Photo by Harry Elliott
Joe Jackson, the veteran British pianist/vocalist, insists on a certain level of sound quality, which can be traced all the way back to his 1979 A&M debut album,
Look Sharp! His five-decade-long career has covered a vast repertoire, and along the way, he's stuck in a few allusions to previous work. When you cue up "Fabulous People," the last track on side 1 of his excellent, biting, playful new LP
Hope and Fury (earMUSIC), and listen to the intro, you zero in on the ting-tinging of the glockenspiel. You think, "Haven't I heard that before?"
Yes, you have, on Jackson's most popular song, "Steppin' Out," the unlikely, Cole Porter–esque top-10 single that charted at the end of 1982.
"Well, the song was finished, but it didn't
feel finished," Jackson said. We were talking via Zoom, and the song he meant was "Fabulous People."
"I felt like it needed some kind of an instrumental interlude, or maybe an intro, or something else. I just started playing around with some chords, and I thought, 'Oh, this would be kind of cool with the glockenspiel on the top, kind of like "Steppin' Out." I think I had a moment where I thought, 'Wait a minute, do I really wanna do that?' And then I thought, '
Hell, why not?'
"It was fun to do that. I did a similar thing on
Night and Day II, which is the album everyone forgets about. There's a reference to it on there as well." (footnote 1)
About a decade ago, Jackson teamed up with Intervention Records to reissue five of his classic albums on high-grade 180gm vinyl. All were mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearant Audio, from the original masters. Three of them—
Look Sharp!,
I'm the Man, and
Night and Day—were pressed at RTI. The other two—
Body and Soul and
Summer in the City—were pressed at Gotta Groove. They're all excellent listens—if you can find them, since they're all out of print.
Then earlier this year, Intervention put out a new
Night and Day, this time on 150gm vinyl, pressed at Gotta Groove.
"Joe and his team have always been supportive of our Joe Jackson reissues, especially in helping us secure licensing deals with the labels," said Shane Buettner, founder and head of Intervention Records. "Joe's albums remain among the most in-demand and cherished LPs in the Intervention catalog."
I told Jackson I'd love to see Intervention tackle
Big World, his 1986 double-live album with all original material. "That would be alright by me. I was proud at the time how we managed to pull that off—that we recorded a whole new album live and direct to master. I remember being so disappointed that no one really seemed to understand that or care about it."
In preparing the reissue of
Night and Day, Buettner and his team listened to an original A&M US pressing and used it as their baseline. To their ears, it was the best-sounding version of the LP, better than any of the reissues up to that point. "The 150gm gives up nothing to 180gm," Buettner wrote.
Well, they're pretty close. On the 180gm version of "Steppin' Out," I could clearly hear Jackson ghost-sing an "h" sound before the words—"hangry" for angry; "hand" for and. It's a vocal technique that results in better enunciation and emphasis on words that begin with vowels. On the 150gm version, the "h" was there, just not as noticeable. Both Intervention pressings of
Night and Day outperformed my original 1982 A&M LP, but after a few good A/B sessions, the 180gm got the final nod over the 150 by just a tick. Elements like the bongos on "Breaking Us in Two" had slightly more presence.
I told Jackson I felt
Hope and Fury's side 2 opener, "After All This Time," was the literal opposite of "Breaking Us in Two," which opens side 2 of
Night and Day, in terms of the feelings it favors about whether to give up on a relationship or try to save it. "I hadn't thought of that—but, yeah, that's actually quite a good point," he replied. "It does make sense. And as you say, 'Time' is sort of a cataloguing of clichés about relationships ending—but then, the twist in the chorus is, 'Let's be better than that and stay together.'"
I asked Jackson to confirm once and for all something about "Steppin' Out" that's long bothered me—namely, how to play its main chords on piano. "Yeah, F#maj7, Emaj7, then D#m7 is the sequence that everyone gets wrong—and it's all over the same bass riff. It's all over F# and the bass, basically." Why do people get it wrong? "I don't know. But I've heard some hilariously wrong versions of it." He laughed.
"I can't predict the future—it's impossible, isn't it?—but just the idea that anyone would be interested in enjoying my music in any way at all is a very nice thought," Jackson concluded. "There's not a whole lot I can do about it, but I've always liked the idea of being timeless rather than trying to be fashionable or current. If you try too hard to do that, you become dated very quickly."
Footnote 1: Jackson references "Steppin' Out" lyrically on "Hell of a Town" and repeats that song's signature piano riff toward the end of "Glamour and Pain."
