Bit late to this but happy birthday to musician Joe Jackson who was 70 on Sunday.
Joe (pictured above at Forest’s 35th anniversary party in 2014) came to our attention as a potential ally when he wrote an article for the New York Times opposing the New York smoking ban. That was in 2003.
Thereafter he supported our campaign against the ban in England, appearing on TV and radio (including, on at least one occasion, the Today programme). He also wrote another article, this time for the Telegraph, recorded a protest song, and published an essay, ‘The Smoking Issue’ (later updated as ‘Smoke, Lies, and the Nanny State’).
During that period Joe attended several Forest events and spoke at a fringe meeting at the 2005 Labour Party conference in Brighton when he shared the platform with another friend of Forest, David Hockney.
The following year we presented Joe with our Smokers’ Rights Champion of the Year Award at the Groucho Club in Soho, and although he spends much of his time in Berlin and New York, we have kept in touch, on and off (mostly off!), ever since.
He was kind enough to invite my wife and I to see his band at the London Palladium a few years ago, and I once met him backstage at the De Montfort Hall, Leicester, when he was sharing the bill with Todd Rundgren.
But enough of the name-dropping. In truth, I can’t quite get my head around the fact that it’s 45 years since I bought Joe’s second album, I’m The Man, in a small independent record shop in Aberdeen.
Funnily enough, another record I bought that year (1979) was XTC’s Drums and Wires. Decades later I discovered that Joe is a big fan of XTC too and we ended up swapping lists of our top 30 XTC songs, which was a bit surreal.
Meanwhile (and I know this is subjective), more recent albums such as Rain (2008), Fool (2019), and What A Racket! (2023) are as good as anything Joe has done. (If anyone is interested, he’s on tour in the UK in October, performing songs from the new album with a small nine-piece orchestra. Naturally, it includes a song called ‘Health & Safety’.)
So, happy birthday to a great talent whose memoir, A Cure For Gravity (1999), is beautifully written and a great read. It ends, though, just as his career was about to take off, so don’t expect any showbiz gossip. It’s far better than that.
Remarkably, I discovered when reading the book that long before we met we both lived in Camberwell Grove, a tree-lined avenue in south east London, albeit at slightly different times. What are the odds?!
PS. To be honest, I was unaware of Joe’s birthday until I stumbled, late last night, on a cutting from the Saturday edition of The Times that had been copied and posted on social media.
Under ‘Birthdays Tomorrow’ Joe was one of a long list of distinguished people including Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscientist, 50; Simon Clegg, chief executive, British Olympic Association (1997-2009), 65; Chris Hemsworth, actor, Rush (2013), 41; Hulk Hogan, wrestler, 71; Lord (Anthony) Hughes of Ombersley, justice of the Supreme Court (2013-18), 76; Richard Scudamore, executive chair, Premier League (1999-2018), 65; Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc, 74; and many more.
It was Joe however who the subs chose to feature in the picture that accompanied the list, but there was one small problem.
The person in the photo was not ‘Joe Jackson, musician, Is She Really Going Out with Him? (1978)’, but the late Joseph Walter Jackson, patriarch of the Jackson family and father of Michael Jackson.
An easy mistake to make!
Update: How did I miss this?
‘Rock stars are idiots’: Even at 70, Joe Jackson is our greatest angry young man … ‘Pretentious’ music critics; US soft rock; the killjoys who banned smoking from pubs… The Steppin’ Out singer has declared war on them all (Telegraph, August 9)
Very enjoyable.
Below: Joe with Ranald Macdonald, MD of Boisdale Restaurants, and photographer (and fellow musician) Dan Donovan in November 2014
