Paul Heaton:
It's Happy Hour Again

January 1997

By Jan Gradvall

Translation by L. Fischer (from Swedish)

If Cole Porter had grown up in Hull. If Morrisey had grown up and got himself a life. If Thomas Öberg in Bob Hund had written some lyrics for Vikingarna. It is not easy to pin down the strange phenomenon of The Beautiful South. It is not easy to pin down a band that combines the most bitter lyrics of northern England with the sweetest melodies of northern Europe.

The Beautiful South should not even be big. When the band released theirfirst single in 1989, in the scattered remnants of The Housemartins, it was "Song for Whoever", a satire on the double standards of the pop industry. Instead of the usual one-girl song such as "Diana" or "OhCarol", Paul Heaton went for them all: "Oh Cathy, Oh Allison, OhPhillipa, Oh Sue / You made me so much money, I wrote this song for you."

If an artist such as Mark E Smith of The Fall had written such a song, nobody would have been surprised. Track nine on a critically acclaimed import album that did well for two weeks. But "Song for Whoever" by The Beautiful South was not an indie single among the others, but one of that year’s biggest hits. "Song for Whoever" climbed all the way to second place on the English chart and was to become an evergreen on the radio.

Extremely cynical and almost offensive lyrics? Nobody cared when they heard the melody. An airy, soft pink melody made out of spun sugar that went down as friction-free as something by Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach.  It was indie pop for housewives. Blur in a Dame Edna-wig. When The Beautiful South later released their debut album "Welcome to TheBeautiful South" they presented a string of glittering pop tunes, but at the same time they presented an album cover that could have been designed by Henry Rollins. One of the black-and-white photographs shows a woman with a gun in her mouth, preparing her suicide.

The Beatiful South have since continued to sell chocolates filled with arsenic. Their albums "Welcome to The Beautiful South" (1989),"Choke" (1990), "0898 Beautiful South" (1992) and "Miaow" (1994) wasconfusing the traditional rock press, but contained at least two or three songs each that became hits and taxi drivers and pub owners all over Britain were humming their tunes. The sublime love duet "A LittleTime" was to become their first number one hit.

Nobody could have predicted, however, what was going to happen when the band released their greatest hits album "Carry On Up The Charts" in the middle of the Christmas rush of 1994. The album went straight to number one and did not stop selling.

Today (Jan 1997) "Carry On Up The Charts" has sold over 2.2 million copies, which makes it the third best selling album of all time in Britain. It should be stressed that this applies for Britain only. The Beautiful South are big in their home country and nowhere else. In Sweden they have sold about 12 copies.

This autumn the band have released their fifth album, the excellent "Blue Is the Colour", and history repeats itself. Number one in Britain and zero reaction elsewhere. The rock audience cannot understand The Beautiful South’s music and ignores them. The radio audience cannot understand The Beautiful South’s lyrics and love them. Somewhere in the no-mans-land that stretches in between, the band’s front man Paul Heaton is hanging around in a bar. Right now he is also ordering a beer.

It’s happy hour again
What a good place to be
Don’t believe it‘
Cause they speak a different language
And it’s never been happy to me

("Happy Hour" The Housemartins, 1986)

Of course it is a bar. It is one of those un-mistakeable English hotel bars with vagely brown wallpaper, vagely brown furniture and definitely brown wall-to-wall carpet. It is also late efternoon, the time of happy hour. In one corner sits a businessman with a wedding ring very close to a woman with heavy make-up who is probably not his wife. In another corner sit an elderly couple looking around. They do not say a word to each other for the hour that follows.  Someone is swearing over a non-functioning cigarette vending machine.

Paul Heaton has chosen the table closest to the bar. Nearby sit his two best friends, Kevin and Alfie, who have got nothing to do with The Beautiful South.

They are not there by coincidence. The man from the record company whispers to me that Paul Heaton has a tendency to be quiet for very long periods during interviews when he is alone, but he is usually more social when he is with his friends.  The situation is somewhat absurd. They are not three schoolboys travelling around together. Paul Heaton is 34 and Kevin and Alfie are at least that old. Both his friends seem to think the the situation is embarrasing and try to keep their distance all the time. They are nice men with John Candy-stomachs, flimsy shirts and Bob Dylan-beards. Once in awhile Paul lets them into the conversation when he becomes uncertain:

"Kevin, what could you really say about Hull?"

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