A Cure for Gravity

Joe Jackson

Anchor, £6.99
Buy it at BOL

Joe Jackson, as you will recall, was the skinny, balding singer for whom you would settle if Elvis Costello was unavailable. He had hits with songs like "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" and ... um ...

I am being cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. His voice did sound eerily like Costello's; as did his band. That Costello could blow him out of the water lyrically must have been a grievous blow, considering that Jackson wasn't that bad. You guessed that he was just not angry enough; didn't have a sufficiently rigid or urgent idea of the image he needed to project.

There are a couple of tight-lipped references to Costello in this book - fewer, in other words, than there already are in this review - but at least they show that Jackson has what shrinks call insight into his own condition. And that happens to be one of the necessary characteristics of a good autobiography, which this book is.

For a man who came to relative fame on the coat-tails of punk, that notionally working-class musical movement, Jackson was the authentic article in a way that Joe Strummer wasn't: he was working-class himself, raised in boredom and general lack - asthmatic, geeky, different - in Portsmouth. He happened to have a great gift for music, and an intuitive understanding of it that mystified his family and peers; the first LP he ever bought was the Eroica. Eventually - and you can understand why he had to keep quiet about this for a few years - he was accepted as a student by the Royal Academy of Music. "I saw music as White Magic. Pure energy, pure emotion, pure spirit. I thought that musicians, regardless of what kind of music they played, were beyond reproach, like firefighters or nuns," he writes.

Not that much later on, he is describing some hair-raising gigs in pubs seething with drunken sailors, or a residency in a Greek restaurant, or his time as the keyboard player for the mesmerisingly ghastly double-act Koffee 'n' Kreme.

This is astute of him, and honest too: to concentrate on his childhood and years of dogged failure rather than include his time of celebrity; for that was never really substantial enough and besides, there are enough glib rock memoirs, barely worth the name, that earnestly record how horrible it is to be a rock star. And failure became him in a way real success wouldn't have.

The locus classicus of unsuccessful attempts to break down the doors of the music industry is Giles Smith's Lost in Music, as I keep telling everyone. (Picador, still in print, or it had better be.) Smith can really write, which is probably what keeps him from making the kind of wide-eyed pronouncements about music that I've quoted above; and everyone marvels at how Jackson can write.

I'm a bit more picky, and refer people to the paragraph here in which Jackson, sitting in some dreary lounge bar, is depressed by the way the seedy cocktail pianist appears to have convinced the audience that he is a musician. Jackson says he can't help noticing musical flaws, unnecessary frills, and other musical lapses of judgment; but he does insist that this doesn't make him a better person.

Similarly, I wince a little at some of the phrases that don't quite come off, and nearly all the exclamation marks (there aren't so many, though); but he still writes a lot better than we have any right to expect. After all, the book kept me glued to its pages. It's not actually artless, but charmingly close to it; a touching, intelligent and humane slice of someone's life.