Paul Heaton scores first solo number one as Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 finally reaches the top 40

Paul Heaton has scored his first solo UK number one album, and it has arrived in the same chart week that Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 reached the UK top 40 for the very first time.

Heaton's latest chart-topping LP, titled Jenius, is his sixth overall but the first under his own name alone. It follows his three with the Beautiful South and two more alongside former bandmate Jacqui Abbott. The former Housemartins musician reached the top on Friday, in part, by shifting more vinyl copies than any other album over the past seven days, BBC News reported.

Paul Heaton's long road to a solo number one

Heaton rose to fame as part of the Hull band The Housemartins in the 1980s, in a line-up that also contained a pre-Fatboy Slim Norman Cook, before the Beautiful South and then his run of albums with Abbott. Those records produced five number ones. What he had never managed, across all of it, was topping the chart on his own.

In a four-star review, the Times noted how Heaton's "casually funny" and "deceptively piercing" latest album "again confirms his gift for dissecting human weakness with an unsentimental but humane eye". Victoria Segal wrote that the Ian Broudie-produced record was full of "stylistically playful songs", such as One Eye Open and Favourite Kind of Idiot, which "weave through the personal and political".

The celebration is likely to be a communal one. Heaton told the BBC this week he was planning to put money behind the bar at dozens of pubs to mark his 65th birthday next year, echoing a similar gesture in 2022 when he opened £1,000 tabs at 60 pubs.

Behind him at number three is Brandon Flowers, whose new album Thrasher landed there after a pivot from the glamorous indie rock 'n' roll of The Killers to Parton's own brand of country music.

Dolly Parton's belated UK top 40 hit

Parton, who died earlier this week aged 80, has three singles in the top 40. They include 9 to 5, which landed at number 12 in this week's UK chart having previously peaked at 47 in 1981. Her biggest streaming country-pop classic was written for the 1980 film of the same name and earned her an Oscar nomination as well as topping the US charts, but until this week it had never reached the UK top 40 at all.

Waves of tributes poured in over the week, and her best-loved tunes were played across the nation. Among those paying tribute was her goddaughter Miley Cyrus, who described Parton as an "angel by my side". Parton had her own British connections, including a surprising connection to South Yorkshire and a wish to live in a small UK town. Her own wishes are shaping what happens next, too, with Dollywood set to stay open because Parton asked it to.

The single nobody can shift

One record came through the week untouched. Sam Fender and Olivia Dean's Rein Me In extended its own record as the longest-running number one single in UK chart history. Friday still belonged to Heaton, though, with dozens of pubs in line for a round on his tab next year.