[ December 31, 2003 ]
Gay Times: Gaze Time
Gay Times
Gaze Time
Dec 2003
Courtesy of Sarah Cannell
The Beautiful South's Paul Heaton tells Richard Smith about an eye-opening holiday in Sitges, being outed by The Sun, and the story behind the new song, 101% Man.
Q: You wanted to talk to us?
A: Yeah, I did. Partly because of one of the songs on the new album. I thought you might be interested to see how I see things, perhaps naively. I was quite interested in hearing your line on what I had to say.
Q: Fair enough. Why did you write the song, 101% Man?
A: It was just something that somebody on Big Brother said. One of the contestants announced they were gay, and this person said, "Oh great -- all my friends are gay!" And it really stuck in my throat as a really bad cliche. It's a little bit like; "A lot of my friends are black, but..." You know that something's gonna come after it. The first line of the song tried to deal with that; just because you've nodded at a gay man in the street, it doesn't mean you've necessarily got any gay friends.
Q: I thought it was a straight man teasing his friends that they're queer, but having these secret desires?
A: Ah, no. It's people saying they've got loads of gay friends, but they actually find the thought of two men kissing far too odd. You get occasional eye-openers in your life, and I've had a few of those. I went on a package holiday to Sitges with my girlfriend about three and a half years ago and a load of positives came out of that.
One of the main things was I met a friend of mine I knew from Hull, who I hadn't known to be gay. He was there with his boyfriend and his boyfriend's friend, and we spent a lot of time with them. What I was trying to get to in the song was the prejudice that there are just two or three gay types of men, when there are the whole lot.
Q: What does the line "There's no 101% man" mean?
A: I meant there are straight lads that think they're 100% hard, but there is none of that; we all fall short in different ways. And there's a lot more bravery in the person who stood up for himself than people who think they're big men -- the sort of person who'd pick on these sort of people. The crucial part of the chorus is, I find homophobia cowardly. I've known gay people who are oblivious to insults. They've come out quite early, and they're hard as nails. They're just like "*whatever*!" I respect those people.
Q: In 1986, the Housemartins were "outed" by The Sun, weren't you? Even though you're straight.
A: There was a thing about me, Norman [Cook] and Stan [Cullimore] all being gay. There were two editions of the paper. There was an article in the northern edition; it said Hugh was going to leave the band because he was sick of the three of us bickering. And in the southern edition, they said Stan's dad had spoken to them, and this was an awful way for it to come out, and Jimmy Somerville, who's a close friend of the family, has been an enormous support -- which was absolutely bizarre.
Stan's dad didn't talk to anyone. We'd all briefed our mums and dads not to talk to the press, because we knew a campaign against [us] was coming.
Q: I always thought it was an act of vengeance by The Sun, as The Housemartins used to play a lot of benefit gigs for the sacked print workers.
A: Yeah. I'm sure it was.
Q: I found a fan of yours on the net who's very worried. He remembers you being outed, so he went through all your lyrics. He misheard a line from Five Get Over Excited as "I'm a man from Scandinavia, I want a guy in the London area..."
A: It's funny; there was a song on the first Beautiful South album, I Love You But You're Boring. There's a line in it where it says "Bait straight people." I was just meaning "straight" in general. And I got two quite nasty letters about it, threatening me, saying "We don't mind you being gay, but why do you have to force it on people?" Which is another awful stereotype; it's one of the myths at the bottom of
homophobic feelings.
Q: Another fan reassured him; "You just have to look at the lyrics. They're mainly about boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, tits and self-consciousness about how fat one feels." True?
A: Most of them are about boyfriend/girlfriend situations, but not about tits. Maybe 36D, but that wasn't really about tits. A lot of our songs are left enough in the air to be construed both ways. Blackbird on the Wire was about being in a relationship and wanting to get out of it. I got a letter from some gay men in San Francisco, and they took it as being still in the closet and not being able to express themselves. And I looked back at the words and they just fit it -- apart from the first line -- perfectly. I was chuffed about that, that they chose to interpret it their own way. I forget what I'm on about, really, quite often.
Q: How do you think people will react to this song?
A: The message of this song wasn't really to go out to gay people, it was to straight people to question their own stereotypes. And think we have a largely straight audience. We've played it just live twice and it was an interesting reaction -- you get people punching the air and then they'd hear what I was singing about and they'd stop. Their jaws dropped a little bit.
Q: You've got a very blokey, quite laddie image, haven't you?
A: Yeah, I do, and that was one of the reasons why I thought it was quite important for someone like me to sing this song. I have a laddish outlook and I think it makes a bit of a change, someone like me singing about something like this.
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