“I’m not blaming other artists,” the reliably rainwear-clad Paul Heaton is saying on BBC Breakfast’s big red sofa. Ever thoughtful and eloquent, a musician all his adult life and a socialist even longer, the singer, songwriter and fan advocate is getting on his high horse about the spiralling cost of concerts. He’s definitely not blaming – or even naming – other artists. But the ghosts in the TV studio are Oasis, and the extortionate ticket prices for their 2025 reunion that fans will still be paying off the next time the Gallagher brothers fall out.
“If you want control of that, you have to be at the meeting – the meetings to decide ticket prices and whether there’s dynamic pricing,” Heaton tells presenter Naga Munchetty. “I always think of people I know – could they afford tickets? I argue low quite often. It’s the same with everything, if you want a good deal for your fans, you’ve got to be in the room.”
Tonight, those fans are in the room with the former Housemartin and Beautiful South frontman at Yorkshire’s Bridlington Spa, on the opening night of his tour in support of his 10th solo album, the Ian Broudie-produced The Mighty Several. All tickets – £35. All dates, including the venues that scaled up to arenas – sold out. Already on sale and filling up fast – a spring 2025 stadium show at Bramall Lane, home of Sheffield United, Heaton’s boyhood-and-forever football club, where tickets are £39.50.
Sure, Heaton’s shows are light on dancers, lasers and, well, any costly production pizzazz. But it takes a commitment to keep prices low while not losing your shirt. (And it’s worth noting, Heaton is managed by SJM, one of the most successful, canny, and cash-rich management and concert promotion companies in the UK). Still, isn’t it boring – and, frankly, not very rock ’n’ roll – to be in those meetings?
“They’re not boring because I’m there!” Heaton says, pint halfway to lips, when we meet a few weeks after his BBC Breakfast interview. “Anybody who suggests a price too high knows they’re going to get my back up. It’s about saying, ‘No, no, no,’ and grinning.” His accountants have even told him they’ve “never been in a meeting where somebody’s wanted to pay more tax”.
“It’s eccentricity,” acknowledges the resident of a modest terraced house in Withington, Manchester, who’s tried (and failed) to have his council charge him more council tax. “But it’s also about not having money control me.” And not ripping fans off: “We punk fans hated that. Somebody could quickly go from hero to [zero] if they charged too much for a T-shirt or ticket.”
Those facts – the affordability and the sell-outs and the upgrades – are, of course, related. But they also speak to something else. A few months after a Pyramid Stage-wowing slot at Glastonbury 2024, and at a time when “fan service” (or lack thereof) is a more-valued-than-ever element of the artist/audience relationship, Heaton has emerged as a music lovers’ champion – even for those not moved by his brand of literate, provocative, political-with-a-small-p guitar pop. Almost 40 years on from the release of his first single, the Housemartins’ “Flag Day”, and at the age of 62, Paul Heaton is more popular than ever.
Still, being a performer of the people brings its challenges. His tickets are so cheap that, firstly, Heaton reckons about a third of the gig-goers at, say, Manchester’s 23,000-capacity Co-op Live arena won’t have seen him before. So he’s tweaking his set-list accordingly, reinstating a few crowd-pleasers from his back catalogue encompassing multiple deathless bangers – including “Happy Hour”, “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)”, and “Don’t Marry Her”.
Secondly, “People will be potentially shocked by the bar prices – seven quid a pint, that’s a fifth of the price of the ticket. But there are things beyond my control. Although maybe I can stick some money behind the bar somewhere…” he muses about a selfless giveaway on which he has form: to mark his 60th birthday, Heaton put £1,000 behind the bar at 60 pubs across the country.
This sleeting day in Manchester, Heaton’s adoptive hometown, we’re sitting in one of those hostelries, the Britons Protection. This is another of the rooms that Heaton likes to be in – the snug of a pub. Before we get to the interview portion of the afternoon, we have to go through the pre-match ritual of a couple of rounds of lubricating lager and invigorating chat, with this clubbable, pubbable conversationalist already wondering which boozers we’ll hit afterwards.
Yes, Heaton likes a pint, and has the seemingly hollow legs to prove it. But pub culture, and all it represents, is also how he likes to move through the world and to better his songcraft. In 2010, I joined this keen cyclist on his Pedals and Beer Pumps tour, a run of pub-celebrating gigs in the northwest accomplished not by van but by saddle; our Grand Départ was Coronation Street’s Rovers Return.
“It’s not just a wish to live modestly,” he says, referring back to his and his wife’s happy pursuit of a lifestyle contrary to what we might think befits someone who’s sold 15 million albums. He quotes a freshly composed couplet, but asks me not to print it “because I might use it in a lyric”. The nub of it is: “I don’t just write brilliant stuff, it’s stuff I’ve overheard. In other words, I need to be surrounded by people.”
“That’s one of the problems we have in society,” he continues. “When we all used to go to the pub and you’d spout something daft, everybody would go: ‘You silly c*nt, shut up.’ We don’t have that with computers. With the [online] echo chamber, all these people are looking at a screen and believing what’s there. And nobody’s telling them what’s wrong. That’s important to me – listening to other people about things, whether I agree or disgree.”
It’s meaningful to be talking to Heaton right now in other ways: the morning of our meeting, news broke of the death of John Prescott. The former deputy prime minister was a Labour MP in Hull, where the Housemartins formed, for 40 years. We quickly get onto Starmer’s Labour. “I was really hoping they’d tax people like myself much higher,” he says. “But it’s by far the most working-class cabinet in the history of politics, never mind the last few years, so I’m not ready to cast too many aspersions.”
Going by his BBC Breakfast performance that goes, too, for Oasis. But the point is worth pressing, not least because, well, two pints… How persuaded was he by Oasis saying they weren’t in the room when the meetings were being held about dynamic pricing?
“Very persuaded,” Heaton says. “I will say in their defence – and I’m always going to defend two lads from Manchester, it’s not in my makeup to be bitchy – when they last got together, dynamic pricing didn’t exist. Then more recently, with their solo records, I think dynamic pricing still wouldn’t be a massive thing. So I think it caught them off-guard.” He will say this, though: “They weren’t there to represent their fans.”
Heaton is proud to come together with his fans at none other than his own football grounds soon. He reluctantly agrees that, almost 40 years on from his first release, that’s an achievement. “It challenges my modesty to say that,” he says of his stadium pop-sized profile. “But if I am gonna brag, we wrote ‘Happy Hour’ in ’85, and I’m still singing it in the same key.”
“I don’t look crazily different to how I looked,” he continues, not unreasonably, of the Paul Heaton who first capered across our screens on Top of the Pops in 1986. “People still see the same person, with roughly the same politics. That’s a connection with people – although I’m probably a bit of a nicer person. When you start off, you’re probably knocking too many doors and making a pest of yourself, trying to get noticed… So to be able to relax now and just say, ‘This is what I’m about,’ is a lovely feeling.”
The Mighty Several is out now. Paul Heaton tours the UK to 16 December and plays Bramall Lane, Sheffield on 25th May 2025
