Midweek Notes - August 19 2026

Happy birthday to my mum, who looks really great for 46. She was the one who introduced me to my favourite songwriter of ever, who also has an affinity with the city where Mum was born.

Paul Heaton is from Sheffield but lived for a while in Hull, where Mum spent the first ten years of her life before leaving for sunny Stanmore, North London. Heaton’s time in Hull saw him meet the men who would become his first successful band, The Housemartins. Along with Elton John, I believe Heaton is one of Britain’s most commercially successful country singers, even if nobody would call Heaton or Elton country artists; indeed, someone once retorted ‘Are you a millennial?!’ when I tried my Elton-is-country theory.

Heaton’s Beautiful South catalogue contains songs about barflies (Old Red Eyes Is Back), bickering (A Little Time, You Keep It All In, How Long’s A Tear Take to Dry) and ageing (Prettiest Eyes). As with the greatest country songwriters, plenty of his ditties only use three or four chords: Don’t Marry Her, Perfect 10, Rotterdam and, best of all, Good as Gold (Stupid as Mud), with the very country yet very British (actually very Yorkshire) hook “I’ll carry on regardless”. I cannot believe Heaton has not written his memoir yet, because it would top the bestseller list for months.

This Old Skin was an original track on his band’s 2004 covers album. Significantly, it is a country song which begins in South Carolina and has an appealingly C&W feel: “I’m gonna move right out of this town when this old skin stops weighing me down”. The song was credited to aliases of Heaton and his songwriter partner Dave Rotheray, and by which time I saw them promoting this set, it was clear that the spark had gone and they were merely going through the motions.

The finest of all Heaton’s country numbers is I’ll Sail This Ship Alone, a heartbreaker that could have been written by Harlan Howard, the master of the form. “They said if I wrote the perfect love song you would take me back,” Heaton sings, adding that even though he wrote it, he lost it so he is left to beg to get his beloved back while steering his ship “between the pain and the pleasure…between the sharks and the treasure”. As I endlessly replayed their 1994 compilation Carry On Up The Charts, I was of the county party without knowing it.

Heaton has been a solo artist for 20 years, mostly teaming up with former duet partner Jacqui Abbott, who quit the group for a private life as a mum to a son with disabilities. When Abbott stepped back from performance again, this time from her and Paul’s duo, she was replaced by Rianne Downey, a country-minded singer-songwriter. Downey returns on Favourite Kind of Idiot, a song with a typically Heatonian title and a buoyant stomp-clap feel. The song was the first taster of Heaton’s new album Jenius, his tenth since dissolving his second great British band for ‘musical similarities’.

Out on Friday (August 21) and boasting 15 tracks, Jenius once again runs the full gamut of the Paul Heaton title roulette: the Radio 2-playlisted Sad Songs and Lawsuits begins “there’s a cowboy song that goes like this” and quotes the title of Tammy Wynette’s song about D-I-V-O-R-C-E, yet the verses have a reggae feel; then there’s The Whisky Did and Good for the Bee. Fully four songs have negatives in their titles: Can’t Get Next To You, She Ain’t Pretty, Do Not Ask Me and Don’t Lean On Me. Heaton fans with long memories know that the Housemartins recorded a song called Lean On Me, which was not a Bill Withers cover but a new copyright that Heaton wrote with Pete ’Eighteen with a Bullet’ Wingfield.

Since 2014’s What Have We Become, Heaton’s first album with Abbott, he has put out a dozen songs every other year: Wisdom, Laughter and Lines (2015), whose big single was I Don’t See Them; Crooked Calypso (2017), whose song She Got The Garden is a country song to rival She Got the Goldmine, I Got The Shaft by Jerry Reed; Manchester Calling (2020), whose opening track is The Only Exercise I Get Is You; and in 2022, the year he turned 60, N.K-Pop, featuring the song I Drove Her Away With My Tears.

Rather incredibly, Heaton can fill big venues like Hammersmith Apollo and Wembley Arena. In June 2017, he played the Hull KR rugby league stadium as part of Hull’s year as the European Capital of Culture. Heaton’s band The Housemartins released the album London 0 Hull 4 in October 1986, which features the number three hit Happy Hour, which was originally a piece of political agitpop called French England. Both Think For A Minute and Flag Day could be country songs if they had chosen to layer them with pedal steel or fiddle; ditto Build, Me and the Farmer and the jaunty Five Get Over Excited, which all came from their second album The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death and came to me via their brilliantly titled compilation Now That’s What I Call Quite Good.

Forty years after he hit the charts as a Housemartin, Heaton is booked into the O2 Arena on Saturday 7 November. The Royal Albert Hall, where Heaton and Abbott promoted his compilation The Last King of Pop in 2018, is alas occupied with a tribute to the armed forces for Remembrance Weekend. Support at the O2 comes from Ian Broudie, the man who wrote Three Lions and The Life of Riley, together with his band Lightning Seeds. Broudie is also a hotshot producer, and helped carve the sound of Heaton’s 2024 album The Mighty Several. He is back behind the boards for Jenius, in what is a collaboration for the ages and, given their mutual love of football, should be a lovely few days in the studio getting all the tracks down in the old-fashioned way.

The Mighty Several leads with the opening track National Treasure, which is actually in celebration of carers and bus drivers. The album includes a singalong called (but of course) Fish ‘N’ Chip Supper. Listening out for anything vaguely country-adjacent brings up H Into Hurt and Just Another Family, which could both be honky-tonkers if they were arranged like a Dwight Yoakam song from 1987. Then there’s the torch song Silly Me, a vocal showcase for Rianne Downey and guest vocalist Yvonne Shelton, and Pull Up A Seat (“roll up to see me break down”), which Heaton gifted to guest vocalist Danny Muldoon. That singer also leads the political satire Small Boats, a song driven by a rootsy fiddle.

Heaton promoted The Mighty Several with a Glastonbury appearance in 2024 where Norman Cook, who was a Housemartin before becoming the face of commercial British dance music as Fatboy Slim, joined him on bass for the knees-up ditty Happy Hour. Two years before that, Heaton played the O2 Arena with an opening set from Billy Bragg, a bard from Barking in Essex who is no stranger to country and roots music. In 2022, Heaton’s stock was extraordinarily high: many tickets for the tour were capped at £30 to allow low-waged patrons the chance to see him; he and Abbott put on free shows during the pandemic to boost morale; and to celebrate his 60^th birthday he infamously played a series of shows in British pubs, always putting money behind the bar for people to get drinks on him.

Showing an interesting choice of newspaper to promote the album, Heaton was interviewed in the Telegraph, accompanied in a pub in Greater Manchester by his daughter. ‘I’m one album away from a failure,’ said the Yorkshire-born songwriter, and I admit to have been less keen on the recent releases, perhaps measuring them unfairly with those which were full of songs written before he turned 40.

He diagnoses impostor syndrome, adding that he does not ‘feel fully part of the industry. Nobody has ever covered a single track of my back catalogue. Nobody’s ever asked me to sing on a record. I’ve never even had a Mercury nomination.’ He even felt that his Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Song Collection in 2022, a pinnacle of his success that coincided with the spring of his 60^th birthday, was a kind of participation medal. To Heaton, lack of critical acclaim is ‘a curse of popularity’, as if he wanted not to have sold millions upon millions of concert tickets and albums. I own most of them, including many vinyl singles pulled from their first four albums, bought by a former girlfriend off eBay.

Heaton says success was like being spun around in a washing machine, what with all the promo he had to do as an indie artist, and that he had lost touch of who he really was; hence why he broke up his first band, to stop the record company from treating the staunch socialist as an asset to be bartered and sold. Instead of the kind of big venues that could have accommodated them, he made them play Warrington and Hartlepool.

He says, quite startlingly, something I never twigged about his songwriting: ‘I was starting to write lyrics for women as well as men. So I thought, “I’ll start afresh”.’ Heaton repeated what he has often said about the Beautiful South being everybody’s second favourite band, adding that he finds ‘an amazing amount of pleasure in making other people happy’. He has given me so much joy as I have grown up with his catalogue.

I marked Heaton’s birthday by deciding to give away a 25,000-word book about Carry On Up The Charts to Facebook fans of the man; it’s probably what he would have wanted. In the book’s dedication I described him as ‘a hero and a treasure’, and I stand by that. I am also drawn to his eclectic musical taste and idiosyncratic personality; it extends to collecting old crisp packets and creating personal top 20 charts of every month.

I have never met or interviewed Paul Heaton, but one day I would love to do so, if only to tell him that he’s alright at songwriting. Nor have I spoken to Adam Duritz, lead singer and songwriter in the alternative rock band Counting Crows, but I did get to speak at length to another great songwriter, albeit one whose songs have reached far fewer hearts than the songs of Heaton or Duritz. Find out who he is, and about his new album, in this Sunday’s Hymn Sheet.

In the meantime, BBC Two celebrated the national treasure and, according to his 2018 career retrospective, the self-proclaimed Last King of Pop with five hours dedicated to him on August 8, all of which is available on the BBC iPlayer. There’s the 1987 documentary that captured The Housemartins on film, which is available on Youtube, while across two compilation shows (this one and this one) there are performances for various TV and radio shows, including all the times The Beautiful South popped up on Top of the Pops across their 20-year lifespan and Heaton’s 2024 Glastonbury performance.

Housemartins doc:

Paul Heaton at the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00305gg

Bramall Lane gig: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00305gj

TOTP: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030dcr/top-of-the-pops-the-beautiful-south

The highlight of the evening was Heaton’s 2025 gig at Bramall Lane, the home ground of his beloved Sheffield United Football Club. It captures on film what I had seen with my own eyes when I saw Heaton and Jacqui Abbott play in Hammersmith in 2017. The setlist included plenty of Heaton Country (what he’d call Heatongrad) classics, many of them from Carry On Up The Charts: Old Red Eyes Is Back, Bell Bottomed Tear, I’ll Sail This Ship Alone, A Little Time, Let Love Speak Up Itself, the mighty One Last Love Song (“give ’em a chorus, that bit at the end”) and, of course, Good as Gold (Stupid as Mud).

Like that song’s hook, Heaton will be carrying on regardless until he can carry on no more. His songs, which have already lasted four decades, might well be part of a disco in 2050, whether they are about women who are more than a Perfect 10 or celebrating Rotterdam (Or Anywhere). By the way, it is relevant that all the songs in this and the last paragraph are in a major key. Therein lies Heaton’s true genius/Jenius: sad songs in happy keys.

Oh, and one more thing: happy birthday Mum. If you had stayed in Hull, you might well have bumped into your contemporary in the 1980s and married him. I could have been Paul Heaton’s son!! Or maybe some other Yorkshire lass would have said “Don’t marry her, have me”, or the less clean album version of that line which fans delight in bellowing at Paul Heaton’s shows.

If you too want a copy of my essay on Carry On Up The Charts, email jonny_brick@yahoo.co.uk with the subject line PAUL HEATON IS A JENIUS. His new album Jenius comes out on Friday 21 August