PARIS, FRANCE - APRIL 14: Joe Jackson performs at L'Olympia on April 14, 2019 in Paris, France. (Photo by David Wolff - Patrick/Redferns)

Redferns

In a recording career now going on nearly 50 years, British singer Joe Jackson generally follows the beat of his own drum rather than what’s popular at the moment. Amid such well-known pop and rock songs like “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” “I’m the Man,” “It’s Different for Girls,” and “Steppin’ Out," Jackson has been known to go on occasional stylistic tangents (or “sidesteps,” as he calls them) on his albums — including swing (Jumpin' Jive), classical (Night Music) and jazz (The Duke, a tribute to Duke Ellington).

On his new album, Hope and Fury, Jackson has returned to his version of “mainstream,” particularly rock and pop music after his excursion into English music hall with 2023’s Mr. Joe Jackson Presents Max Champion in ‘What a Racket!’ ; it hearkens to his previous records, Night and Day (1982) and Laughter and Lust (1991). But don’t call Hope and Fury a concept album.

“There’s no theme," Jackson says recently about writing Hope and Fury. "I never start with a plan or a concept. I’m just always working on ideas. It's kind of a process of it's like going for a walk and seeing where you end up. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other until you get somewhere interesting. And it starts to become fun. The thing just gradually takes some kind of shape, but it's very much in an intuitive sort of way, and it's not like a plan.

“I don’t think that there’s a theme running through all the songs,” he continues. “I think that there are some things that connect them. There’s quite a lot of England in it, more so than in [2019’s] Fool, for instance. And there's a fair amount of this kind of love-hate relationship that I have with England. There's a lot of contrasts.”

The love-hate sentiment about his native country can be heard on the album’s opening track, "Welcome to Burning Sea.” With its Middle Eastern and Latin grooves, Jackson says the song is his take on modern-day multicultural England.

“I started on it when I was in Brighton. And after a while, I thought, "Why am I writing a song about Brighton?" I mean, how much do I really have to say about Brighton? And my hometown, Portsmouth, kind of fought its way in. And I've always been very interested in the contrast between those two cities because they're only 45 miles apart, but they're radically different.

“Then I realized that I was really writing about England. It was neither Portsmouth nor Brighton, but both, and ultimately, a fictional seaside town; it’s a microcosm of the whole country. It’s just full of contrasts. So it's like old and new nostalgia, but also survival, decay, a lot of fun and food and drink and music. It's a whole mixture of things, the observations and feelings about England today.”

“Fabulous People,” another track unveiled ahead of Hope and Fury’s release, recalls the elegant pop of the Night and Day album. “It’s got some of the same ideas of “Steppin’ Out’” in the arrangement,” Jackson says. “It's quite a humorous song. I can't resist poking fun at people who I think take themselves too seriously. That's one of my problems.

“But in this case, the humor of it is that the character in it is a young, very boring, very ordinary, normal white heterosexual guy. And he can't bear the fact that he's a really normal, boring, ordinary heterosexual guy. The little twist of sadness in the humorous song is when he says, ‘I tried being myself, but no one cared.’ It's kind of sad in a way, but it's also quite funny, I think.”

Jackson’s bittersweet take on relationships, a thread in his music, is evident on “After All This Time.” He says he generally avoids clichés in his songwriting unless he can rework them in a twisted way, as he did on that track.

“So it became kind of a catalog of clichés,” he explains. “It goes from ‘It’s a crying shame’ to ‘It's a sad affair’ to ‘It's a can of worms’ and so on and so on. Then the chorus kind of twists it around and more or less says, ‘Aren't we all a bit tired of all these clichés? Let's just stay together. We may have been through hell, but let's be different. Let's not be cliché. Let's stay together.’ So it's a song about overcoming the cliché of the relationship that breaks up because it gets too difficult. It's like, ‘Let's be better than that.’”

The most poignant song on Hope and Fury is “End of the Pier,” which lyrically compares and contrasts English society 100 years apart. Jackson describes the track as the saddest song on the record and one of his best.

“I started working on it and started falling into place,” he recalls. “I had this idea that it would go forward in time halfway through. It would be kind of like looking at a working-class family just after the First World War. And then looking at not the same, but an equivalent family 100 years later in the aftermath of the COVID lockdowns and contrasting the two.

“I had the idea that it would be very cool if each verse had the same structure and the same rhyme schemes. Basically, it almost sounded the same. It's like you're looking at the same thing from a different angle or something. It was a rather ambitious idea, and I wasn't sure if I could pull it off. So it took a lot of work. The lyrics took a long time to write. But I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.”

Given his nature of going against the grain since he launched his career in the wake of punk in the late 1970s, Hope and Fury might be interpreted as a pointed and caustic record. “Some people that I’ve spoken to have said, ‘Oh, it’s a really angry record.’ I don't see it that way at all. I mean, it's hope and fury. It's not just fury. So there's a lot of hope and love in it, and a lot of fun and a lot of humor in it. I would say it's a generally upbeat album. But it has a lot of contrasts. I would say it's bittersweet sometimes rather than angry.”

Jackson will begin touring on May 1 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Aside from performing Hope and Fury songs and his classics, he may also throw a deep cut here and there. “I like the element of surprise,” he says. “If I go to see a show, I like to be surprised. It’s harder to do that now because you do one show and it's all over YouTube. So there's only so much you can do.”

One of those tour dates includes a stop in New York City, where he divides his time. “I have a great following here over the years,” he says of the Big Apple. “It was always the first place I came to, the first place I played in the States. So yeah, it's great to play here. The only thing is I just can't fit everyone on the guest list.”