Joe Jackson

Jackson has actively campaigned against smoking bans in both the United States and the United Kingdom, writing a 2005 pamphlet The Smoking Issue, a 2007 essay Smoke, Lies and the Nanny State, and issuing a satirical song ("In 20-0-3") on the subject. It was in 2003, soon after the New York smoking ban, that Jackson left the city and returned to Portsmouth, England, where he has a flat in the oldest part of the city that overlooks the harbour. In the DVD interviews in Rain, it was stated that he moved to Berlin in early 2007.

He has been quoted as saying he now spends most of his time in Berlin, but still has places in Portsmouth and New York City. Jackson noted his enthusiasm for real ale in his autobiography, A Cure For Gravity, published in 1999, which Jackson has described as a "book about music, thinly disguised as a memoir". It traces his working class upbringing in Portsmouth and charts his musical life from childhood until his twenty-fourth birthday. Life as a pop star, he insisted, was hardly worth writing about. Read Less