You can trot out the stats: The Beautiful South are the fastest-selling band in pop history; they're the best-selling British songwriters since Lennon and McCartney; one in seven British homes has a Beautiful South album etc, etc. But perhaps it's more instructive to begin with the ending of another band - The Housemartins. Two members of The Beautiful South, Paul Heaton and David Hemingway, used to be in The Housemartins, that atypical Hull pop group who prided themselves on their Marxism and Christianity. Showing the same knack for an instantly memorable melody in songs like Happy Hour and Me And The Farmer as The Beautiful South do now, the band also included Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) in their line up but broke up after three years once they realised that their canvas wasn't broad enough for their musical ambitions.
Operating more as lose revue - they have three complementary and interchangeable lead vocalists - The Beautiful South's caustic sentiment and idiosyncratic humour allows them to reach the places The Housemartins couldn't. The new band also provided Paul Heaton with the perfect songwriting partner in guitarist David Rotheray, allowing their sound to escape from the traditional primary colours of a guitar group.
Along with Sean Welch (bass), Dave Stead (drums) and Briana Corrigan (vocals), Heaton, Hemingway and Rotheray went to Milan (mainly because of the football) in 1989 to record their debut, Welcome To The Beautiful South. The first single from the album set out their stall. Song For Whoever was a marvellously soulful duet between Heaton and Hemingway which also managed to serve as an intelligent critique of the way female names are used as props by male composers. Calling forth a litany of names, Heaton implores at least one of them to provide him with "the number one I hope to seek". The follow up single, You Keep It All In, swayed over any doubters and the band embarked on their irresistible rise to the top of the charts. "Bitter lyrics set in sweet tunes" said the critics of the day about the music, and how right they were.
Subsequent albums such as Choke and 0898 which were both coming down with marvellous singles like A Little Time, Ol' Red Eyes Is Back and Bell Bottomed Tear copper-fastened their position as one of the most listenable but also one of the most lyrically astute bands in existence. The rough and tumble of the lyrics proved too much though for singer Briana Corrigan who left the band "due to amicable musical differences". It's believed she wasn't happy with how Paul Heaton portrayed women in his lyrics, particularly on a song called 36D.
She was replaced in 1993 by Jacqueline Abbott, who was spotted by Heaton while she was singing in a garden in St Helen's. Leaving behind her £1.50 an hour job in a supermarket, she jumped aboard the Beautiful South chart express and made her debut on a cover of Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' which was from the Miaow album.
After four studio albums, the band then released a greatest hits package called, aptly enough, Carry On Up The Charts which went to number one and stayed there for six weeks. The album became the third-fastest selling British album of all time, behind Michael Jackson's Thriller and the woeful Phil Collin's But Seriously.
Any thought that the release of a greatest hits package meant an end to the Beautiful South were swiftly dispelled by the Blue Is The Colour album which was released in 1997. The single, Don't Marry Her (F**k Me) provided a tincture of controversy in that it was banned by radio, a ban the band got around by simple replacing the offending word with "choose" - they also had to replace the phrase "sweaty bollocks" with "Sandra Bullocks" in the same song. Their most recent album Quench, has already spawned three massive hit singles in Perfect 10, Dumb and How Long Does A Tear Take To Dry. The album also featured old Housemartins' friend, Fatboy Slim, who was employed as "rhythm consultant". As if they needed one.
The Beautiful South play Dublin Castle on Sunday, May 2nd, at 7.30 p.m.
