Paul Heaton
“The lazy days, the phoenix nights
The reds, the blues, the blacks, the whites…”
- Acid Country
Paul Heaton has been a pop singer for 25 years. ‘Acid Country’ is his latest album. To promote it, he failed to play any stadiums or appear on any teenage pop shows. Instead, he went on tour by bicycle. “I enjoyed just the little daft things, really, smells, and going past big fields of bluebells,” says the Verlaine of the velocipede. “When we were coming up from Surrey, we got to Bamstead and we could see the Gherkin and that felt like an achievement as well… “
The title track of, and other tracks on, ‘Acid Countr’y reference this great land of ours, and how mixed and strange and downtrodden it can be. And, as befits a man who used to be in the sardonically-named Beautiful South, there’s a new song called ‘Welcome to the South’. “I’ve got no problem with the South,” says Paul. “I’ve lived there and on the tour it was good cycling through the places I’ve lived. it was really nice cycling through Surrey and it was really nice cycling through Humberside.”
‘Welcome To The South’ says this of a popular Sussex town:
“And it will take your politics
And minus it of fight
Dress you up in rebel chic
And bend you to the right…”
“When I went to Brighton there were always a lot of Northern people about who had lost their way about. The same applies to people from London who’ve moved there. I’m sure there’s many success stories but I always seem to bump into the failures… There’s an underground of losers with which I identify.”
The folk you learn to trust the most
Are the folk with hardly any
- The Ladder’s Bottom Rung.
Some might see this fondness for “an underground of losers” as almost sentimental. Paul disagrees. “There’s a lot of kindness to contrast against the Mail On Sunday and The Daily Express, who are constantly telling stories of people on the make. There’s a whole load of stories going unheard about people putting purses back and stories of people who aren’t greedy but we don’t report them. People are looking for negative things to say about society and it’s all part of running us down.”
“This house needs a cat to kick
Instead of poor old me”
– This House
Not that ‘Acid Country’ is all sympathy. There’s ‘This’ House, a classic Heaton domestic dispute set to music, which is, as Paul says, “more your standard Heaton game, that normal relationship of people where neither of them want to be in front of each other in the house.” He is the master of the cranky duet. “It’s the idea of “acid country” that I’ve touched on as a genre; country writing does have a lot of those cranky duets. That appeals to me. Most country songs are written from one point of view or another, not in a conversational way and the conversational song is more interesting to me, not what we keep in our heads. What we say in tight situations, what we say in arguments very much expresses how we are as people.”
One of the pleasures of ‘Acid Country’ is its musical confidence, a way away from the brassy soul of classic Beautiful South or the jumpy pop of the Housemartins. ‘Acid Country’ has feedback, pop, soul, and, yes, country. “I’m working on – it was a 55 verse song but it’s growing – and I’m approaching that from a different angle musically, because I have to. You can’t have 55 verses of me being me…” says Paul.
“Let’s fight a war on greed
And not a war on poverty”
- Acid Country
After more than 55 verses of a remarkable career, what makes Paul Heaton write songs? “Probably just the older you get the more annoyed you get about things,” he says, “I imagine the night of the election I imagined a secret ballot of Billy Bragg, myself and perhaps Paul Weller… and even though we’d voted Labour going, “Yesss! We’re back in business again!” I put this to Billy Bragg and he said, No, Paul! No! None of us wished that!’ I said, ‘You must have done!’… Things have been going my way for a while. Society’s been getting more conservative and less co-operative, and I was getting more and more angry, which is giving me more possibilities of record sales!”
He’s not really joking. “I just get angrier and angrier and most people are getting mellow with age. And I feel more isolated…There are less people to talk to about things, in terms of thinking. It used to be you’d express yourself in a pub or a club and people would say, yeah, you’re right there… now there’s just silence. I feel quite extreme. It’s like the opposite of “PC gone mad”. I used to call it ACP gone mad -anti-communist persecution gone mad.“
Paul Heaton floated in with the Housemartins during the heady days of Thatcher and Major. He saw them out, and then voyaged through Blair and Brown with the Beautiful South. Now it’s the age of Clegg and Cameron, and Heaton sails his ship alone. “I’m on my 25th year – not that I got a whole host of happy 25th anniversary in the music industry cards,” he cackles. “25 years since the first tours and John Peel sessions. It’s all been good though. I’m not one of these people who, now he’s resized his audience, is unhappy!”
Paul Heaton is looking forward to his long slow decline. “A brilliantly long slow decline until I’ve just got one fan…”
“The only single occupant
Is northern ghost in house”
- Welcome To The South.
“I really enjoy working with the people I’m working with. We just have quite a good laugh really. Which is similar to how it was in The Housemartins and the Beautiful South,” says Paul. But being solo, you can pack your stuff up in a small case and go on tour. You can bundle up into a van and go. I only have to make three phone calls. With the BS and the H there’s so many people onstage and involved in management…. And it was expensive, and people wanted hits… Now I can do what I want.”
Welcome to Paul Heaton. Welcome to Acid Country.