There’s an icy and squally haar that descends on the thoroughly downbeat sea-town, Hull every winter; usually after Christmas when everything there was ever to look forward to has jumped on a ferry to Zeebrugge and the last of the post offices in Hessle has been robbed. The south is not only beautiful, it’s a darn sight warmer too, which is likely to be why Heaton, always cruelly torn away from one Northern sea-port or another, took the least injured of his Housemartin troops that way in the mid-1980s, exchanging the cheeky, witty and loosely political diatribes of ‘Me and the Farmer’ for gentle ruminations about domestic life in Britain. It wasn’t a significant departure by any means, an unmarked bend in the road as opposed to a U-turn and it’s taken the better part of twenty years for Heaton to realise the departure was never really necessary in the first place.
‘Acid Country’ is something of a halfway house for those fans that love the feisty, kitchen-sink drama of ‘The Perfect Ten’ and ‘You Keep It All In’ but still hanker after the days when the girls, the bicycle-clips and the ordnance survey maps of the British Isles had not obscured Heaton’s original vision (whatever that was). It’s still a world of launderettes, beer, betting shops, corner shops and allotments where the weather is always raining and exceptions to male inadequacy are rare but this time Heaton has added a smattering of Americana, a flattering optimism of sorts. The utterly charming Sally Ellyson of Hem turns up on the album’s clear winner, ‘This House’ and though almost choking on some of Heaton’s typically skewed metaphors, she nevertheless adds a warmth and a sincerity that was always sadly absent when the Beautiful South were doing their thing. There’s still a whiff of desperation in Paul’s resolve to move, entertain and have us collapse hysterically on the floor in equal (but no less tremendous) measures but this time its evenly paced and less indomitable.
If either Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash had been brought up within a scarves-throw of Bramall Lane, this might have been the result.