70’s Pick of the Week
“I’m The Man”, by Joe Jackson (1979)
Right around the time when Nike were becoming popular, people danced sort of pogo-style and we were transitioning from punk to new wave, there came a guy from England that had something different. I had the good fortune to see Joe Jackson live that year and it was a superb show. Not the roughness of the punk band 999 that had just played a few months before, we knew there was something refreshingly original about the guy. It was almost a sensitive punk; a commentary on real life.
On the album cover of what was his second album, Jackson appears as what they call in the U.K. a ‘spiv’, and as Jackson himself said they, “always wears a gross polka-dot tie and a pencil-thin mustache, and he's always trying to sell you a watch or something like that real cheap. I think people always want to put a label on what you do, so I thought I'd be one step ahead of them and invent one myself - spiv rock.”
