Joe Jackson
POP
Shepherd's Bush Empire

David Sinclair
June 06, 2003

JOE JACKSON has spent the better part of 25 years keeping one jump ahead of his audience — so successfully that many of his fans have given up the chase. But now, after a musical odyssey that has taken him into classical, jazz and Latin music, he has returned to his point of departure with spectacular results.

Having reconvened the Joe Jackson Band, with whom he recorded his first three albums between 1979 and 1980, he has released a new album, Volume 4, featuring a fresh batch of songs written and recorded in the snappy, new-wave pop vein of his earliest work. The album is fine, but his show with guitarist Gary Sanford, bass player Graham Maby and drummer Dave Houghton at Shepherds Bush on Wednesday was a triumph of a different magnitude.

The band had not lost one ounce of their supple collective clout as a musical unit. Versatile, nimble and supremely economic in their playing style, they handled everything from the intricate, neo-reggae syncopations of Fools in Love to the tearaway stomp of Got the Time with sublime poise and uncanny definition.

Having always looked like a man in his mid-forties, Jackson, now 47, appeared virtually unchanged. As thin as ever in a three-quarter-length drape jacket, he sang with cool authority and surprising emotional warmth.

“It’s nice to see you looking well/I know your age but I won’t tell,” he sang with a mischievous edge on Chrome, a plaintive new song every bit as well-crafted as the old favourites which peppered the set.

During an interlude in which he accompanied himself on piano, Jackson sang an exquisite version of the Beatles’ Girl, which he had deftly converted into a ragtime piano instrumental by the end.

A spiky character in his youth, Jackson maintained a genial rapport with the crowd even as he declined to play a succession of requests shouted from the floor. But his performing instincts remained razor-sharp as the flow of favourites accelerated towards the end, and they raced to a heady climax with Sunday Papers, Look Sharp, It’s Different for Girls and an immaculate final flourish of I’m the Man. And indeed he is.