The 1980 Listening Post - Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons - Hats Off Step Lively

 Reviewed by Paul J Zickler

Released: August 15 1980 Jo Jo Zep And The Falcons Hats Off Step Lively Genre: Pop Rock Rating: 3.9 out of 5 Highlights: I Will Return All I Wanna Do Don't Go Jo Jo Zep is Joe Camillieri, a singer, songwriter and saxophonist from Australia. He and his band, the Falcons, played blues, R&B, rock and reggae. They weren’t huge, but they had fans like Paul Kelley, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello (who covered one of their songs on a 1987 LP). They moved towards a pop reggae sound in 1979 and scored a couple of hits, toured the U.S. and Europe, and eventually burned out and broke up. Or so says Wikipedia. The opening track is Puppet on a String, a sort of infectious new wave reggae thing. I was bobbing my head along with it while it was playing, but I instantly forgot it once it was over. P.T. has a fun rhythmic bounce, a clever bridge, and a cute farfisa organ riff. Little did I know this was a portent of bigger things to come. There are a couple of other tunes that were even more forgettable, and then something crazy happened. Imitating your favorite artists is one thing, but managing to create good songs with strong hooks and creative playing while doing so is a much neater trick. Amazingly, Jo Jo manages to do it three times in a row. I Will Return, All I Wanna Do and Don’t Go all owe huge debts to Elvis C, Graham P, Joe J et. al, but they’re also damn fine tunes. And there they are, back-to-back-to-back, right in the middle of the album. After that, they go back to the just OK rock reggae thing, with the horns and the riffs, followed by No Mystery to Me, a less successful attempt at Costello territory, and the inevitable R & B ballad closing track, which is almost saved by some big harmonies on the chorus, but ultimately just plods along. Still, nothing here is remotely awful. It’s all listenable, and some of it is pretty terrific. Another band that had potential but didn’t quite put it all together. Seems unfair that they ended up in the final set of obscure remainders from 1980, but then, it was a big year for music, and somebody was bound to be left behind.