01 Look Sharp
02 Cancer
03 Real Men
04 Breaking Us in Two
05 Fools in Love
06 Chinatown
07 Target
08 T.V. Age
09 It's Different for Girls
10 Tuxedo Junction
11 Steppin' Out
Joe Jackson is an English pianist, songwriter, vocalist, author, and occasional bandleader, active since the late 1970s. Emerging on London’s New Wave scene, he achieved fame with the 1979/80 albums Look Sharp!, I’m the Man, and Beat Crazy. Over the years, his music has incorporated rock, reggae, salsa, jump blues, Tin Pan Alley, big-band vocal jazz, and avant-garde classical forms.
Joe was born David Ian Jackson on August 11, 1954, in Burton upon Trent. He spent his childhood in Portsmouth and his teens in Gosport, where he learned violin and piano. From age 16, he played piano bars and won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied musical composition alongside Annie Lennox.
Jackson earned the nickname “Joe” when cabaret audiences noted his resemblance to Joe Cool, the piano-playing guise of Snoopy in the comic strip Peanuts. Jackson himself accepted the name as an ode to the titular teenage genius character in the Sixties ITV super-marionation series Joe 90. At age 20, he changed his legal name to Joe because he deemed David an over-given forename among his generation of Portsmouth natives.
In 1972, Jackson teamed with Gosport friends Graham Maby (bass) and Mark Andrews (guitar) in Edward Bear, a covers band named after the line “Edward Bear, coming downstairs” in English author A.A. Milne’s 1926 children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh. When a namesake Canadian soft-rock band scored a 1973 transatlantic hit with “Last Song,” Jackson shortened the name to Edward but signed as Arms and Legs to MAM, a pop-singles label that housed Irish sensation Gilbert O’Sullivan.
With the advent of new wave, Andrews formed Mark Andrews and the Gents. Jackson formed his own band, comprised of Maby, guitarist Gary Sanford, and drummer David Houghton. Meanwhile, he played piano on Portsmouth’s cabaret circuit behind the vocal duo Koffee N’ Kreme and used the earnings to fund his first demo. In 1978, American A&R talent scout David Kershenbaum spotted Jackson on London’s club circuit and secured the singer a deal with A&M. From: https://jazzrocksoul.com/artists/joe-jackson/
