Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
There are song writers of such acerbic wit and deliciously well observed lyrics that when the time comes, as it assuredly must to all, the world of music will be at pains to understand why they weren’t more appreciated in their life time. Like the 19th and 20th Century devotees of Oscar Wilde, the clamour for true recognition might go unheard by the greater population starved of such lyrical insights and yet, somewhere deep in the bowls of the immersive and beautiful grin of gratitude we surely must give thanks with, Paul Heaton will always be remembered with clarity and honour.
Thankfully such things are a million miles away and with his second solo collaboration with his former Beautiful South partner, Jacqui Abbot, that sharp and poignantly barbed clever humour, that tongue in cheek and feeling of the truly observant is there in all its glory to revelled in as each song from Wisdom, Laughter and Lines is played over in the mind and lays down its wares for the satire dream.
Paul Heaton is one of life’s true wits, his lyrics are full of the type of playful inventiveness that you could never hope to achieve and yet in them all lays truth, they are the songs that Time allows to be seen for what they are, songs that capture the true feelings of many and at times the sheer disgust at what we as a nation have allowed ourselves to be taken down within, the cul-de-sac of bitterness and the ever increasing solitude that comes from being the pariah of the world.
Yet in that truth lays hope and with Jacqui Abbott adding searing drive to the album, the songs take on a new mantle of expectation and as in the first album together, What Have We Become? it is a match made in Heaven.
Tracks such as The Austerity of Love, the utterly brilliant Heatongrad, the pungent punch of acidity that wreaks wonderful havoc in Lonesome and Sad Millionaire, the look of positivity in The Queen of Soho and the shock value of the well disposed in Wives 1, 2 & 3, the music, the lyrics are buoyant, sanguine and full of a hope that cannot be easily dismissed, it is the hope that the messages contained within the songs are identified with and we can pull back from the pessimism and destruction we place on each other.
A wonderfully crafted album, a piece of art, a two act play in the body of lyrical responsibility, cynical perhaps but truly right in its assumption and direction, Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbot are the King and Queen of 21st Century wit and wisdom.
Ian D. Hall