Today, Paul Heaton And Jacqui Abbott release their new album, Crooked Calypso. It’s the third record the pair have made in their post-Beautiful South career, and looks set to add a considerable chunk of sales to the 10 million-plus Heaton has racked up across his career with The Housemartins, The Beautiful South, with Abbott and as a solo artist.
Famed wordsmith Heaton spoke to Music Week last month, sounding off about our story that showed it now takes an average of 4.53 songwriters to pen a hit. And, with the duo having recently played their biggest gig to date, a 23,000 sellout at Hull’s KC Lightstream Stadium, we sat down with the president of Heaton and Abbott’s record label, Virgin EMI’s Ted Cockle, to talk about the campaign…
Team Heaton And Abbott seem to all get on pretty well…
It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I had the pleasure of working one album of The Beautiful South and I'd like to think we got on. And, when I came to Virgin, the Mercury catalogue is now under my jurisdiction. Add to that the Simon Moran and Conrad Murray [of SJM] combination of characters who manage Paul and Jacqui, who we get on very well with on other things we do such as Blossoms and The Stone Roses, and it just seemed sensible to renew [the relationship]. Things had got tougher for Paul on his own solo records so we started this process, put the two albums out, got a gold record [with 2014’s What Have We Become?] and it's just worked well for the both of us.
This is their third record in as many years – it’s clearly a productive partnership…
Well, the reason Paul's so fascinating and such a curiosity of a man is that he doesn't go and tell the world, like some others do, about how many records he's actually sold in this country. He's not that breed of character. But trust me, the catalogue is as sizeable as anybody's, it's a monster. He’s a fascinating man, he’s always got interesting tales, and his turn of phrase remains pretty good. The new album has all these great lines, it's always entertaining just to go through the lyrics alone. He's on good form.
There’s been a lot of debate about multiple co-writers recently. But he’s still old school…
Yes. He takes himself off and gets on with it. And obviously Jacqui, in terms of voices that work for the British public, there's something about her vocal timbre, it just works. That partnership works for radio, the public and everything else. Things got a bit tough for him after the break-up of the band so to be at Hull Stadium with 23,000 people sold out is quite a renaissance to say the least. The touring is as big as ever and you have to praise the SJM part of that for being clever and wise in their decisions, but 23,000 people in Hull shows the depth of interest.
How’s the album shaping up? Can it be bigger than the first two?
We think so. There’s an additional number of songs which constitute very obvious singles for us. There's some really good depth to the record, we're coming off the back of the City Of Culture in Hull and this 23,000 crowd. We came out the blocks with Ken Bruce on June 14 with the single [I Gotta Praise] and they’re with Chris Evans on Radio 2 on release day and we're adding as many TVs and associated things as possible. We're happy.
They still sell a lot of physical albums. Can you move them into streaming with this record?
So much work is being done across the catalogue in terms of helping their own and Beautiful South playlists but, pleasingly, the format of choice for so many people is the album, so we can do some good solid business in that lane. Because there is such a catalogue we can tease that out, but we don't have to. If you're the new breed of younger band, people don't have affection for the album but the nature of their audience means they've grown up on the album, they know there's value to what they do and the audience is still committed to that format, so happy days. If you've been convincing in that format historically, people stick with you. They've got an ardent fanbase and people want to spend time with a full album and going to see a show. They're in a rare little niche where that remains valuable and important.
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