AUDIO: Fools in Love

I've never been sure exactly how Elvis Costello turned into a big star, while Jackson remained sidelined. Both turned out epoch-making new wave classics in the late 1970s. Both combined very sophisticated musical skills with punk disgust. Both eventually got bored with pop and went on to a series of increasingly odd quasi-classical projects. But the fickle finger of fate somehow pointed to Costello and away from Jackson. Who can figure?

Still, recently, I've been hearing a fair amount of Joe Jackson in current releases like Radio 4 and the Snitches, I wonder if it's time to take another look at Look Sharp!, Jackson's first and most spectacularly edgy album.

Jackson was four years out of the prestigious Royal Academy of Music, working as musical director of the Playboy Club in Portsmouth, England, when a demo landed him a recording contract with A&M. He recorded the eleven tracks on Look Sharp! in a week and half. The backing band he assembled -- guitarist Gary Sanford, bass player Graham Maby and drummer Dave Houghton -- would remain together through 1980's Beat Crazy, and Maby collaborated for much longer. Together, they created a sound that crackled with nervous energy, one in which nearly any instrument -- guitar, bass, drums, piano or voice -- could carry the rhythm.

Look Sharp! is full of love songs for the self-loathing, witheringly sardonic lyrics spiking out from unstoppably catchy melodies. The very first line of lyrics, in "One More Time", is "Tell me one more time as I hold your hand that you don't love me," and it gets worse from there. Later, the big hit single "Is She Really Going Out with Him" sets the bitterest kind of disillusionment to a sing-along-worthy chorus. Even the sardonically beautiful "Fools in Love" looks for little and finds less, asking "Fools in love, are there any other kind of lovers?" By the end of the album, Jackson can hardly even look at the women who haunt it. In "Pretty Women", he's damn near speechless, choking on the familiar words "Here she comes, just a walkin' down the street" and bemoaning the power of miniskirts.

Frustration -- romantic, sexual, artistic, intellectual -- drives Look Sharp! from beginning to end. You can hear it in the repetitive, propulsive guitar riffs that drive every track, in the urgent vocals, in the drums that simmer under even quiet tracks. "Fools in Love" is as close to a ballad as this record offers, yet its dit-dit guitar rhythm and syncopated sticks keep it on edge throughout. The title track, treading heavy on the backbeats and staccato piano, captures the jerky uneasiness of a guy who will never be entirely sure that he does look sharp. It's a paranoid, self-aware cut, its killer chorus underlining the angst with the lyrics "You've got to look sharp, and you've got to have no illusions, just keep going your way, looking over your shoulder."

Jackson doesn't have a great voice -- he's likened it more to a character actor than a leading man -- but it's hard to imagine anyone else singing songs like "Sunday Papers" and "Is She Really Going Out with Him." Would you really want a leading man voice -- let's say Bryan Ferry or Jarvis Cocker -- covering these songs? Of course not. It would be ridiculous.

After Look Sharp!, Jackson released one more seminal new wave album, 1979's I'm a Man, then embarked on his experimental period. A ska/reggae album in 1980, the Cole Porter homage Night and Day in 1982, and then a series of semi-classical works. He was, in some ways, returning to his roots as a classically trained musician. He is, after all, one of the few pop stars who can play Stravinsky sonatas on the piano or manage a credible turn on the oboe. Still, his fans didn't follow him, and Jackson become more or less a footnote.

That seems to be okay with him. In his autobiography, A Cure for Gravity, Jackson writes, "I was at a crossroads. Where did I want to go? Did I want to continue doing the same thing and become a Pop cartoon character or, instead, grow up in the public eye."

He chose to grow up. Today, Joe Jackson lives in New York, works with musicians who interest him and records when, how and what he wants. He seems unlikely to pull a When I Was Cruel-style flashback, and there's a certain amount of integrity in that. Still, you can recapture the bone-wracking energy of his debut album any time you want to. Just say one more time.

-- Jennifer Kelly