When Joe Jackson plays here in the new year, it will be the English singer-songwriter’s third time in New Zealand in a 50-year career. He first came in 1983, in the wake of his early albums with hits that swung from the jagged New Wave of Is She Really Going Out with Him? and It’s Different for Girls, to the slick 1980s piano-driven pop of Steppin’ Out from his million-selling Night and Day album.
After spending the 1990s avoiding pop music and, incongruously, winning a Best Pop Instrumental Album Grammy for his Symphony No 1, he was back again in 2003 celebrating 25 years of debut album Look Sharp! Some 21 studio albums later, Jackson and band – which includes Graham Maby, the bassist who’s been with him since the beginning – are gracing the town halls of Auckland and Christchurch in January.
The tour by the 72-year-old who has split his time between hometown Portsmouth, New York, and Berlin, follows two intriguing, very English albums. On 2023’s Mr. Joe Jackson Presents Max Champion in ‘What a Racket!’, Jackson took on the persona of a pre-World War I music hall entertainer. It’s effectively his second time-travel set after 1981’s Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, covering swing-era songs by the likes of Cab Calloway, Louis Jordan, and Louis Armstrong. This year’s Hope and Fury was a return to Jackson’s mix of acerbic lyrics behind sophisticated tunes on songs such as Welcome to Burning-By-Sea and End of the Pier, with their odes to modern life in faded English coastal towns. A call finds Jackson in Boston towards the end of a North American tour before heading across the Atlantic until the end of the year. The closest he’ll get to an end-of-the-pier show is a theatre by the beach in Bournemouth, not far from his hometown.
How do they regard you in Portsmouth? Is there a statue or a plaque somewhere?
No, not yet. Anyway, maybe they’ll put me next to the statue of Charles Dickens. There’s a plaque on the wall of a bad Chinese restaurant announcing Peter Sellers was born upstairs. So maybe I’ll get one of those, but I might have to die first.
Some of the songs on Hope and Fury have almost a valedictory feel to them.
I think maybe you could say that about the last song on the album, See you in September, but it’s kind of like valedictory for now, not forever.
I was horrified by a couple of interviews that I did where they said, “Why did you end the album with a sad ballad?” Now, that’s a really happy song, and it boggles my mind that someone could not see that it’s a happy song. The whole idea of it was because my birthday is in August, which is a really good time to have a birthday because it’s a time of year where nothing much happens. People go on holiday. The music business grinds to a halt. You can’t tour, so I’ve often found myself saying, “Well, see you in September,” and then thought that’s a good idea for a song. It’s just about taking time to relax, take some time off and enjoy life. Nothing sad about it. It’s not like, “This is my epitaph”.
But everyone interprets things differently and picks up on different things. Sometimes it’s so off the wall that I have to say, “No, just no, you’re wrong.” When someone tells me what their favourite album of mine is, that it changed their life, it’s the greatest album they’ve ever heard, and it’s my least favourite of my albums, what am I going to say? No, you’re wrong? The only thing to say is thank you.
Well, they certainly have a lot of albums to choose from now. And after the initial run of records that got you known, you diversified musically but lost the spotlight.
Whatever you do, if you stick around for a while, like I’ve done, then you can’t win. There’s no way that you can guarantee any kind of success or even holding on to the audience that you had in the beginning. I mean, if I’d been doing exactly the same thing as I did on my first album all this time, plenty of people would have got fed up with it, and plenty of critics would have slagged me off for it. Then again, if, as you say, you diversify, you get slagged off for that as well. And there’s just no way to win. The media in general just isn’t interested in following the career of an artist who’s going to do different kinds of things and who’s no longer the flavour of the month.
I got asked recently, “What do you think you do better now than you did in the beginning?” And I had to think for a minute and said absolutely everything except for one thing. I’m a better singer, I’m a better writer, a much better lyricist, a better piano player, a better producer. The only thing I can’t do better is to be new and trendy.
There’s no way I can ever be 23 years old with my first album coming out again. And that’s just what you have to deal with if you want to keep making music for the rest of your life, which is what I’ve always wanted to do.
What was it like being 23 when your first album was coming out?
Well, I couldn’t believe it. All of a sudden, I found myself touring all over Europe and touring all over the States, and I wasn’t expecting that. On one hand, it was great fun. It was fantastic and really exciting. And on the other hand, it was disorienting and you had to deal with some weird stuff. It was not what I expected in some ways. But on the whole, I don’t have any regrets.
Going back a few years, what brought on the Max Champion music hall album?
What brought it on? It sounds like a disease. What brought it on was being locked down in England, which was something I never agreed with, right from the beginning, and I still don’t. It was a huge, huge mistake, and we’ll be dealing with the fallout of it for years, and a lot of people are in denial about it. That’s as close to any sort of controversy as I’m going to get.
Anyway, I found myself the last thing I wanted to do was be indulging doom and gloom and whining. I thought, “Well, I’m going to try and work on something that will just be kind of escapism, and just pure fun, and just silly.”
And during that time, I was doing quite a lot of research on Victorian and Edwardian music and entertainment and music hall, which I love, and playing a lot of the songs from sheet music and so on. Just for the hell of it, I thought, “I’m going to try and write a couple of music hall songs that could have been written in about 1910.” And this idea grew – I could create a character and not be myself for once and be someone else.
Joe Jackson: Christchurch Town Hall, January 23; Auckland Town Hall, January 26.