[ June 1, 1992 ]
Vox: Drinking Canada Dry
Vox Magazine
Drinking Canada Dry
June 1992
Written by Steven Malins
Courtesy of G. Dipper
Have those sensitive Beautiful South boys jumped on the boozy New Lad bandwagon? VOX finds them wide-eyed but mainly legless on tour in North America. Rock and roll out the barrel, as they say.
The Beautiful South are an hour into their set at Toronto's claustrophobic, over-heated and sold-out Concert Hall. Although the noisy crowd have inspired confidence, the gig is not going well. Singer/lyricist Paul Heaton is suffering the furnace-like temperature in a black polo neck jumper and yellow jacket, his natural crumpled charm exaggerated by a hangover and lack of sleep. Vocalist Dave Hamster Hemingway looks awkward, freezing mid-song as he forgets words and hits bum notes. The set is unfamiliar, acting as showcase for tracks from the new album 0898 Beautiful South. They sound disjointed and out of sorts.
However, the situation is far from lost. Paul Heaton suddenly gives a what-the-hell shrug, grins, turns on his heels and stands the whole gig on its head with a swaggering dance across the stage. The band (nine members including the brass section) and the audience instantly loosen up, and the music gels for the first time on a sharp poignant rendition of Let Love Speak Up Itself. Things are really cooking by the evening's biggest surprise, an energetic cover of the Bee Gees' classic disco falsetto You Should Be Dancing.
Backstage after the show, Dave Hemingway, the band's most self-effacing member, sums up the evening. Paul saved us by turning on the old charisma. I just plug away and do my best. I have my moments, though not tonight.
Paul Heaton is more forthright in his appraisal of the others. Hemmingway in particular. Dave is a terrible worrier. He basically things he's second-rate, which is a bit sad really. He still feels he's lucky to have scraped his way into the band. It's a bad attitude, a real working-class perception of fame. The only thing that annoys me is that it doesn't look good to have someone who isn't confident on stage.
Heaton, who once claimed that his former band The Housemartins were only conceived as a three-year project, sees The Beautiful South as a similarly fluid and temporary arrangement. "When I set up the band I was thinking of three strong front people," he says, "but I don't suppose you can change people's personalities. It always looked good in The Clash with three people who had their own arrogance and cockiness. I was hoping to gradually wean myself out of the band, but I don't think they're ready for that - and it doesn't look like they will be for a while".
Crammed into the band's dressing room are record company people, press, road crew (the South are touring with a total entourage of 15) and the obligatory hangers-on, while affable group members sit and chat with anyone who want to talk. However, although possessing the cheesey-happy charm of a typical Beautiful South song, this relaxed atmosphere camouflages some bizarre conversations and gossip. Heaton is fenced in by a group of male fans, some of whom Hemingway later calls Mark Chapman types.
Thirty-year old Joey Jnr has travelled by bus from Detroit, a five-hour trip and nervously waves a thick wad of single and album sleeves for signing. Though he has no money for a hotel, and the next bus home is in the morning, Joey maintains: I haven't thought about that. I just knew I had to see them. Behind Heaton, a teenage boys slips off his leather jacket, places it just outside the dressing-room door and request that each band member walk over it in turn. They all decline.
Temporary bass player Chris Elliot, (VATman by profession, roped in to replace Sean Welch, who's on maternity leave) looks a little shocked and admits to finding some of the fans sad people, a bit scary. Paul Heaton, however, is used to dealing with such loyal obsessives.
At eleven o'clock the next morning, while Joey Jnr is on the way home laden down with freshly-signed booty, Heaton is holed up in a bar, ready to recall the night's events. I have more problems dealing with the men rather than the women. Men are after you for weird things. This nice but crazy little man came up to me last night and said: I'm going to have your music playing at my funeral.
Dave Rotheray (the band's guitarist and songwriter) said to me: Are you sure it's not going to be your funeral, Paul? Another bloke came up to me and said: My son was a big fan of yours. He died last year. I understand now why he liked that line in Song for Whoever about the pencil case. When I was clearing his room out after he died, I found his little pencil case and it was full of contraceptives.
Although it is Rotheray's delicate touch that leavens the band's very English, almost whimsical melodies, Heaton's lyrics and personality are the focus for the South's weird following. His mixture of dry, sour observation, social comment and wisecracking humour is at the heart of the songs. Heaton's moods range from nervousness and shyness to cocky intensity. I do get some really mad people following me. The last time we came to America there was a group of people who were convinced that I was the new Edgar Allen Poe. I don't' want to talk about this much more, because it might upset somebody, but fans have implied they want to die with me.
This dark side of the South's personality may come as a surprise to those familiar with jaunty hit singles like Song for Whoever, You Keep It All In and Old Red Eyes Is Back, but Heaton feels that the band's public image has been softened by media censorship. He'd prefer to make gory promo videos, and insists: Our career has been seriously hindered by our lyrics. I Think The Answer's Yes from Choke would have made a good pop single, but there's no way it would get airplay because of its anti-Amnesty International sentiment. Some of the idiots they're trying to free in the Far East have butchered people.. Hang the bastards and tickle their toes, I say.
A founding member of the Housemartins, Heaton can claim the best part of a decade's expertise in mixing pop with serious lyrics. His former band found a niche with instantly accessible tunes like Happy Hour, and pulled cute stunts like collecting Mars bar wrappers to pay for National Express but passes, and lodging with their fans to save costs under the Adopt-A-Housemartin scheme. Yet they were also capable of whipping the right-wing press into a frenzy, and were viciously attacked for their involvement with Red Wedge, miners' benefits and CND. The tabloids claimed that band members were gay, born not in the North but in Surrey, and all called Quentin. Actually Norman Cook was the only one christened under that unfortunate monicker.
The double-edged approach of both Heaton's bands may well originate in Hull's traditional affection for Country music. Country songs share an affinity with those of The Beautiful South: both genres explore the painful, the humdrum and the political through melodic, easy-listening structures.
Hull's got a real tradition of Country music, nods Paul. The club circuit is Country-based. People from Hull see themselves as very traditional, and Country music caters for that. Indeed a strong, said Country lilt characterised the South's best songs; usually carried by Briana Corrigan's wistful squeak, this effect is particularly evident on A Little Time and Bell Bottomed Tear (a likely single) from the 0898 LP.
Another central preoccupation of the Country fraternity is booze. The Beautiful South know a thing or two about alcohol - they drink plenty of it, write about it and brag to the press about their all-day benders. At an interview for a local Toronto radio station Paul and Dave Rotheray apologise for their groggy state, blaming drinking on the plane, in the airport lounge and getting bladdered in a session which lasted from one in the afternoon until three the following morning. Chris Elliot overhears the interview in a hi-fi shop and spots a local pensioner muttering darkly to himself, shuffling up to the radio and flicking it off, with a cursory Damn limeys. There are those who would agree that the South behave like English beer-boys abroad, and that they are irritatingly laddish.
Certainly, some of their antics on this three-day promotional tour lend weight to this view. Apart from the heavy drinking they get up to daft bastard things like ringing each other up in the early hours to check whether anybody is sleeping over, squeezing themselves into a video booth to record a song for their manager Paul Bambi Thompson (a chorus-line of girls backed them up outside), and taking the piss out of Dave Hemingway, who concedes: I am the butt of all the band's jokes. I let them get away with murder. Still, as long as they're happy, I don't mind them laughing at me. You get used to it after a while.
Meanwhile Dave Rotheray is living up to his laddish reputation as the band slob, leaving mini-bar bottles and clothes scattered around him as he sprawls through the band's second afternoon in Toronto watching TV. His regular room mate, drummer Dave Stead, seems oblivious to its all. Steady used to be quite tidy but he's lowered himself to Rotheray's animal level, comments Heaton. Rotheray usually just pours the contents of his case onto the floor and lives out of the mess for a few days.. Their room also plays host to most of the band's late-night drinking, enjoyed with a gaggle of fans and friends who all wake with a collective bad head.
On a more serious note, Rotheray admits during a later-and TV stint that his relationship with the mother of his child ended because I was always in the pub. I had to drink to keep Paul company. Alcoholism is a disease, isn't it? says Paul Heaton quietly.
Although Heaton remains tight-lipped about his broken hand following a match between Sheffield United and local rivals Wednesday, he is more open about his solo drinking. On a recent trip to Sardinia he threw a wobbler, refused to join the band on a promotional trip to Germany and went on to spend a few days getting my head together. It sounds a bit of a spoilt brat thing to do, but I can get on a plan and sort myself out somewhere alone.
Before his first drink on the trip's final morning, Heaton appears edgy, quiet, and less willing to talk. After collaring a handful of local shoppers to ask for the nearest bar, Heaton finally sniffs out the day's first watering-hole and his mood becomes less guarded. He chats about other bands - I'm very suspicious of The Pogues, a bunch of cowboys - while of money says: I'm earning a lot. I should be taxed more. He says that he can't make any relationship last for more than two years, because he gets bored, and complains: People from London's music business don't understand us because we're not middle class. They judge us on our working-class accents. And then there's band in-jokes.
We have competitions to see how many girls we can get in on the guest list, he says. Fletch' (percussionist on the tour) had 14 girls on the door yesterday. I only had one. My single success was a 40 year old woman who came to the show and pushed a note under my hotel room door this morning saying she was a new fan.
Conspicuously absent from such hi-jinxes and boozed-up camaraderie is the Irish-born, ex-Anthill Runaways's vocalist Briana Corrigan, who spends most of the three-day Canadian visit with the group's sound engineer, Yvonne. The ginger-haired frontwoman asserts that at last she feels comfortable being the only female in the Beautiful South, but Briana still seems to have some hidden reservations: I can't afford to get too upset by things, she confesses. I came to Canada on my first Beautiful South tour and it was terrible, a personal disaster.
I didn't feel happy with what I was doing, and it was the first time I'd spent so much time with the band, she continues. I just couldn't work out how I was going to fit in. In an attempt to ease Briana's problems Heaton hired a female tour manager for the next trip abroad. A nice gesture, perhaps, but it didn't work out. We didn't get on says Briana. There was pressure for us to get on well, because we were expected to share a room before we'd even met each other. She was very bossy.
Briana's role in the band highlights the contradictions that exist within the ranks of its strongest personalities. Heaton attacks his record label Go! Discs for its sexism and male-dominated set-up, pointing out that both The Housemartins and The Beautiful South have employed women as sound engineers, monitor engineers and managers. At the same time, thought, he confesses: Dave Rotheray and myself are very shy about approaching women. I don't usually have the confidence to go up to women unless I'm absolutely bladdered. It's a weir gift. But he does have the nerve to write songs from a woman's perspective, something Briana thinks he does well: I feel really comfortable singing things like Bell-Bottomed Tear. It doesn't feel like a male vision she says.
There are disputes, however. One track on 0898 that writer and singer do disagree over is 36D, which satirises Page Three girls. Brian explains: Only a man could have written 36D. Initially I was going to sing on it, but I made a conscious decision not to after seeing the lyrics. It's an aggressively male song and to have so many men on stage standing playing and singing it seems to completely defeat the object.
Heaton's reply is typical of the bloody-minded streak which he says makes him the least likeable member of the band. I realised Briana was unhappy straight away, and that I was stirring things up a bit. It's wrong to attack a woman like that but I do take delight in attacking people even if it isn't right. I like the idea of not being right-on all the time. It's boring isn't it?
This schizophrenic blend of male and female, shyness and cockiness, humour and seriousness makes The Beautiful South such a surprisingly complex and inventive unit. While Heaton's brashness keeps everybody on their toes, Briana, the unobtrusive drummer David Stead and quiet Dave Hemingway are also essential to the band's appeal and personality. Despite Heaton's leading role, ex-Housemartin Hemingway feels that Paul has mellowed; he's less dictatorial in this band.
Three o'clock in the afternoon, and the band are propped up on another bar watching The New Avengers and eating chips. Paul is looking a little anxious, since he hates flying and the band are booked on a plane to Los Angeles later that evening. It's just superstition, because I'm in a band.
I was fine before that. I'm really nervous if I've just written some songs and I haven't recorded them. I can't stand the idea of being cut-off halfway through something. I always think of myself as a short-term person. Before he gets on any aircraft he checks that he has all his lucky mascots - including the magic pixie (a plastic figurine attached to a keyring) and a photograph of Simon Le Bon. Just before take-off Heaton confides I cross myself and grip Dave Hemingway's balls.
While Dave Rotheray shows off two badges he's acquired in Toronto - one reads Big Hair Frightens Me; the other Every Second Somewhere In The World An Old Lady Is Calling Bingo - the jokes are, as usual, cracked at poor Hemingway's expense.
The Hamster recounts I was always very shy. It's amazing that I joined the band in the first place; I didn't think I'd have the balls to do it. I spotted a pair of Doc Marten's in a shop the other day but when I went back to buy them there was a note in the window saying back in ten minutes.
That's my life really - back in ten minutes, Dave
For more info on sometime VAT-man, TBS fill-in bassist Chris Elliot, check the Gargoyles page.
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