… the small measures and high prices, and the CCTV cameras were bad enough; now, with the smoking ban, it’s as though we have to do our best to relax with not only Nanny looking over our shoulders, but Matron too.”
The Uncompromising, Witty, and Always Evolving Joe Jackson
Joe Jackson called time on crusading due to worries that he might become known “more as the smoking guy rather than the music guy”. The concern is valid, of course, but also a shame, not least because his wit on the page often towered. As with his music, he never worried about people at the back who might be struggling to keep up. In this, I speak of myself – it was only when I neared the end of his wholly berserk essay Dogs Must Be Banned From All Public Places that I realised he was using humour to draw parallels with the lot of the beleaguered smoker.
“I am a tolerant person,” he wrote. “If [dog lovers] want to roll around in dog hair in their stinking homes, then good luck to them. Unless, of course, there are children present, in which case the dogs should be forcibly removed and shot. Likewise, if the dog addict’s flat adjoins another. The same, naturally, goes for their cars. To have a dog in one’s car when a child is present is clearly a form of child abuse. Even non-asthmatic children are having their lives shortened by regular exposure to stinking dog germs.”
Which got me thinking: perhaps the real reason Jackson doesn’t care for music writers is because he suspects he can do the job better. Certainly, his evident despair at journalists who would struggle to play Chopsticks on the piano presiding as judge and jury on his own meticulously constructed work is an itch he’s been unable to scratch since being slated in Time Out back in 1973.
Or maybe he’s just a guy who’s hard to please. In 2010, Joe Jackson was in a bar in Durham, North Carolina, at which his enjoyment of a micro-brewed pint was soured by a lounge pianist making a hash of Moonlight Sonata, by his beloved Ludwig Van Beethoven. The tempo fluctuated like a wonky pacemaker, an over-reliance on the sustain pedal meant minor and major chords blurred together, while a section in which the pianist apparently got lost gave way to spasms of improvisation. To his astonishment, at the end of the piece, his fellow patrons began to applaud.
“Are they bad or stupid people?” he wondered. “Of course not. That white-haired lady on the next table could be my mother. My mother likes what she calls ‘nice music’ – music that is simply pleasant to the half-attentive ear. She might well enjoy this.” Evaluating the distance between what people like and what he believes is good, once again, Joe Jackson found himself keeping company with the defining characteristic of his long career. “These questions have been going round in my head for years,” he noted. “These issues of belonging rather than standing out, of the general climate of opinion versus the personal vision.”
Joe Jackson’s UK tour begins in Manchester on October 3
