[ August 4, 1999 ]
NYT: Caustic and Loose in a British Way
The New York Times
Caustic and Loose in a British Way,With Soul
August 4, 1999
By ANN POWERS
The noise from the crowd in the Supper Club was deafening on Monday night, but it's doubtful many American ears heard it. The occasion was a rare club show by the Beautiful South, a band that has amassed a British-born fan base over the course of seven albums yet remains as esoteric as a dish of bubble and squeak here.
The Beautiful South carries on the English tradition of remaking American soul to appeal to listeners far removed from the racial dynamics that created it. Bands from the Beatles to Culture Club linked soul's pathos to the sentimentality of the music hall, that British institution where old-fashioned entertainers plied their routines. David Rotheray, the guitarist who writes the Beautiful South's music, borrows heavily from Motown and the crossover pop of Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones.
At the Supper Club the seven-piece band was joined by three horn players and a percussionist. The group made a happy jumble of Rotheray's arrangements, not bothering to capture the polish of its studio recordings. The rhythm section -- Sean Welch on bass and David Stead on drums -- was quietly masterly, and the interplay between keyboards and horns enriched Rotheray's party tunes.
But the groove remained loose as the three singers, Paul Heaton, Dave Hemingway and Jacqueline Abbot, wiggled and swayed as if they were well into a Friday night at the pub. Heaton was particularly impish, affecting hip-hop dance moves that would get him barred from any self-respecting New York crew but that heightened his image as everybody's favorite lampshade wearer.
Heaton's smoothly caustic lyrics separate the Beautiful South from other English soul strivers. He writes the most unlikely hits, many of which had fans singing along delightedly on Monday. "36D" derides the intellectual emptiness of a pinup girl. "Good as Gold (Stupid as Mud)" scorns an ordinary bloke's senseless optimism. "Perfect 10," from the group's new album, "Quench" (Mercury), is an affectionate sparring session between Heaton and Ms. Abbot in which he declares his love for voluptuous women and she hints at her disappointment with diminutive (in the most private way) men.
Other songs deflate the very notion of artistic commercial music. "Song for Whoever" had the golden-voiced Hemingway taking the part of a hack writer who courts women only because they inspire him to write treacly verses. Seemingly everyone in the Supper Club joined in on the chorus, crooning, "Oh Cathy, oh Allison, oh Phillipa, oh Sue, you made me so much money, I wrote this song for you." It was an odd moment in which the mechanisms of pop were exposed to everyone's nonchalance.
The fatalism of Heaton's songs is fundamentally connected to their Englishness. While Americans admire rock that threatens to break through class barriers or sexual and racial taboos, the English often prefer songs that jauntily acknowledge life's unavoidable hierarchies.
The pathos of such admissions is bearable when mixed with humor. The romantic crises and personal disasters Heaton chronicles, couched in the context of a threadbare middle-to-lower class, recall the films of Mike Leigh or the novels of Roddy Doyle. Ms. Abbot's sensible and demure voice was particularly suited to these mini-dramas as she played foil to the boyish Hemingway and the reckless Heaton.
As one of the wittiest groups appealing to a mass audience today, the Beautiful South still has a shot at an American hit. It would probably be a novelty, though, like the one enjoyed last year by their Canadian friends, the Barenaked Ladies, for whom the band is opening on an East Coast summer tour (the bill is reversed when they play together in England). Americans can take this kind of sunny pessimism only as an odd joke. As for an American hit, to paraphrase a line of Heaton's, the Beautiful South will carry on regardless.
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