Is he really going out with them?

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Joe Jackson is on the phone from the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. He isn't playing jazz. But then not a lot of performers stick to the title.

"It's pretty varied," says the urbane-of-voice Jackson, 48. "Everyone from Radiohead to old jazz geezers to hip-hop."

And, as it turns out, it has room for eclectic singer-songwriters and composers who wish to go back to their name-making roots of 25 years ago.

Jackson has reassembled the band - The Joe Jackson Band - with which he got through his first three albums of witty New Wave pop - Look Sharp! (1979), I'm The Man (1979) and Beat Crazy (1980) - before they parted company and he headed into more musically sophisticated territory during the 80s. As a a graduate of London's Royal Academy of Music, where he spent three years training in piano, Jackson was no post-punk chancer.

But why go back to the band? He says partly it's because it's the last thing that would be expected of him as an artist who has moved so far away from those days.

After all, there's not many of the class of '79 who have a symphony to their name.

"Sometimes enough time has to go by before you are able to look back," he says about the reunion which has been on the road since early this year and has resulted in a new studio album, The Joe Jackson Band Volume IV.

"We actually formed the band and recorded in 1978. So a 25th-anniversary reunion was in the air and I thought it was a terrible idea. There was no way I was going to do it. But as I thought more and more possibly about making a new album with these guys it became intriguing - old guys, new songs. What if we don't try to imitate what we did back then but approach it as a new contemporary project? And just let it have echoes of that time which are going to be there inevitably and let it have an element of nostalgia but just enjoy it?"

There was no pressure from his former bandmates - Gary Sanford (guitar), Graham Maby (bass) and Dave Houghton (drums) - to put the group back on the road. Maby had continued to work with Jackson, Sanford went on to play as a sideman with some big names, while Houghton went back to playing local gigs as well as teaching drums.

"Not at all - they were all completely confounded, they didn't believe me when I first asked about it. Graham, it took me about 10 minutes to convince that I was serious. And no one would ever have thought this would happen, least of all me, and in a way that's what's cool about it."

Like Elvis Costello's Attractions or Ian Dury's Blockheads, Jackson's backers were a tight, spiky powerhouse unit. A band easily able to switch gears and styles from the spare pop of hits like Is She Really Going Out With Him to the frenetic I'm The Man and Got the Time - the latter was famously covered in the late 80s by American speed-metallers Anthrax.

"It's very funny because people told me there is this speed-metal band who covered Got the Time and I thought, 'Okay, I'll check this out', and it was nowhere as fast as we used to play it - or still do. It was kind of sluggish. But I'm very happy if anyone does a cover of one of my songs, even if it's crap. I'm flattered."

The band originally split amicably in late 1980, after Houghton needed to get off the road for personal reasons.

Jackson's post-band career effectively started with the swing-era covers album Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive. But it was the considered 80s pop of Night and Day, with hits like Steppin' Out, which kick-started his solo years which along the way diversified into soundtracks, instrumental albums and producing - with his profile decreasing.

In 1992, he found himself with a bad case of writer's block after the tour for the Laughter and Lust album.

"I couldn't even listen to music, he told Britain's Independent. "I just lost it, totally. It was awful."

The block abated after two years, he started writing and recording again, delivering the albums Night Music, and Night and Day II - as well as his Symphony No 1 which won a Grammy in 2001 for best pop instrumental album.

It's been a diverse path and Jackson doesn't mind that he's made it hard for people to stay a fan of his work.

"If you're really a fan I think you're at least interested. I would hope so. That is who are the real fans, the ones who are still there and still interested in what I do. In fact, a lot of them would have lost interest if all I had done was crank out some formula for 20 years.

"But that's a critic's perspective - I can't be an eclectic artist who's difficult to sum up in a few words. I'm not allowed to be that and that is what I am. I have to be called the guy who changes genres with every album or something stupid like that."

Even in those early years, which he's now reviving, he was misunderstood. Unlike many of his skinny-tie-wearing contemporaries, he says he was never an angry young man

"That was a time when people wanted to see angry young men so I was the angry young man at the time. That was really funny because it conjured up the image of someone who is permanently furious - who gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth furiously. Even now people still interpret some of those songs as angry when in fact they were supposed to be funny. It's quite obvious they were supposed to be funny but people see what they want to see."

What people want to see from the Joe Jackson Band is the old hits played like they were back then - even if they weren't around first time.

"We occasionally get people in the audience with spiky hair and skinny ties and they are mostly really young kids. They're the youngest ones, they're kids who have latched on to something from quite a long time ago, maybe even before they were born and they've latched on to it in some sort of cultish way."

Jackson doesn't mind this being called an exercise in nostalgia - the new album satisfies his artistic integrity, the gigs have been fun so far, and the band never played in New Zealand in their heyday.

"You can't just go forward. No one can do that. At some point every artist does something which connects with their past. Something they've done before. I think it's a natural part of the process, actually. I've maybe done it less than some people. I think it's healthy and it's fun. The proof of the pudding, as my mum used to say, is in the eating. We've been on tour since March and we're all still having a great time. We've done 60-something shows and it's still fresh; we are still putting new songs in the set and having a great time and the audience seems to be having a great time, too."

* The Joe Jackson Band, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, Sunday September 7; St James, Auckland, Monday, September 8.