The English pianist, singer and songwriter Joe Jackson has been in the business for forty years with more or less successful pop and rock albums, including excursions into the world of jazz and classical music. Now he presents Fool, his twentieth album, on which his voice sounds so fresh and powerful as at the beginning of his career. Throughout the entire album, Joe Jackson and his men are mostly under power, even in the relatively quiet songs "Dave" and "Strange Land", where the power supply is noticeable through a considerable intensity of expression that goes right under the skin. Drive in abundance can be admired in "Fool", one of the album's highlights. The mood in "32 Kisses" is almost thought-provoking before the final "Alchemy" opens the door to an alternative world of sound, in which maximum expression and ballad-like depiction of existence are the main focus when the power plug is pulled.

Is there a recipe that allows Joe Jackson, even after decades of energy-guzzling activity, to produce an album that sounds as fresh as the first day? He himself says: "Every time I've made an album I've gone on tour and after a month or two the songs feel better, the band plays better, I sing better and I say: Damn, I wish we could record the album now! Well, I finally made it. At the end of a tour it goes straight into the studio. Still on the way, wherever we played the last show, we recorded. It turned out it was Boise, Idaho. It turned out to be a nice place and we got much better results very quickly than we would have done a month or two earlier. Last but not least, it was fun." It took just one and a half weeks for Fool to be in the box.

Of course, all this is only possible in the right environment, i.e. with the right, perfectly coordinated team, in this case with Teddy Kumpel, guitar, Doug Yowell, drums and Graham Maby, bass, who already has been on tour with Joe Jackson for a long time. For three years now the band has been working together and playing smoothly together. The result of the recording sessions is an album that has what it takes to build on the great successes of Joe Jackson in the 1980s.

Joe Jackson, who now lives in Berlin, celebrates the fortieth year of his musical career together with his current band on an extended world tour. There you can surely hear songs from his new album and of course some evergreen songs from a long and unusual career.