Album Review: N.K. Pop by Paul Heaton

Songs on the duo’s fifth album mix storytelling with the personal and the political to confirm their musical chemistry Ever since his early days in the self-styled “fourth best band in Hull”, The Housemartins, Paul Heaton has been the master of wrapping up barbed lyrics inside some gorgeous melodies. He’s mastered the trick over his career, whether it be with The Beautiful South or, more recently, with his musical foil Jacqui Abbott, with whom N.K. Pop is his fifth album.

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Paul Heaton sits comfortably in a roll call of literate pop writers to emerge in the 80s, alongside such articulate wordsmiths as Lloyd Cole, Roddy Frame and Paddy McAloon. What sets him apart from those contemporaries is prolonged commercial success: a remarkable run of 16 albums to make the Top 10, with The Housemartins, The Beautiful South and, since 2014, in tandem with Jacqui Abbott. Yet his approach to writing, on paper at least, is rarely that of someone clocking on at a typical hit factory, and his songs are routinely populated by characters, scenarios and subject matter more in keeping with Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.

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