Joe Jackson

Low Ticket Alert! Joe Jackson + Band – Hope and Fury Tour 2026 Presented by Z2 Entertainment & KBCO     Door time: 6:30 Show time: 7:30 Joe Jackson was born on August 11, 1954, in Burton-on-Trent, England, but grew up in the South Coast naval port city of Portsmouth. At age 16, Joe played his first paying gig as a pianist in a pub next door to a glue factory just outside of Portsmouth.  This was followed by other pub gigs (in which he was often trying to entertain crowds of drunken, bottle-throwing sailors) and accompanying a bouzouki player in a Greek restaurant. At age 18 Joe won a scholarship to study Composition, Piano, and Percussion at London’s Royal Academy of Music. By 1978, Joe was living in London and hawking an album-length demo, with his own band (Graham Maby, Bass; Dave Houghton, Drums; Gary Sanford, Guitar) standing by. That demo  –  already called Look Sharp  – eventually found its way to American producer David Kershenbaum, who was in London in the capacity of talent scout for A&M Records.  Joe was immediately signed, and Look Sharp was more professionally re-recorded in August ’78.  The Joe Jackson Band finally started to play regular gigs, and the album was released in January 1979. Joe Jackson’s story up to this point is much more fully, fascinatingly, and hilariously recounted in his book A CURE FOR GRAVITY.  From here on, though, it becomes more a matter of public record.  Look Sharp was followed within a year by the very similar I’m The Man, and in 1980 by the darker, more reggae-influenced Beat Crazy. At the end of 1980, drummer Houghton decided to quit, and Joe decided to dissolve the band and try something new. In 1981, Jackson recorded Jumpin’ Jive, a ‘musical vacation’ paying tribute to Swing and Jump Blues artists such as Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway.  Returning to songwriting, Joe spent a large chunk of 1982 in New York.  The result was Night and Day, a more sophisticated and melodic record built around keyboards and Latin percussion, rather than guitars.  With a new guitar-less band, Jackson hit the road for a whole year, and the album became his biggest success, going platinum in the US.  During the tour, Joe also somehow found time to write his first film score, for James Bridges’Mike’s Murder.  (He would go on to write several more, including most notably for Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker in 1988). Jackson’s next album Body and Soul(1984) was in a similar vein to Night and Day but featured a horn section (which, along with the Blue Note-inspired cover art, led many people to wrongly assume he’d made a jazz record).  For Big World (1986), Jackson stripped everything down to a 4-piece again and recorded live, direct to a 2-track master. In 1989, he went in the opposite direction with the majestic, semi-autobiographical Blaze of Glory, and toured with an 11-piece band.  Laughter and Lust (1991) was more like a mainstream (though still idiosyncratic) rock record, but yet another lengthy world tour left Jac...