The Beautiful South, ‘Old Red Eyes Is Back’: Write about what you know

The Beautiful South
‘Old Red Eyes Is Back’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 22 on January 18, 1992

There’s a moment in the recent Netflix musical tick, tick…BOOM! where playwright Jonathan Larson is on the phone with his agent. He’s just showcased his debut musical, a sci-fi rock opera based on Nineteen Eighty-Four. The showcase was a flop and nobody wants to produce it.

Larson’s agent gives him this advice: “next time, write about what you know.”

But all Johnathan Larson knew was being a broke, struggling writer in a shitty Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by friends dying of AIDS.

So, we wrote what he knew. The result was Rent, which went on to become the biggest musical of the 90s.

“Write what you know” is hideously painful advice, because life is generally quite boring, even for writers (especially for writers).

Last week, we talked about how pop lyrics usually focus on common themes, such as falling in love. Lyricists fall back on these tropes because they’re easy. Every lyric writer knows what it’s like to have a crush. So does every pop song listener.

The first Beautiful South single, ‘Song For Whoever’, makes fun of this cliché by being a boilerplate love song about no one in particular.

When you first hear ‘Song For Whoever’ on the radio, it sounds convincing enough. The melody is sweet, the vocals are sincere, and it seems genuinely romantive, even if Paul Heaton can’t quite remember to whom he’s singing (“Jennifer, Alison, Phillipa, Sue, Deborah, Annabel, too/I forget your name”)

But it’s actually a cynical joke about writers who turn out tacky love songs. He loves these girls for “the PRS [Performing Rights Society] cheques you bring” and “the Number Ones I hope to reap”.

Heaton is part of a long tradition of acerbic British songwriters, from Noel Coward to Morrissey to Jarvis Cocker. One of the things that makes him different, however, is his unerring instinct for a radio-friendly pop melody. His first band, The Housemartins, combined Christianity, Marxism and jangly guitars to produce Top 10 hits like ‘Happy Hour’ and ‘Caravan Of Love’

Heaton then went on to form The Beautiful South, who shot to Number One in 1990 with ‘A Little Time’, a little two-person drama about a relationship falling apart:

It’s a pleasant, jazzy song with a lovely dynamic between the male and female vocals. You almost don’t notice that it’s a close study of narcissism and toxic relationships

That’s the Paul Heaton method. In much the same way that you get a dog to take a pill by wrapping it in bacon, Heaton wraps his bittersweet stories in glossy tunes that sound good on FM radio.

Maybe the most striking example of this is ‘Old Red Eyes is Back’, a catchy number about a man drinking himself to death.

Our main character in the song is Old Red Eyes, an alcoholic who has watched his entire life slip away. Now, he sits in bars ordering one more round, despite warnings from his doctor that his next drink could kill him.

Heaton has struggled with alcohol throughout his life. So have many of the people around him. The 90s were an insane time for drink culture, a moment when near-suicidal alcohol consumption was celebrated as legendary good fun. Heaton’s old bandmate, Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim), almost drank himself to death in the 00’s, which inspired Heaton to finally give up the booze.

Write what you know.

Personally, I used to know an Old Red Eyes and I have seen him drink himself to death.

I used to tend bar in a town filled with alcoholics. There was a German guy who was notorious for being a heavy boozer, even by local standards.

His liver finally gave out. The doctors refused to replace it because they knew that he would continue drinking. His family, his friends, the whole town all protested and lobbied against the decision, collectively swearing that they would help him kick the bottle. Eventually, the health service relented and gave him the life-saving transplant.

The guy kept drinking. I hear he went straight from the hospital to the nearest bar.

I first met him after the transplant, after everyone had given up all hope for him, when he was into his final months on earth.

I shivered every time I saw him. He looked like Frankenstein: tall, shuffling, black eyes, matted hair. His skin was this nightmarish pale green. Quite literally a dead man walking.

I only served him once. A small beer in the afternoon. It felt like assisting a suicide.

This is my truth. This is what I know. And I could never find a way to turn that into a jaunty pop song, even if you gave me a million years to work on it.

That’s the essence of Paul Heaton’s genius. Writing what you know is only half the battle. Great artists show us the mundane in a way we’ve never seen before.

And you know what? ‘Old Red Eyes’ isn’t even the catchiest song that Heaton wrote about alcohol abuse! That award goes to the 1986 Housemartins track, ‘Happy Hour’:

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