Paul Heaton - Jenius

This summer it’s 40 years since The Housemartins released their debut album, Hull: 0 London: 4, peaking at number 3 in Britain. Subsequently, Paul Heaton has released, in various configurations – with The Housemartins and The Beautiful South, solo and with Jacqui Abbot, not to mention as Biscuit Boy  –another 21 studio albums, plenty going gold, some multi-platinum, as they’ve risen to the charts’ highest reaches. For each, moreover, he’ll have written many many more songs than he’ll ever include. Now, less than two years since The Mighty Several – itself his sixth album to go Top 5 in a dozen years – this prolific, poetic observer of human nature is back with another fifteen gems. Ultimately, Heaton estimates he’s now written some four or five hundred songs. In so doing, he’s established – though he’s too self-deprecating to state this himself – his own distinctive, if unconventional brand of quasi-English folk. Moreover, these singular classics not only keep coming but somehow keep getting better.

White Vinyl