Paul Heaton: ‘My mum liked me sticking fingers up at the world’

Paul Heaton has sold more than 15 million records, had top five albums in five different decades, and won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection in 2022. His rare talent has been evident since his early days with The Housemartins, through bigger success with The Beautiful South, and since 2007 as a solo artist or alongside Jacqui Abbott.

An evening of programming on BBC Two celebrated his music earlier this month (check out the Housemartins documentary from 1987 on iPlayer). Yet the question remains as to whether Heaton’s songwriting skills are cherished and celebrated quite enough.

Do you still keep a chart of your favourite new music?

I go through all the official iTunes top 150 new releases on country, reggae, R&B and hip-hop.

But that’s 600 songs…

It’s about 600 albums. But they’re not all new releases. So, my memory being good, I can see straight away if I’ve already listened to them. 

You actually listen to them all?

I listen to a snatch of each song on the new releases. Unless they are AI – a year ago there would also be about 10 AI releases, now there’s 30 or 40 in each chart. It’s weird. But at least there’s more stuff I can skip now. 

I’m obsessed with The Beatles documentary Get Back. What would fly-on-the-wall cameras capture
of your writing process?

There would be no instruments there. It’d just be me wandering around or going to the shop then singing into my phone when something pops into my head. A good example would be You Keep It All In. I used to have a tape recorder next to my bed and I’d sing into it if I had anything. But the batteries ran out. This was 1988, the late-night garage shut at eight, and the song came into my head at 9pm. I had the whole start.

So what did you do?

The garage wasn’t going to open till seven in the morning, so I stayed up all night. I kept on repeating and repeating it and ended up with the whole song. When light rose, I was sprinting to the shop to get batteries
and record it. I’ve probably still got the cassette.

Any mishaps writing the new album?

I have a lot of songs coming into my head at the moment. Sad Songs and Lawsuits [from his new album, Jenius] was written two or three years ago but I was writing in a slightly morose state and didn’t feel as though the tunes were coming out. So, for the first time, I went away to write some tunes to the lyrics. I’m going away at the end of August to write the 2028 album – I like sitting in a bar where nobody knows me, and just getting my pad out. 

What do you make of Andy Burnham?

I’ve never been a massive Labour supporter but I know he’s going to get attacked for the wrong reasons. They won’t attack him for his policies – it’ll be the way he dresses or something. Michael Foot was too scruffy, Corbyn didn’t turn up at the rugby, so we’ll wait and see.

Read more:

• Paul Heaton: ‘If you told me I was going to become famous I’d have said: pull the other leg’
• What the wave of St George’s flags across England means for national identity
• Gig ticket prices are extortionate now – but there’s still hope for live music

There’s a bit of politics on Jenius, as always. It sounds like you’re taking on Reform on One Eye Open?

I always have a cynical eye on certain people – on that song, it’s people I spent the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, sharing football dressing rooms with who’ve become ‘political’ all of a sudden. Now they think they’ve got the answer to everything and it all lies in the colour of a person’s skin. If putting up a Union Jack makes you happy, I’m not stopping you. But I genuinely don’t think it makes them feel happy. What makes them happy is when other people get angry about it so they can have a little fight or say ‘‘the woke are taking down our flags’ and ‘we can’t do anything that’s British these days’. It’s the scrap they want. But Farage’s cult is on the wane, isn’t it? 

Do you engage with people you disagree with?

I don’t do anything on Twitter because that’s not a debate, it’s a shouty-shouty forum. You can’t really have any political debate without going to the pub. It can be quite depressing talking about politics, but it still delights me. Me and my daughters speak about it all the time. My youngest is only 15 and she’s out campaigning for the Green Party. I met Zack Polanski in Wilmington recently and he recorded a lovely message for her.  

You sound angry on the opening song [Can’t Get Next To You].

I can’t get angry in a natural way, but I can get sarcastically angry. So I might use that a little bit more. Back when The Housemartins were playing miners’ benefits, I wanted us to sound more angry but I didn’t have that sort of voice. I translated that anger into song and melody. I know a group of miners from Ashington. After one benefit show they said, “Yours was the only one where we could hear the lyrics”, because the rest were all angry punk bands. I realised if you want to get a message across, make sure people can hear what you’re saying. I know it sounds fuddy-duddy, but that’s what my mum instilled. She’d say, “Be more like Feargal Sharkey and Pete Shelley.”

She sounds great.

She was always taking me to concerts. My mum’s favourite song of mine was Heatongrad. She’s passed away now, but she liked me sticking fingers up at the world. 

What can we expect from the tour this autumn?

Playing arenas, it has to be a wall of songs people know and some from the new album. It makes me happy thinking about it. Making people happy makes me happy.

Jenius by Paul Heaton is out now

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