The New Cue #221 October 10: Paul Heaton
Howdy,
Let’s get cracking, it’s another week of big-time chit-chat on The New Cue. We had a rare face-to-face team meeting last week, on neutral turf - The Crown, Islington, North London: nice boozer - and discussed many exciting new developments for this publication, some of which we hope to one day remember through the Peroni haze. Hold those thoughts.
One thing I can tee up, though, is a London party on Thursday, December 1st, a Christmas knees-up in a Central location preceded by an all-star line-up of big-mouths and brains…so pencil that in. We’ll announce it in a week, just as soon as we can work out how to stick it all on a poster.
In the meantime, please enjoy today’s interview with one of The New Cue’s all-time heroes, Paul Heaton. He’s even made a special gift for all you New Cuers, but you have to read to the end. Love you,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Paul Heaton
Paul Heaton is among Britain’s greatest living singer-songwriters, and arguably pop’s most idiosyncratic and altruistic star. Not only has he got a lovely, one-in-a-million ear for melody, he also possess a warm, silkily soulful voice that he’s used to deliver unusually funny and subversive lyrics since the Housemartins first appeared in the public eye in 1986. When I remember his work with The Housemartins, the first song I hum is Think For A Minute.
Then, when I leaf through the songs he released with The Beautiful South - the band he started in 1988 with Dave Hemingway, and went on to sell around 15 million albums in total - the first song I think of is We Are Each Other, because whenever I enter the cramping up stage of a long-distance relationship race, it always pops into my mind. It’s as incisive as any great novel about marriage, and much catchier.
Ted (hiya!) called Paul up at his home in Manchester last week to discuss his fifth album that he’s made with his former singing foil from The Beautiful South, Jacqui Abbott, called N.K-Pop, which came out on Friday, and is the follow-up to 2020’s number one Manchester Calling. It’s another typically happy marriage of gentle melody and sharp-witted lyrics about subjects that don’t often make pop songs, like Still, about the trauma of losing a child.
It also includes the jaunty recent single, Too Much For One (Not Enough For Two). I hadn’t seen the video before the interview, but if I had I’d definitely have asked about the fact it stars those mainstays of Saturday morning ‘80s/’90s TV, Trevor and Simon, alongside Phil Daniels, but never mind. Just enjoy it for yourself.
The interview was the morning after Ted’s team QPR surprisingly won away at Bramall Lane, home of Paul’s team Sheffield United, who were top of the Championship at that moment. But they’re both big boys.
Hi Paul, how are you?
Hello Ted. You beat us last night.
(Paul’s PR) told me not to gloat, so I’m doing my best here.
Ha! I don’t mind. When I realised you were phoning this morning I put a bet on. I put 5p on QPR to win and I won 23p. Did you watch it? I thought it was thoroughly deserved really. QPR just looked to be really well organised, as they seem to be often against us.
Let’s move on. First of all, it’s very important that I thank you again for the incredible generosity you displayed towards the Q team when you donated £35k to us upon closure.
A pleasure.
Really made a difference to a lot of people.
I bumped into a photographer a year or so later and he mentioned that it helped him buy whatever, and that was really nice to hear. Obviously you thanked me at the time but it was lovely to hear it had gone to the right people.
But then you did it again for your 60th.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve sort of saved stuff like this for a rainy day and obviously there are going to be a few more rainy days coming with our current government, so I’ll continue trying to do it. I was genuinely surprised about the reaction to my birthday because you don’t realise what kind of reaction it’ll get.
It’s unusual, though, that someone puts a thousand quid behind the bars of sixty pubs in the country.
I think in general – I don’t know many people in music – but I’ve heard that in general music people do the opposite, they try to save their money. Same with ticket prices. I spoke to SJM assuming that everybody would be trying to keep the prices down, that I couldn’t be the only one. They said, actually, most people have increased their prices! I’ve been like this quite a long time, though. Someone I used to work with turned up at the Albert Hall about four years ago and was saying to me ‘do you remember that time you came to the pub after work and said you’d been offered a wage rise but turned it down, said you didn’t want it or need it?’ It’s weird, isn’t it? I did need it, but I didn’t want them to control me with money.
But that’s why you go to work, though, to earn money?
I have seen that the more money you make, the more it controls you. They move to bigger houses, with bigger fences and bigger gates. The higher the gate, the more safe they feel, but I always think that’s really unsafe. I live in plain sight. I live on an ordinary street. You come up to the door and I answer. There’s no barrier between me and other people, because I think if there is it promotes a them-and-us thing. If I have someone stalking me I know straight away. I’m not a curtain twitcher but I know everybody on our street. So if someone tried stalking me, they’d be stalked back.
How is being 60?
It’s like being relegated to the old Division 4. Once you’re down there, you have a new set of fixtures. Colchester away – hang on a minute, I haven’t been to Colchester for ages. New opportunities arise, it’s a bit like that. The fear of it is worse. It isn’t matched by what you find when you get there, there’s a quaint 60s little skip you do. ‘Oh, this is alright!’ The worst time for me was between 57 and 60, and it’ll probably be between 67 and 70, too, when you fear the relegation. But once you’re down there it’s actually fine. Get on with it.
There are a few songs that touch on mortality on N.K-Pop - such as The Good Times, I Drove Her Away With My Tears - do you find it’s more centre stage for you now?
To be fair, I’ve always written about stuff like that. I wrote stuff like Prettiest Eyes.
I wrote Old Red Eyes Is Back, as well.
Songs like that, that although they didn’t relate to death directly, they did speak about growing old. So since my late 20s, early 30s I’ve been quite a morbid fucker. I suffered a couple of losses during lock-down, my mum and my best friend as well. I think I was trying to get things like that in perspective with My Mother’s Womb. Good Times is a bit more morbid, however. I don’t feel more morbid now than when I was young, really. I’ve always wanted to write about people that were older than myself and I suppose that window is narrowing a bit more now. I can’t imagine an album where I’m writing about young people very well. It would be a bit creepy. The history of pop is quite creepy though, men in their 30s, 40s and 50s singing songs about young love.
I love the lyric on My Mother’s Womb “Fuck being British, fuck being English/I’m from my mother’s womb”. It’s a great tribute to your mum. What was she like?
Like the song says really, there’s no exaggeration going on. She was about as cantankerous as one could be without swearing. And by cantankerous I don’t mean she was miserable. She was constantly laughing. My nephew Lee was last to see her before she died, about two days before and I saw her three days before. She was moaning to the nurses on the ward that the other people on the ward were stupid. Very outspoken, opposite of my dad. Funny, too. Liverpudlian, really. A lovely person, but quite cutting.
Do you have these themes in your head before you start writing or do you wait for them to land upon you?
I had that one for a while as an idea, based around the idea of people having problems with each other. I’ll have a leading line and it’s sort of like trying to do a difficult crossword. I’ll go away and try and build it for hours, my wife sits opposite me reading and I drink, one of the few times I drink properly. Writing the lyrics I’ll just be humming the tune. Sometimes it’s someone else’s tune, about a tenth of the time. About half the time it’s my own tune. Occasionally it’s no tune, just like a meter to remind me how the lyrics should form. I Drove Her Away With My Tears, I had that whole tune in my head. I sat in a football bar in the middle of a Portuguese housing estate drumming away on my knee.
And your wife doesn’t mind this as a holiday?
She’s fine. Normally it’s in Holland when I write so we’ll go out on bicycles, but because of the various Covid travel bans we had to pick a country and Portugal suddenly opened, so we ran to the border. We spent a week there rather than where I normally write.
When The World Would Actually Listen is about someone who struggled during lockdown – what was your coping mechanism for it?
It’s actually about a close member of the family who was struggling all through and had been struggling before. I wrote it because I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see them again. I felt it was a story of other people being unlucky. They’re much, much better now by the way. Weirdly, being at home actually did them a load of good, having that space from pressures. The song that was really about lockdown was Ain’t Going Nowhere This Year, just trying to put some humour into it. This bloke’s quit his job and is about to go to the airport when everything shuts down. To answer your original question about coping, well, I have a young family. My wife works in the local school as a teaching assistant and it was really stressful for her. And it was stressful for my daughter who’s at college dancing in Leicester. Leicester and Manchester are the two cities that suffered the most with lockdowns. She’d be sent home from Leicester and then Manchester would close down. I felt so sorry for her. They all handled it pretty well. I think most people can tell stories of their kids adapting surprisingly well.
What’s your relationship with Jacqui like, creatively?
I hope she doesn’t mind me saying this, but she has a severely autistic child so she comes in right at the last minute. This time it was almost not at all because it was really hard for her. But she learns songs much quicker than I do, she learns harmonies almost before she’s learnt the song. She’s rapid. I hate to say it but I’m pretty much in control of everything artistically, though if she sings something I’d planned to and it sounds like hers, it’s hers. This was a tough album for her.
What have you got planned for the rest of the day?
It’s Wednesday, innit? It’s quite a relaxing day for me, Wednesday. My busy day is Friday, when I do all my downloads and make my charts, listening to music all day. I’ve got all three of my daughters here tonight, so just a nice relaxing day at home. The album’s coming out on Friday so I suppose I’m meant to be busy, jet-setting around, but I’m not. I don’t do any jet-setting.
What do you mean by doing all your downloads and charts?
I used to go through Q, Mojo, Hip Hop Connection, also The Fly, then DIY magazine, going through all the hip hop, reggae, soul new releases on iTunes, listen to them there and then put them on a Spotify playlist. So, for example, last Friday I had 113 on Spotify to listen to and I have to get them down to about five so that I have twenty for the month. I do this for my charts, which I’ve done since May 1980. But I’ve also backdated to ’77 at the moment.
Wow!
I’m glad my wife’s not listening to this. I was going to say it’s almost a full time job, and it is. She’ll say, ‘What are you doing?!’ I’m working! ‘That’s not working!’ It’s research for my influences! ‘Where’s the hip hop on this new album?!’ I mean, it’s a hobby I treat like a job.
That’s basically what being a music journalist is.
Yes! Yes.
What would you recommend at the moment?
Ah, right…the reggae album I’m listening to at the moment is by Kabaka Pyramid, called The Kalling.
There’s an album by Ashley McBride called Ashley McBride Presents: Lindeville. That’s alright.
Do you know Joey Maxwell?
I go down a rabbit hole of all sorts, but mostly it’s new country, new hip hop, R&B. I like Jockstrap, too.
Yeah, it’s a thankless task Ted, but we have to do it don’t we?
Tell you what, would you consider making us a playlist of what you’ve been listening to recently, please?
OK. As October is a current project, I’ll do you a playlist of mainly September with a handful from October. You can post it from your account.
Brilliant. Thanks very much for your time, Paul.
Pleasure Ted.
TK.