WHEN Lou Reed and David Bowie hooked up in Berlin in the early Seventies, the drugs really did work for the increasingly gaunt duo (although Bowie's subsequent Nazi salute at Victoria Station and Reed's electronic shocker Metal Machine Music might provide counter evidence to Berlin and Low).

Portsmouth piano man Joe Jackson has now re-located to the German city, coming under an influence altogether more elemental: lashings of Berlin rain.

"There's no padding on the album at all; it's stripped to the bare essentials, so I hope it has a timeless quality. The title seems to fit," says sun-shy Joe.

Having reunited with the Joe Jackson Band for 2003's Volume 4, Jackson reconvenes with the rhythm section of Graham Maby and Dave Houghton, but not guitarist Gary Sanford, for ten diverse, taut, very grown-up songs. They not only reassert Jackson's grand piano craft, but also his songwriting brio as a swish swing writer who can ally sardonic wit, melancholia and wasp-sting social comment to complex, crisp arrangements that flow from Gershwin and Porter pop through Blue Note jazz to classical nocturnes as he dissects relationships, trends and émigré city life with the customary cussed Jackson judgement.

Rain is Jackson's best since his letter from New York, Night And Day, with a bonus DVD of live performances and interviews to boot.