Forty years after that Metrópolis broadcast on TVE La 2, I finally get to see him live! There are artists who don’t just accompany an era – they define it. Joe Jackson (Portsmouth, 1954) is one of them. Trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he has released more than twenty albums, written several film scores and spent his entire career exploring pop, jazz, new wave and chamber music with restless curiosity. He is a musician who has always chosen evolution over comfort.
In 1986 he released one of his boldest projects: Big World. The album was recorded live – but not as a live album. Jackson and his band performed the entire set in front of an audience under one extraordinary condition: absolute silence. No applause, no murmurs, no ambient noise. The result was a hybrid work, half concert and half studio recording, capturing the immediacy of live performance with the precision of a controlled session.
That same year, Jackson presented the album on Metropolis, the legendary La 2 program that shaped an entire generation of indie music lovers in Spain. It was a show that taught us to look at music and culture from a different angle – more European, more experimental, more free. I remember hearing Home Town there for the first time and being completely blown away. It sounded like nothing else at the time: elegant, sharp, modern, with an attitude that didn’t imitate anyone. The next day I went out and bought the album without hesitation. And now, forty years later, I’m finally going to see him live. It’s not just a concert – it’s a reunion with the person I was when I first discovered that music could be many things at once.
An artist who never stopped moving
After his New York years, Jackson returned to London in 2003 to revive the Joe Jackson Band, which had dissolved twenty-three years earlier. They recorded Volume 4, a natural sequel to their first three albums, and the tour was documented in the vibrant live release Afterlife (2004). That same year he collaborated with William Shatner on Has Been, singing a striking duet version of Pulp’s Common People.
Since 2006 he has lived mainly in Berlin – a city that suits his temperament: cosmopolitan, restless, always in motion.
What this concert represents
On October 21 at La Rambleta, Joe Jackson will bring not only his repertoire but, at 71, all his musical lives: the young British composer, the New York iconoclast, the craftsman of hybrid sound, the bandleader who resurrected his original group, the Berliner who continues to reinvent himself.
For me, it will close a circle that began with a Metropolis broadcast in 1986. For anyone attending, it will be a rare chance to see a musician who has never stopped being himself, even as he changed skins. Indeed, Joe Jackson has performed in Valencia only a handful of times.
This October’s concert at La Rambleta is not just another date on the calendar – it is a rare, almost historic opportunity, given his age and his infrequent appearances in the city, to reconnect with an artist who doesn’t often pass through Valencia.
Report by Kaiko H2Q
Article copyright 24/7 Valencia
Joe Jackson
October 21
21.00h
La Rambleta
Bulevar Sur, esquina con Pío IX
46017
Valencia
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