Stuart Macbeth meets former Beautiful South star Paul Heaton, who admits his fighting talk should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt

Stamping your feet is part of being 53 Paul Heaton states darkly.

The singer’s cynical lyrics and biting pop songs carried his bands The Housemartins and The Beautiful South up the UK charts in the 1980s, 90s and 00s.

Now he returns with a new album Wisdom, Laughter and Lines, his seventh solo record and the second on which he collaborates with former Beautiful South singer Jacqui Abbott.

Released on October 23 the album finds Paul grumpier than ever.

“I have a remarkable amount of fun being angry,” he admits of new songs such as Heatongrad in which he threatens to do in the Queen with an AK-47, hang newspaper editors from trees and demolish the reputation of the army and legal system. All in the space of three-minute pop song.

But Paul hints that much of his anger can be taken with a pinch of salt: “I hope you can see me smiling underneath. It’s a quality Harry S Corbett had when grinned through his teeth in Steptoe and Son.

“I don’t just sing about doing in the Queen from the point of view of wanting to put her though serious misery. I also do it to wind people up. I’m saying ‘this is what I’ll do when I get in charge’ knowing full well that I never will!

“The album has more of me getting older, more of me complaining about things I can’t put a right to. But it’s also strong on melody and lyric and tells a story about where I think Britain is in 2015.”

Parts of Wisdom, Laughter and Lines depicts a world of scratch cards, benefits claimants in hoodies, phone calls to social services and men who take pop mints to hide their lager breath.

“You’re six feet underground but I still dig you” runs one of Paul’s trademark punch lines, which he reveals an essential ingredient of the perfect lyric.

“You also need a crescendo” he elaborates, humbly dissecting his craft, “a building up to saying something that will resonate with people, which has a point to it musically. You can be as simple as you like with English language so long as you have a good punch line.”

What makes many of his new songs so effective is the exchange between Paul and Jacqui Abbott on songs like The Austerity of Love. The two were introduced outside a nightclub in 1992 and Jacqui went on to score huge hits with Paul in The Beautiful South, including Perfect Ten and Rotterdam, before leaving in 2000 to look after her son who had been diagnosed with autism.

“The songs I had written were for a female to sing with me. At the moment Jacqui is the best singer,” explains Paul.

“Weirdly enough it is a bit easier to write an exchange between a man and a woman. Often I’ll write a line and suddenly think how much stronger it would be if I had Jacqui singing the response back to me. It’s far easier to write songs when you have someone else there, being sarcastic.”

Paul doesn’t hesitate in writing lines from a woman’s point of view: “I think if I had received a lot of letters saying that what Jacqui says doesn’t make sense I would be more worried. But I don’t get those, I get letters saying I completely agree with you what you say, I can identify with that.”

Paul’s post Beautiful South records include What Have We Become, his previous collaboration with Jacqui which reached number three in the UK album charts last year.

The pair performed a string of concerts last year including Sunday Night Live at the Palladium and festival shows at Latitude, V and Glastonbury. The singer admits that he likes playing festivals but is far “too lazy to walk around!”

Among Paul’s most noble solo ventures have been the 720 mile Pedals and Pumps tour in 2009 and his 2,500 mile 50/50 tour in 2012 – 50 dates to mark the singer turning 50 – all conducted on a humble bicycle.

“It was a way to keep fit but I thought I could go out and about and help pubs too,” Paul reasons. “We had a good response, with lots of pubs starting to do live music afterwards. I wanted to reach parts of the country where other singers hadn’t played.

Oxford Mail:

  • Going alone: Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott are back on tour with an album of new material

“I cycled through Cornwall, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, to places like Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. I was able to show venues that I play in some of the remotest parts of the country by coming to them on my bicycle.”

“I played stadiums and arenas with The Housemartins and The Beautiful South and I don’t really remember anything about those gigs.

“We’d get bussed into places like Sheffield Arena where the band would come and go without really seeing anything. The only people you would meet were security staff. These bicycle tours were the complete opposite. I remember every gig on the 50/50 tour.

“I cycled 2,500 miles on that tour on a diet of crisps and beer” he grins, “and I didn’t lose a single pound.”

He is considering a future cycling tour: “I have thought of cycling from Liverpool to Rome, via Rotterdam next year to mark the 20th anniversary of my song Rotterdam.”

Paul admits that he has now developed a brilliant rapport with his audience, a far cry from his early days of touring with The Housemartins when, he says: “we didn’t know how to react to all these people we didn’t know, jumping up and down and going crazy.

“In arenas with The Beautiful South, I became more shy with the level of fame and reacted by becoming increasingly introverted.

"But as I have got older I don’t find anything suspicious about people coming to see me play,” he muses. “There is a level of affection that people have for me and the records, you can see when you perform that you’re making people happy.

“People still smile and clap. Although my generation don’t dance quite as we used to,” he laughs. Paul has fond memories of previous trips to Oxford, despite claiming he was the coldest he has ever been in his life while watching a football match at the Manor Ground in the mid 1980s. He describes the city as “the perfect place to show off my grumpy regalia”.

So what’s making Paul angry on the grotty Monday morning when we meet? "What annoys me most today is how language and accent are disappearing” he fumes. “People concentrate on words like ‘innit’ which they think are bad. They’re always looking to the east for things to blame when, in fact, our language is slowly becoming Americanised. People are taking their eyes off the prize.” American culture is taking over with phrases such as “can I get it” and “can we do it.”

Where and when
Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott are at the O2 Academy Oxford on Wednesday, November 4
ticketweb.co.uk