Music Review: Don't you know, it's different for boys
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Joe Jackson
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
may be Burton-on-Trent's most famous son, but he's come a long way from Staffordshire. Nowadays he's a native New Yorker, and it shows in his accent, which fuses the States with flat English vowels to produce an Australian twang. Jackson also has a loose American ease, having left behind the antsy bloke who, as late as 1994, told the press that our cynical refusal to call him a composer, not a pop singer got him down.
That bitterness has vanished - in fact, he ended the evening in a very jolly mood. Solitary, and in festive undertaker's suit and blood-red shirt, he folded his 6ft 4in frame into origami behind a keyboard and made "It's Different for Girls" splendidly tortured; "Won't You Be My Number Two" was callous but bruised. Eventually, we got his famous deconstruction of "Danny Boy" ("it follows the simplest tenets of songwriting - so why didn't I write the fucking thing?"). And then the velvet drapes parted, revealing screened depictions of devils and angels, a violin howled a dissonant, scary opening bar and we were plunged into the album Heaven and Hell. This takes the form of a romp through the seven deadly sins and, it must be said, works best live, where it took on the feel of a series of souped-up immorality plays.
Supported by the hardworking violinist Valerie Vagoda and keyboardist Elise Morris, Jackson first delivered a Brechtian fugue on gluttony. "Angel" (lust) pitted a funky Morris as sleezy whore against Vagoda's choral Madonna; while "Tuzla" (avarice) was a dubby trip to the black-market front-line, complete with bomb detonations, military drums and Jackson spewing venom through a field-radio vocoder. "Sloth", heavy with lugubrious accordion, crossed Tom Waits with Alf Garnett; "Anger" was too loud; while "Song of Daedalus" (pride) began with symphonic beauty and became ugly. The evening's standout was "The Bridge" (envy), a delicate kd lang-like ballad, proved more uplifting than it had a right to be. Jackson recently called these songs "an existential challenge": well, what isn't? But as an adventure in new classical, on the whole, they rocked.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments