Denson Winklepickers

Joe Jackson : One More Time

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On January 5, 1979 A+M Records released Look Sharp!, the high energy debut album by English songwriter Joe Jackson and one of my favorite albums that year. It showed us his U.K. hit " Is She Really Going Out With Him?" was no fluke. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, Jackson may have looked at what Elvis Costello and Graham Parker were doing and thought he could easily mine the same misanthropic vein. Maybe he was slumming it because after three albums he moved on to more jazz-inspired recordings.

As a kid, I was taken by homely Jackson's snide remarks about pretty girls and happy loving couples. Jackson validated my acting like a jerk around both,  which was unfortunate. But even more, I was taken by the ultra tight bass playing of Graham Maby, who would go on to record with Marshall Crenshaw, They Might Be Giants and Freedy Johnston. I bought myself a bass guitar and started a high school band in 1980 called The Geeks.

(The title of this post is the name of Jackson's shoes on the cover and, in tribute, may be the name of my next band).

  From Kurt Loder writing for Rolling Stone :

Joe Jackson looks very sharp indeed on this head-turning debut album that not only crackles with the vivacious sonic vigor of mid-Sixties Merseybeat, but also makes explicit (even more than the Clash or the Police) the New Wave/reggae connection. In the process, Jackson comes on like a feisty cross between Billy Joel and Elvis Costello, and even pulls off an uncanny Keith Relf impersonation. Not bad for a Royal Academy of Music graduate. 

 Cut live in the studio and perfectly captured by David Kershenbaum's crisp, lucid production, Look Sharp! is a stripped-down pean to spontaneous combustion, from the neo-Yardbirds raveup of "One More Time" (complete with dead-ringer Relf-ian warblings and recherché harp playing) through the vintage Beat-Boom wallop of "Got Time" to the Rockpile-style pummeling in "Throw It Away."

Even though "Is She Really Going Out with Him" cops its title from the Shangri-Las and "Pretty Girls" opens with a quote from Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," Jackson is no cloddish revivalist. Instead, the LP's most engaging characteristics are its pervasive Caribbean consciousness -- partially invoked by the smoky lope of "Fools in Love," but instantly apparent in such other reggae-tinged tracks as "Pretty Girls" and the punchy "Sunday Papers" -- and his sometimes acidulous social commentary. In "Sunday Papers" ("If you wanna know 'bout the bishop and an actress.../If you wanna know 'bout the stains on the mattress"), he sounds almost as fed up as Billy Joel, while avoiding Joel's terrible tendency toward bombast.

More to the point, however, is Jackson's occasional resemblance to Elvis Costello, both lyrically ("Fools in love/Are there any creatures more pathetic?") and melodically (the chorus of "Happy Loving Couples" is a semiclone of Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week"). Most of the time, though, Joe Jackson is his own man. With proper promotion, he could easily be this year's model in the post-New Wave sweepstakes.

From Robert Christgau who gave the album a grade of B:

In which an up-and-coming professional entertainer tricks up Britain's latest rock and roll fashion with some fancy chords and gets real intense about the perils of romance. Well, better "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" than "Sunday Papers," the social-criticism interlude, which inspires fond memories of "Pleasant Valley Sunday."