Many of Joe Jackson’s classic albums have announced his musical ambitions with titles that emphasised a rich palette of sonic and thematic contrasts. On Night and Day and Body and Soul, he astutely mixed jazz, salsa, and Tin Pan Alley pop with wry observations as an Englishman in New York.
Jackson dusts off this titular gambit with his newest release, Hope and Fury, with strikingly different results. The phrase is a play on the English patriotism of “Land of Hope and Glory”, and I’m intrigued how the album’s cultural references will go down when Jackson hits home base in Berlin and New York on the forthcoming Hope and Fury tour (since leaving New York, Jackson has lived primarily in Berlin).
On Hope and Fury, Joe Jackson plays a real-life counterpart to his alter ego, Max Champion. While his previous record, What a Racket!, played out with a 12-piece orchestra, Hope and Fury is pared down to a combo that features Jackson’s long-time collaborator Graham Mabey on bass and a guest percussionist, Paulo Stagnaro. Its style harkens back to the pub rock of I’m the Man, mixing in the salsa flourishes of Night and Day.
While in the guise of Max Champion, Joe Jackson inhabited a mockney persona. Yet on Hope and Fury, his authentic Hampshire accent is harnessed to sneering, unmelodious effect, as, notwithstanding Portsmouth’s identity as a maritime city, he reflects upon the demise of the great British seaside resort. Jackson is pictured on the album cover sipping tea on Pompey’s shingle beach while a superimposed pavilion on the pier burns in the background.
The opener “Burning-by-Sea” further puns on such resorts as Clacton-on-Sea, places whose names have become bywords for tabloid discontent and nostalgia. A seaside town called Burnham-on-Sea is ten miles south of where a pavilion on the pier really did burn down nearly 20 years ago. “We got sushi bar, greasy spoon, steak and ale, vindaloo.” Over a punkish reggae beat, Joe Jackson fires off a torrent of cliches about a sordid English weekend, to the effect of saying things ain’t what they used to be.
“I’m Not Sorry” stokes the fire with a burning backbeat and some simmering Latin piano runs, while its lyrics taunt unapologetically for “every cause that (Joe) didn’t support.” It sounds like the angry young man of Look Sharp has aged into an angry old man, much like Van Morrison or John Lydon. Jackson didn’t perform at Live Aid, and the track feels like a broadside against his politically engaged contemporaries.
Still, Hope and Fury is more libertarian than reactionary. It’s lightened by “Fabulous People”, which is driven by a chiming electric piano that strongly recalls “Steppin’ Out”. It tells the coming-of-age story of “Billy”, whose small-town life is enlivened by “the rainbow flying on the shopping mall”, and that “soon Billy was like a kid in a makeup store.”
On the flipside, “End of the Pier” is a post-COVID, anti-lockdown diatribe that scorns doctors and nanny-state politicians (“Doctors never tell you what’s the point, why get away when you’ve got the whole world on a screen. Put on your mask, take your ID, for flashing lights, CCTV”). The song title’s dual meaning is fleshed out through stories of contrasting hardships faced by working-class families in 1922 and 2022. It is a curious attempt to tap into disillusionment and nostalgia, with no one left alive who can relate to its dual portrayals through lived experience.
The closer, “See You in September”, looks forward to the European leg of Joe Jackson’s Hope and Fury tour in September 2026. Yet apparently, “it’s the time of year when nothing really happens”. Wherever the politics of Hope and Fury truly lie, the most disconcerting impression from all the finger-wagging and score-settling is that it sounds like a swansong. As a possible final word, it leaves a distinctly bitter aftertaste on an otherwise remarkable career.