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The profile · researched 21 September 2026
Hope and Fury: Joe Jackson brings his English score-settling record back to Britain
Joe Jackson released his 22nd studio album in April 2026, a record aimed squarely at the country he left, and is now halfway through an 80-show, 14-country tour that reaches Ireland and the UK in late September and early October.
Portsmouth, Gosport, and a name change at twenty
He was born David Ian Jackson in Burton upon Trent on 11 August 1954 and grew up in Paulsgrove, on the northern edge of Portsmouth, moving to Gosport as a teenager. At eighteen he won a scholarship to study musical composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London — an unusual route into a career that would, within a decade, be filed under new wave. At twenty he changed his first name to Joe, after the British television puppet Joe 90, whom he was told he resembled.
His first band, Arms and Legs, broke up in 1976. He signed to A&M in 1978, and the debut that followed, Look Sharp!, arrived in 1979 with "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" on it. The bassist on that record, Graham Maby, is still in the band in 2026, which makes the partnership close to five decades old.
Jackson now lives in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, and keeps places in New York and Portsmouth. That geography is not incidental to the current record: he has described Hope and Fury as the product of splitting his life between New York City and Portsmouth, and calls the music "bicoastal Latin-jazz-funk-rock".
The work that stuck, and the work that confused people
Night and Day, released in 1982, remains his commercial high-water mark and the only studio album of his to reach the Top 10 in both Britain and America, peaking at No. 3 in the UK and No. 4 in the US. It carried "Steppin' Out" and "Real Men", both of which are still in the set every night. Body and Soul followed in 1984. That stretch placed him alongside the other British acts breaking America in the early eighties, a framing he has never been especially comfortable with.
What followed was a career built on deliberate swerves — orchestral writing, film scores, instrumental records — and one of them produced his only competitive Grammy win: Best Pop Instrumental Album in 2001 for Symphony No. 1, which had come out in 1999. He has five Grammy nominations in total. Jackson's own account of the pattern is unfussy: "I always knew I was in this music thing for life. So every now and then I'm going to do something different, to keep it interesting."
The two albums before this one show the range. Fool, in 2019, was a band rock record made quickly. What a Racket! in 2023 was a full detour — a music-hall pastiche credited to an invented Edwardian songwriter, Max Champion, recorded with a twelve-piece ensemble. Hope and Fury is the return from that: nine songs, four musicians, 34 minutes and 44 seconds.
Hope and Fury, and what the reviews made of it
The album came out on 10 April 2026 through earMUSIC, and is his 22nd studio record. It was cut at Fuzz Factory Studio in Berlin and Reservoir Studios in New York, co-produced with Patrick Dillett. The band is the one Jackson has used since 2016: Maby on bass, Teddy Kumpel on guitar, Doug Yowell on drums, with Peruvian percussionist Paulo Stagnaro. For roughly half the tracks Jackson kept his original vocal demos, having decided he could not better them.
The subject is England, and Jackson has been open about the love-hate reading. The title plays off "Land of Hope and Glory"; the sleeve puts him on a beach in front of a burning pier pavilion. "Welcome to Burning-By-Sea" came out of looking at Brighton and Portsmouth. "End of the Pier" sets working-class English life in 1922 against the same life in 2022. "Fabulous People" turns over the question of being ordinary. The opening line sets the tone for the rest: "Hello cruel world / I'm not going away / So I might as well have my say."
Critics split on it. Mojo described a "songwriter who still can be prickly but prefers to be playful". The Times allowed that the "bon mot-laden social observation" could "grate" while calling him a "singular and enduring talent". PopMatters was the outlier: Jeremy McDonagh scored it 5 out of 10 on 14 April 2026, wrote that it sounds "like a swansong" and left "a distinctly bitter aftertaste on an otherwise remarkable career", though he singled out "Fabulous People" for its lighter touch. Commercially it was a modest showing — No. 15 on the UK Independent Albums chart, No. 26 on UK Album Sales, and No. 10 on the German Rock & Metal Albums chart.
Where the tour stands in September 2026
The touring plan announced alongside the album was 80 shows across 14 countries, with tickets going on sale on 14 November 2025. It has since grown: later counts put it near 100 shows in 16 countries. North America ran May to July 2026, Europe runs September to December 2026, and New Zealand and Australia follow into February 2027.
The Irish and British leg is the near-term business. Cork City Hall on 24 September, the 3Olympia in Dublin on 27 September, the Beacon in Bristol on 29 September, then Cambridge Corn Exchange on 1 October, Bournemouth Pavilion on 2 October, the London Palladium on 4 October, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on 5 October, the Barbican in York on 7 October and Saint Luke's in Glasgow on 9 October. Dublin, London and Glasgow are already sold out on his own tour page; most of the rest are marked as low availability.
The tour carries a tagline Jackson has put on the artwork himself — "100% live music" — a direct shot at acts leaning on backing tracks and playback. Whatever else the shows are, they are billed as an evening of four people playing.
The set as it has settled
Across 38 of the 39 shows logged from the North American leg, the running order barely moved: 16 songs in the main set and three in the encore. It opens with Jackson alone at the piano on "Is She Really Going Out with Him?", which is the reverse of how most acts handle their best-known song, and it closes the same way — "Home Town", solo, ended all 38 of those shows. "Steppin' Out" shut the main set 36 times out of 38.
In between, the new record gets four or five airings — "Welcome to Burning-by-Sea", "I'm Not Sorry", "End of the Pier", "Made God Laugh" — threaded through "It's Different for Girls", "Sunday Papers", "Be My Number Two", "Real Men", "Look Sharp!" and "Target". The encore has been fixed: a cover of David Bowie's "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)", then "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)", then the solo finish.
Reviewers on the American leg were warm without being uncritical. Roger Len Smith, writing on the Denver show of 6 June at the Paramount Theater, headlined it "Still Looking (and Sounding) Sharp" and noted the chemistry between Jackson and Maby. Steve Satzberg, on the Lincoln Theatre show in Washington on 7 July, called it one of the year's best. Jackson talks between songs, and the talk is part of it: introducing the Bowie cover he said, "He was a good friend and someone I liked and really respected"; defending "Made God Laugh", he told the DC audience, "It's not a sad song… It's a fatalistic song. Once you realize there's so much in life you can't control, you're just so much better off."
The show, now
A Hope and Fury show runs to roughly one hour 45 minutes — the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles on 2 June 2026 started at 8.10pm and finished at 9.55pm — and holds 19 songs, 16 in the main set and three in the encore. There is no opener; the dates are billed as an evening with Joe Jackson and band, four musicians with no backing tracks, under a tagline Jackson has printed on the tour art himself: "100% live music". The staging is plain. He comes on alone in a tailored grey suit and plays "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" solo at the piano before the band walk on, and at the end the process reverses, with the players leaving one by one until he finishes "Home Town" by himself — a running order he kept for all 38 logged North American shows. Four or five songs come from the new record, each given a short and usually funny spoken introduction, and they sit alongside "It's Different for Girls", "Sunday Papers", "Be My Number Two", "Real Men", "Look Sharp!", "Target" and "Steppin' Out", which closed the main set at 36 of 38 shows. The encore has not varied: David Bowie's "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)", "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)", then the solo close. Reviewers on the summer leg picked out the ease between Jackson and bassist Graham Maby and his vocal condition at 72; Parklife DC's Steve Satzberg called the Washington show on 7 July one of the year's best, and Best Classic Bands' Roger Len Smith found him animated and amiable in Denver on 6 June. Dublin, the London Palladium and Glasgow's Saint Luke's have sold out ahead of the autumn run.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · earmusic.com · bestclassicbands.com · bestclassicbands.com · parklifedc.com · popmatters.com · setlist.fm
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