Album Title
Paul Heaton
Artist Icon Wisdom, Laughter and Lines (2015)
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First Released

Calendar Icon 2015

Genre

Genre Icon Alternative Rock

Mood

Mood Icon Bittersweet

Style

Style Icon Rock/Pop

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Tempo

Speed Icon Medium

Release Format

Release Format Icon Album

Record Label Release

Speed Icon Virgin

World Sales Figure

Sales Icon 60,000 copies

Album Description
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Wisdom, Laughter and Lines is the second album by Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott. It was released on 23 October 2015 by Virgin EMI and was produced by long-time collaborator John Owen Williams.

The album peaked at no. 4 in the UK Official Album Chart. It was certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry on 22 January 2016 for sales over 60,000 copies.

Wisdom, Laughter and Lines was announced on 1 September 2015, coinciding with the release of its first single, 'The Austerity of Love' and details regarding its supporting tour.

In the run up to the release of the album, Gigs and Tours interviewed both Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott about the album and their working dynamic. Paul mentioned that, “Jacqui is one of the best singers I've worked with and is also part of my past. This new album came together easily because we work so well together. The album title ‘Wisdom, Laughter and Lines’ derives from a line in one of the songs and it sort of sums up where I am in life.”

In the same interview Jacqui talked about preparing to perform the new songs live, stating that “It’s just great to be singing again and I’m excited about playing these new songs live. We had such a good run together previously and it’s just a real pleasure to be working with him again and singing these fantastic songs.”
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User Album Review
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.


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