Look Sharp! – Joe Jackson

Is She Really Going Out With Him? is the breakthrough hit from Look Sharp! that introduced the world to Joe Jackson, and while I quickly became a fan of that song it wasn’t enough to make me buy the album. As a new, previously unheard of artist he could have been just another 1 hit wonder for all I knew – there seemed to be so many of them on the radio around that time. I certainly didn’t go into the record store to buy this album because of that song. One hit single on the radio might coerce me into purchasing a 45, but to impart my hard earned cashola on an entire album – no way! A new artist needed to be investigated and pondered before such a substantial investment could be made. There was however, one exception to that rule: if the cover looked fantastic I could be very easily swayed. All the best albums had great covers and there was nothing more exciting than the prospect of leaving the store with a work of art under your arm that once unveiled at home could be deconstructed, deciphered and devoured!

So, it’s 1979 and the 15 yr old version of me wanders into his favourite record store and starts thumbing through the album selections. Usually I had no particular record in mind, but I had some spondooley burning a hole in my pocket and I needed to spend it now! As soon as I saw the stark black and white cover of Look Sharp! I not only had to have the album, I had to have those shoes! I’d never seen a pair of white winkle pickers before (with lace ups at the side no less), though it took me 5 years before I finally found a pair of my own.

The cover design for Look Sharp! is brilliant in its simplicity and minimalism. The light on the pavement covers just enough width to include the shoes, highlighting their presence, but the inference is that the light has been created by an open door and those shoes are his ticket to the opportunity that lies beyond – look stoosh and the world is your oyster! With a small sized font used for the name of the artist and the album (both in white) in opposing corners, it’s surprisingly understated for an unknown artist on his debut, but then Joe Jackson had very firm ideas about his music and the identity he wanted to create for himself from the outset.

The record opens with One More Time, a high energy kick starter that, like the lyrical frustrations of Joe Jackson on this album, feels like a tightly sprung coil just busting to unwind, with Gary Sanford’s blistering guitar riff embodying everything that was exciting about the New Wave movement coming out of the UK at the time.

Sunday Papers maintains the attitude minus the frantic energy of the opener with a cynical world view that ensured Jackson had signed up as a card carrying member of Britain’s New Wave with the likes of Graham Parker and Elvis Costello.

By the time the band launches into that classic, humorous, outsider’s piece of pop Is She Really Going Out With Him? Joe Jackson had laid down three distinctively different musical ideas to confirm that he was never going to be a one trick pony and that he’d be a musical force to reckon with in the years to come.

The side 2 opener Baby Stick Around rips into a rockabilly slam with Jackson stopping down for the shortest of melodic choruses before cutting loose with the band again. It’s infectiously good fun and as he lets fly with “What you wanna bet, we ain’t started yet, baby stick around” you wonder what he might be referring to – it could be an invitation to partake in the rest of the side that follows, or possibly a boasting declaration of the adventurous music he was yet to create, though having read Jackson’s superb biography A Cure For Gravity I suspect Joe would say he was merely adopting a bravado stance and nothing more.

The title track Look Sharp! swings with its own kind of rhythmic strut, a song both funky and angular at the same time. The feel of the song would become the blueprint for the sound that many people would later come to recognise as being distinctly Joe Jackson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2SycsweYQw

Fools In Love is a reminder of how big reggae was at that time in the UK. Marley had taken off and Joe Jackson was just one of many British artists influenced by that sound. For a songwriter who’s a classically trained pianist there isn’t much in the way of keys on Look Sharp! (piano was hardly the flavour of the month in the punk era), though later in the piece the reggae rhythm on Fools In Love does segueway into a lovely piano passage, but it’s the lyrical combination of Jackson’s youthful vulnerability and defeated resignation that give the song it’s potency:

Fools in love they think they’re heroes cause they get to feel more pain, I say fools in love are zeros, I should know – I should know because this fool’s in love again. 

By the time Got The Time closes side two with Dave Houghton’s driving backbeat and a rollicking bass line from the fabulous Graham Maby you’re left wanting for more and before the year was out there was more in the shape of I’m The Man, equally as good as its predecessor – an album Joe Jackson called “Part 2 of Look Sharp!”.

In the years ahead Joe Jackson rarely disappointed with a number of his albums finding their way into this fan’s collection, along with some of the most brilliant live performances I’ve seen – oh, and I still have those shoes too.