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Joe Jackson’s fury is easy to trace. Jeering “hardnuts” of hometown Portsmouth roughed him up on the school bus, set fire to his scarf and scratched up his violin – these were the everyday skirmishes in a bleak working class seaside upbringing.

He remembers one night earlier still when his father sat on his bed after one of his regular beatings to explain that he still loved him. “I couldn’t have been more than six or seven,” Jackson writes in his memoir, A Cure for Gravity, “but I remember thinking: I’m not buying this.”

Tonight, at home in New York after finishing the first leg of his Hope and Fury world tour at the Beacon Theatre, his escape from that grim origin story is literally behind him. The cover of the album shows him hoisting a cup of tea as Portsmouth’s South Parade Pier burns in the background.

“There’s quite a lot of England in it … my love-hate relationship with England,” he says. The first song, Welcome to Burning-by-Sea “ended up being a song about a seaside town as a microcosm of England… and how I feel about it now”.

“I don’t wanna be drawn into political debates that I just find so bloody annoying,” he says later in our conversation, but nor is elaboration really necessary. The marauding chorus of this song sounds like the hardnuts of his youth on a bloody rampage through this “terminal town made of marble and rust”.

“Although there’s a lot of things about those times that I now feel rather nostalgic for,” the songwriter and composer adds with a note of surprise. “Things were more clear-cut then. People felt more sure of their place in the world. It wasn’t all bad.”

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The love-hate duality is very Joe Jackson. Album titles like Night and Day, Body and Soul, Laughter and Lust and Heaven & Hell have been leading to Hope and Fury for decades. Together, they imply the default rejection of the absolutes and definitions that make him bristle, both as a musician and a human.

“I’m much more hopeful than furious,” he insists. “I did a bunch of interviews in Berlin for German and Dutch and Belgian press, and I was really struck by how people were emphasising fury rather than hope, and how many people saw it as an angry or sad or cynical album.

“It definitely has some anger and frustration and sadness in it,” he concedes, “but that [response] horrified me, frankly, because I think it’s pretty upbeat.” The exuberance of the album’s Latin-inspired rhythms has led to the addition of a percussionist for the “100per cent live music” tour bound for Australia in January.

Still, those Europeans had a point. Consider the contemptuous narrator of I’m Not Sorry, for instance, or the character in Fabulous People performing individualism in a group-think world. There’s less humour in End of the Pier, which describes two working class British families enduring different centuries of deadening institutional oppression.

The hope part? It’s hiding in plain sight, rather like the cure for all the gravity Jackson describes in that memoir of his brutal early life. It’s music. The Beethoven and Stones and Ellington and Bowie that sustained him as a misfit kid, later turbocharged by punk rock and New York’s Latin music boom, have borne Joe Jackson aloft despite the grim odds of his childhood.

“Well, exactly,” he says. “When you’re creating anything, you’re willing something into existence and that in itself is something very positive. Even if what you’re willing into existence is something sad or angry, you’re still creating something and making a connection, hopefully.

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“Making a career or being a success … that’s something I never counted on and never expected. But I did find out that making music made me happy and gave me a way to connect with other people. I knew it was something I wanted to do, probably for the rest of my life, and I would have done it even if I’d never even got a record deal, or sold records and gone on tour to Australia.”

It’s worth mentioning that by phone connection at least, Jackson is a bit of hardnut himself. He’s always resisted comparisons to Elvis Costello but as an interviewee, he’s remarkably reminiscent: a musician so allergic to boundaries and definition that a conversation can become a kind of escape room to negotiate.

“You know, I wouldn’t have your job for anything mate,” he says with a pained laugh. “I know because I’ve done it myself, writing about music. It’s difficult because a lot of what makes music such a great art is that it goes beyond words.

“I kind of groan a bit when I hear, ‘What’s this song about?’ The implication is that the song is didactic: it’s written for a purpose, to advocate a point of view or a philosophy. I find myself wanting to say, ‘Well, what it’s about is that there’s the verse in C major, but then it modulates to F minor on the chorus.’ ”

It’s a curious deflection from a writer whose lyrics are so artfully loaded. From the sexual jealousy of Is She Really Going Out With Him? and the consumerist satire of I’m The Man to the gender-political insights of Real Men and Different for Girls, Jackson’s point of view is often bracing. His characters tend to live the kind of socially prescribed lives he desperately wants to shake them out of.

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He responds: “I think there’s something in that. I’d like to, if not wake them up, then stimulate them in some way. Or even just amuse them. I don’t know. I hate mediocrity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness and censoriousness. I see a lot of that kind of thing around.”

It’s one of the things that fired his imagination as a young writer trying to find a voice that could meet the music in his head. In his memoir, writing about being back on the Portsmouth rock/cabaret circuit after years of classical studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music, he describes finding a “kind of a wry and hard-nosed and unsentimental” persona: “a clever cynic”.

“I think that’s just me in my early 20s, and it’s consistent with a lot of people in their early 20s,” he says now. “I think cynicism is a sort of disease of the young. If you’ve got half a brain you become less cynical as you get older, because otherwise you can just be a miserable bastard.”

“This is not a golden age for music; I figured out long ago that there’s nothing I can personally do about it.”Joe Jackson

Humour has always been a handy counterpoint. Take Max Champion, the fake music hall star Jackson adopted as an alter ego on What A Racket!, his 2023 album. He wrote it in the COVID years in Portsmouth, where he still keeps a home despite the scars, as a playful experiment in a very English kind of songcraft. “Just for the hell of it, I’d been looking at some old sheet music for music hall songs, and I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I could write a pastiche, a song that could have been written in 1900 or something’, and I did make a couple of sketches, and it was rather fun.”

Again, the fun flourished in opposition to the depression and anger that otherwise consumed him during lockdown. “I wanted to do something that was escapist, so I had this idea of going back to an idealised Edwardian England, where life might have been hard, but people had fun. You know, they weren’t scared of their own shadows like a lot of people are nowadays.”

One bawdy knees-up called The Bishop and the Actress is a good illustration of the fictional Mr Champion’s genius as a social commentator spanning the ages. Once thick as thieves, the titular pairing is today seldom allowed, the singer laments, because “nowadays there’s trouble all around/ Where entendres that are double are still found”.

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Musically speaking, the music hall genre was another twist in a career that’s covered wiry new wave rock, 1940s jump blues, soundtracks, Ellington, nocturnes, symphonies and less definable manoeuvres. Jackson’s 47 years of recording have naturally had peaks and troughs, but never at the expense of adventure. “I don’t want to be predictable or clichéd or boring,” he says.

Despite his Royal Academy training, he’s far from a musical snob. Even as his pop fortunes dipped with his classical work of the ’90s, he recalls enjoying Britpop and feeling at times energised by the melodic play of Crowded House and “punk with new technology” of The Prodigy. But in his book, he wonders if that decade was the last gasp before pop music “hit the wall”.

“Yeah, it pretty much did,” he reflects. “When someone somewhere comes up with an interesting new twist now, it’s usually not anyone in the States or the UK. Let’s be honest. I do think it’s kind of all been done. Pop stuff that would have been [pre-streaming] on mainstream radio is pretty lame.

“I am constantly finding new music, and it might be something that was recorded in the 1920s or whatever but if it’s new to me, it’s exciting. But this is not a golden age for music. I figured out long ago that there’s nothing I can personally do about it. You just have to do what you can, to not be part of the problem.”

The set list may have changed by the time it reaches Australia, but so far, the Hope and Fury tour has been a good argument for the kind of hope that music can bring to the bullied misfits of the world. For all his ducking and weaving from expectation, Jackson has amassed a surprising array of hits. “We never leave the past behind, we just accumulate,” he’s been singing every night in Home Town, his sentimental dedication to Portsmouth. The climax in America has been his biggest hit there, Steppin’ Out. Far from the “clever cynic” of old, it’s a song that seems to levitate in the zero-gravity updraught that only music can find.

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“Oddly enough, I still like it,” he says of that supermarket playlist staple. “I’m happy that it’s had the success it’s had, but I do think it’s rather funny: I didn’t think it should be the single because it didn’t sound like anything else out there at the time — which may have been why it was a hit! A lot of this stuff is being in the right place at the right time. Some of it is pure luck.”

And a bit of fearlessness? “OK, I’ll take it,” he says, almost despite himself.

“You know, I can’t say that I’m always bursting with confidence, but I keep going regardless. It’s like being nervous before you go on stage, which I am, a lot. But I just tell myself, ‘Look, you’ve got to do this, no matter what. So get on with it.’ ”

Hope and Fury is out now. Joe Jackson plays the State Theatre, Sydney, January 28 and 29; Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, February 1; and Hamer Hall, Melbourne, February 3.

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