There’s a ghoulish woodpecker nailed to the front door. I ring the bell. Paul Heaton answers. The singer’s 62 and looks remarkably unchanged from his Housemartins and Beautiful South days. The only thing missing is the trademark anorak. I assumed he slept in it.
His modest home in Withington, Manchester, is crammed with stuff. Not gold discs as you might expect of a pop star, but football badges, toothbrushes, crisp packets, shoe horns, beer glasses. There’s not much room for more stuff. He shows me his Batman cards. “These are probably the first things I collected, along with marbles.”
The beer glasses belong to Linda, Heaton’s wife. It’s surprising because if there’s one thing you’d imagine Heaton collecting, it would be pub paraphernalia. Pubs are his life. They are where he socialises, works and, when stardom booted him out of its lofty sphere, where he played. For his 60th birthday he donated £1,000 each to 60 hand-picked pubs to give punters a free drink. Heaton is known as one of pop’s good guys – a lager socialist who has stayed true to his ideals (playing free gigs for NHS workers; donating to staff at Q magazine who lost their jobs when the magazine folded) without becoming preachy; an unshowy eccentric who has continued making records, even when nobody wanted to hear them. But his last two albums, with Beautiful South singer Jacqui Abbott, have gone to No 1.
Heaton and Linda have been together 11 years, and married eight. He has three kids; she has two. He puts his anorak on. We’re off to the boozer to discuss his new album. Linda says she may join us later. I ask about the woodpecker. “It’s a door knocker,” Linda laughs, bashing its beak against the door to deafening effect.
Pub 1: the Albert
Heaton enjoyed sustained success over three decades – from the first Housemartins album (London 0 Hull 4, featuring Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim on bass) in 1986 to the last Beautiful South album in 2007 – 12 albums in all, only two of which didn’t make the Top 10. There were numerous hits – Happy Hour and Caravan of Love with the Housemartins; Don’t Marry Her, A Little Time, Rotterdam by the Beautiful South. Heaton specialised in downbeat lyrics set to upbeat tunes. A fair few were about drink. The Beautiful South may not have had cool cachet, but they were a chart phenomenon. The unlikely superstars called themselves “bumpkin billionaires”.
We stop outside the Albert, a gorgeous, tiny Irish pub.
“Hi, Jeanine, you all right, love?” Heaton says. Jeanine runs the pub with her husband, Paul. “How’s business?”
“Horrendous,” she says. “We’re hoping it will be better this weekend. We’ve got karaoke. People have got used to drinking in.”
We sit in the corner. Heaton looks happy. “The seats face each other, and you’ll come in and talk to people you don’t know.” Is he super sociable? “I’m a mixture between sociable and occasionally shy.”
What does he think of the proposal to swap pints for two-third measures to improve public health? He’s not impressed. “I think it would make certain people drink quicker. It wouldn’t be great for me. I find I drink two halves quicker than a pint.”
Heaton didn’t have his first drink till he was 18. It was one of a series of pledges he made to himself aged 14, written in an exercise book. His family had moved from Sheffield, where he spent his formative years, to Surrey for his father’s work. His parents were working class, but his father was promoted to management at an engineering firm. He’s not sure what class that makes him. “Football class, I think.” Football was everything. His dad was almost signed by Liverpool; Heaton and his two brothers played well.
He couldn’t stand it down south, and didn’t have much time for the kids at school. The hard ones had already started smoking and drinking. Heaton was determined not to follow suit. “Everything the other kids did, I didn’t want to do because I thought it was southern. So I wrote down: ‘I won’t start smoking till I’m 28.’” And? “I started on my 28th birthday.” That’s bonkers. He nods. “I know.” But he’d made his pledge.
“I also wrote down that I wouldn’t take drugs till I was 29.” And? “I took my first drug on my 29th birthday.” He never developed a taste for drugs. It was always booze. The 14-year-old Heaton made other pledges: as promised, he learned to drive and got married in his 50s. But he got to a point when he realised the pledges were stupid. So he tore the page out and binned it.
Where does all this come from? “Mum. She was incredibly contrary, and so am I.” Paul the landlord brings over whiskies as a treat.
In what way was she contrary? “She’d start an argument about a film she’d not seen, and say it was shit. I’m like that, too. I had an argument about how shit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is and I’d not seen it.”
Will he see it one day? “No, it’s shit.”
Heaton was trending online recently as an antidote to Oasis. While some Oasis fans ended up paying more than £300 for tickets to their reunion tour because of dynamic pricing, Heaton capped the price for his upcoming arena dates at £35. “If you feel strongly about your fans, go to the meetings where they discuss things like dynamic pricing.” He pauses. “I’m not going to get on my high perch. Nobody wants a fucking socialist Oasis, do they? For God’s sake, that’d be the worst.”
Heaton gets another pint. I ask if he thinks drink has ever been a problem? “Yeah! I still think that. What I try to do with drink is show who’s in charge every few years, and let me control the drink and not the drink control me.”
When was his drinking at its worst? “In the Beautiful South we were drinking every day on tour, absolutely hammering it till 3am.” What time would you start? “Nine or 10 in the morning, all of us apart from Sean [Welch].” Did you get on well as a band? “Incredibly well.” When they split, Heaton cited their “musical similarities”.
These days he never has a drink before he goes on stage. “Apart from a tiny bit of wine to toast each other. So I’m witness now to how much people like me and the music, whereas before I was oblivious to it, and a bit arrogant.” In what way? “Well I think it’s arrogant to go on stage pissed. It’s a lack of respect for what’s going on and the love people had.”
Has he ever sought help for his drinking? No, he says, he’s incredibly strong-willed. “Occasionally I have to put the brakes on. Sometimes I’ve stopped for a year, two years.” But when he stopped, he felt it blunted his creativity. Heaton only feels the muse when he’s had a drink. He writes his tragicomic lyrics in pubs in Holland or Germany, which he finds suitably cold and bleak. The buoyant tunes are composed in sunnier climes. Heaton says global heating has played havoc with his creative process – Holland and Germany are now too pleasant to inspire morose lyrics.
Time to leave. We say our farewells to Jeanine and Paul. Heaton says he might be back for the karaoke.
“We should talk about the new album,” he says on the way to the next pub. The Mighty Several is a lovely record. Musically, it’s a bit Specials-y here, a bit Pogues-y there; a dash of Lightning Seeds (Ian Broudie produces), even a hint of music hall. The subjects vary from bigotry about asylum seekers (Small Boats), to the romance of old, familiar love (After the Sugar Rush), and a man intent on suicide who fills his bath and plugs himself into the mains, only then there’s a power cut (Couldn’t Get Dead).
Pub 2: the Metropolitan
Heaton plays tour guide. He loves it around here – it’s almost as good as Sheffield and Hull, which is where he moved after Surrey and where he formed the Housemartins.
The Metropolitan is more of a theme park than a pub. Heaton switches to a pint of mild. We sit outside in the warm, and he talks about life post Beautiful South. Heaton went solo, and nobody wanted to know. He couldn’t get a song played on the radio. He made albums, but hardly anybody bought them. One day Chris Evans played a song of his, and Heaton was so stunned he took a photograph of the radio. “I’d be walking around Manchester and occasionally people would say: ‘Oh it’s a real shame.’ And I’d be like: ‘What?’ And they’d say: ‘That you’re not making records any more.’ So I’d say: ‘Well, I am doing a bit actually’ and they’d go: ‘But it’s not like it was.’ It was quite depressing and reducing, if that’s a word.”
That was when he decided that if the public wouldn’t come to him, he’d go to them. He toured British pubs on his bike – on the first tour he covered 750 miles, the second 2,500. “I loved it. It made me feel loved again.” He stops, apologetically. “I know that sounds egotistic. Some of the pubs were really small, and it made me realise when you open your voice and sing it fills the room. You forget that. When you get a phone call after making an album saying, we can’t get you on the A, B or C list, and you’ve got nothing, it’s so nice to go out and reconnect with why you formed the band in the first place.”
Lots of people would regard playing pubs after such success as humiliating, I say. “Not me,” he says. He tells me he’s an unlikely optimist. I was going to come to that, I say. He smiles. “When I’m in tears later on after the next pint! We should talk about the new album.”
Pub 3: the Railway
Stacey and Mark who run the Railway have a lovable 14-year-old staffy called Beans because he has a penchant for farting. We sit by the window, the late afternoon sun beating down. Heaton’s back on the lager. Linda has joined and is chatting to Stacey over rosé at the bar.
In 2014, after four solo albums and seven years of drought, an astonishing thing happened to Heaton. He got back together with the fabulous Jacqui Abbott, who had sung with him in the Beautiful South, and they made an album, aptly called What Have We Become? It reached No 3. They made five albums, all of them hits. “It’s been incredible,” he says. He’s enjoyed success over five decades. He says he never thought he’d get one bite of the cherry, never mind three.
Does he have an innate lack of confidence? He shouts over to Linda: “Linda, have I got an innate lack of confidence?”
“In terms of music, yes,” she shouts back. “Everything else, including your collections, you are. But his music, he immediately thinks is rubbish and nobody’s going to like it.”
“I wouldn’t say nobody’s going to like it,” Heaton says. “I like it. Haha!” He gets a pint and pops to the loo.
In 2022, Heaton won a prestigious Ivor Novello award for outstanding song collection. To top it off, this year he played the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. For now, he’s no longer performing with Abbott, who has an autistic son and can no longer give the time he demands. “She’s not ill, like people are worrying. But we have to let her be and not put pressure on her.” He says the last album with Abbott was difficult for both of them. “I have to work with people who are able to match my work levels, and through no fault of her own I felt after the last album she wasn’t able to commit. Very sad, but there’s always a song for Jacqui to sing.”
The new album is called The Mighty Several because it features three other singers (23-year-old Rianne Downey, who played with him at Glastonbury, Yvonne Shelton and Danny Muldoon, whom he came across performing in a Manchester pub). “I don’t want a new Jacqui. I love Jacqui. I don’t want to just replace her.”
Glastonbury really got to him, he says. “Me and Linda hugged each other and cried because it’s been a long journey. It’s hard to describe how moving it was for me. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel that love. When I heard 100,000 people singing Caravan of Love I realised that’s a lifetime achievement and I don’t like to admit things like that.”
He’s in danger of getting emotional, so he changes the subject. “We’ve got distracted. Let’s get back to the album.” But we’ve had a bit too much to drink over the past five hours to remember the names of the songs. “Linda, what other songs are on the album ’cos we can’t remember?”
Nope, she says, she can’t remember either. “To be fair, I like them all though.”
I tell him how much I like the album. He looks embarrassed. Heaton doesn’t know what to do with a compliment. “It’s all right,” he says.
• The Mighty Several is released via EMI on 11 October
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