Joe Jackson: It's Different for Girls

Recorded live in 1979 for BBC2's Rock Goes to College.

Joe Jackson: I'm the Man

Another outing for one of my favourite artists of the New Wave era - one who is perhaps a little forgotten today.

Thanks to the splendidly obsessive Wikipedia entry for Rock Goes to College, I can reveal that this was recorded at Hatfield Polytechnic (as it then was) and first broadcast on 14 January 1980.

Joe Jackson: Breaking Us in Two

A Sunday music video that is shot on a preserved railway. I think we have reached peak Liberal England.

I have chosen two Joe Jackson tracks before: the wonderful It's Different for Girls and the quasi-classical Nocturne no. 4.

Breaking Us in Two comes from his 1982 album Night and Day. It was a bigger hit in the US than the UK. I have always regarded it as a companion piece to the uptempo Steppin' Out on the same LP.

The railway is the Keighley and Worth Valley. More than that, the video was shot at Oakworth , which was the station in Lionel Jeffries' film of The Railway Children.

"Right away, Mr Jackson."

Joe Jackson: Nocturne no. 4

Joe Jackson has had a long career encompassing many styles of music - his new-wave period It's Different for Girls, a brilliant song, was an early choice of mine here.

Jackson's 1994 Album "Night Music" was not well received, and I did not greatly care for the songs on it myself, but I did like the classically influenced instrumental pieces. I used to listen to this one in particular late at night when I could not sleep.

Joe Jackson: It's Different for Girls

Another song from my university years at York. It gave Joe Jackson his biggest UK hit, reaching no. 5 in 1979.

Jackson writes clever lyrics and is fluent in every musical style from jazz to classical. But his heyday was the New Wave years of the late 1970s, which means that he is inevitably compared to Elvis Costello as a songwriter. As almost anyone would, he comes off second best from the comparison.