[ December 29, 2001 ]
Sunday Times: Who the Hull Are They?
Sunday Times Magazine
Who the Hull Are They?
29 December 2001
These chart-toppers sell millions of records. But even in their home town, the Beautiful South can escape recognition. Tony Barell reports.
Paul Heaton is swigging from his pint and enjoying a few sober reflections: "We went through a period about eight years ago, me and Dave, where every time we got drunk we seemed to be climbing up things. Do you remember Liverpool?" There are three Daves in The Beautiful South, but the question is addressed to David Rotheray, the band's guitarist and Heaton's co-songwriter, who smiles and nods. "In Liverpool we found this scaffolding and we climbed up it," Heaton continues. "They were building a tower block, or something. And we got to the top and it was horrible - I had to climb back down again. And about an hour before that, this copper tried to get Dave down from this building - Dave was just climbing up the side of a building."
"Yeah the copper called me a gobshite," remembers Rotheray, "And I wasn't even saying anything - I was just climbing."
For 12 years these tipsy northerners have been climbing irresistibly, up the British charts. Their though poetry about lonely lives and tortured relationships, set to deceptively pretty tunes, has consistently struck a chord with the nation and given them three No 1 albums and a string of hit singles, including a No 1, A Little Time, in 1990. For much of those 12 years they could have claimed an imaginary Brit award as the country's booziest band. Tales of extreme refreshment are legion, and a lot of their songs - Liars' Bar, Look What I Found in My Beer, Old Red Eyes Is Back - have been drink-soaked as well. "The whole place is pickled, The people are pickles for sure, And no one knows if they've done more here Than they ever would do in a jar," observed their 1996 hit Rotterdam, to a melody as infuriatingly catchy as a fish hook.
It comes as no surprise to discover that many Beautiful South songs began as lyrics scribbled in bars, often on "lost weekends" abroad. Rotterdam is actually about a drinking hole in the Dutch city of that name. "Usually I pick a bar where it's all right being sat in the corner," explains Heaton, but this one was a bar where they eat some of the time, and they were making a point that I wasn't eating in there - moving all the cutlery about, making me feel uncomfortable. So I just wrote a bit about it."
But Heatons hard-drinking days are officially over, and his poison today is low-alcohol larger. Last year, his boozing started to spiral out of control; he was letting people down, and became worried that he would lose friends. But won't being on the wagon affect his songwriting? Won't his inspiration dry up? "No," he says, "if you're away from home by yourself, writing, you're in the same state of mind whether you're drunk of sober: you tend to feel a bit isolated, and that works for me."
You could argue that the whole band is in a permanent state of isolation, as their base is Hull, 190 miles away from the hullabaloo of the London music scene. "Now we have made it, it's quite a good place to chill out," says Heaton, "because it's pretty quiet, really." We are sitting on a dowdy pub called the Grafton, which is such a comforting fixture for the band that it practically serves as their official HQ. "We like a bit of repetition, and something to cling onto, and Hull is good for that." The mega-rich pop stars, who have shifted more than 8m albums, can walk down these Humberside streets in anonymity. It helps that their dress code is strictly unsmart-casual; in fact, today they look like a bunch of off-duty plumbers. "It's weird in Hull," says Heaton. "You get recognised more if you're in the local paper than if you're on Top of the Pops. I came back from holiday recently and I was getting recognised by everybody - and I found out it was because I was in the Hull Daily Mail."
Kingston-upon-Hull people seem witheringly unimpressed by fame and world travel. "The usual reaction I get when I come back here if I've been on tour in America, or wherever, is, 'Where the f*** have you been?' And if you say where you've been, there's an inquisition: 'Why no postcard?'" Heaton, 39, was born in Birkenhead, but pitched up here in 1983 when he was looking for somewhere to live after a spell down south, where he worked for a few years as a bought-ledger clerk in Redhill, Surrey. After busking in the streets of Hull, he formed a band, The Housemartins, which had two hit singles in 1986: Happy Hour, and Caravan of Love, an a-cappella gospel number that went to No 1.
The band split in 1988, but Heaton and another member, the singer Dave Hemingway, regrouped and formed a new six-piece. It was very nearly called petal, but Heaton eventually opted for The Beautiful South, a sarcastic dig at England's north-south divide. Like the Housemartins, the Beautiful South was a vocal-heavy act inspired by Heaton's love of gospel and soul, and left wing leanings. Unlike the previous band, its commercial appeal was heightened by a female singer, Briana Corrigan. But after three hit albums and a No 1 single, Corrigan quit to peruse a solo career. Heaton then remembered a teenage girl singing at a party after a gig in St Helens, and decided to track her down. Although she had never been in a band before, Jacqueline Abbott became their new singer.
Then, last year, Abbott upped and left too. The band have soldiered on, but performing hits such as the lovers' duet A Little Time and Don't Marry Her (chorus: "Don't marry her, f*** me"), has become awkward if not impossible. Do they miss having a woman in the band? "Yes," says Heaton. "Going by the new lyrics I've written, we need a female singer."
"Yeah, that song Ouch My Fanny is going to be difficult, isn't it?" quips Rotheray.
"Jacqui was a bit of a fluke, really," says Heaton. "I mean, we don't really want a soul singer, but neither do we want a dead-straight pop singer. And Jacqui managed to put quite a bit of soul into a pop style. You know that Karen Carpenter thing - every line was sung pretty straight, but for some reason sounded really soulful? Jacqui had that, you see."
Heaton seems genuinely mystified by her departure - "Jacqui always seemed to have a good laugh with us, generally" - but he has his theories. "One of the reasons that was implied" he says "is that she didn't feel as though she was rated or respected - which is the opposite of the truth. You see, we don't tend to compliment each other. Nobody really says anything to me about the songs, that they like them - it's just sort of understood." He also hints that he, alone, might have been to blame: "I would say, if somebody like me was getting on your nerves, you'd have to get out of the band pretty sharpish, wouldn't you?" He does have a reputation as a hard taskmaster, an iron hand in a denim glove. When the band started rehearsing the new songs for their fourth album in 1993, he declared their playing to be "sh**", said he was off to Spain for a fortnight, and threatened to break up the band unless they had got their act together by his return. He later explained that the songs were his "babies" and he couldn't bear to hear them mistreated.
He is a mite eccentric, a fact illustrated by his near-mania for collecting things - more like a jackdaw than a house martin. He rarely leaves a hotel without a souvenir such as a do-not-disturb sign or a shoehorn, seldom flies without keeping his complimentary sick-bag. Then there are the football shirts, the autographs - "my last one being Garth Crooks" - and American baseball cards. "I'm sort of assembling a little museum of my life," he explains. "I've always imagined building a big map on the wall, following where I've been. It's because I've got no memory. On the last tour, we finished off in San Francisco, I think, and I noticed the rest of the band had brought their bags onto the bus, and everybody had presents for the girlfriends and kids. And I had these bags and bags of do-not-disturb signs and pens, and I just thought, 'You bastard.'"
Is writing songs a form of collecting? "It is, yeah. My lyric-writing came from a form of hoarding, without a doubt. At school, I kept exercise books full of conversation between me and my mate, which we passed to each other while the teacher wasn't watching. I've still got things like that, I've still got quotes from when I was working on an office, if anybody said anything daft. And still, if I think of something, I make myself write it down."
There is something old-fashioned about this band. It's not just that, as Heaton admits, they arrange their songs to "basically showcase the tune". Nor is it just that many of their numbers are ripe with what used to be called "social comment". It extends to his support for old-style politics ("The Socialist Labour party are the party for me"), and Heaton and Rotheray's eco-friendly enterprise to establish a bicycle park in Hull (they recently closed it after they received next to no support, they say, from the local council). Then there is Heaton's very traditional passion for football (he supports Sheffield United, reminisces about the Roy of the Rovers comic strip, and plays in a local Sunday league).
There is a Dennis the Menace quality about the Beautiful South - best demonstrated by their behaviour when they heard that their 1996 album, Blue Is The Colour, had rocketed to No 1. In the early hours of the morning, they let off fireworks on the lawn of the hotel where they were staying in Southampton. The "coppers" as they would say, were called. Their manager, Phil Cass, was checking them out the next morning, recalls Heaton. "And he was saying, 'Look, it really wasn't that serious', and just then a bloke came into reception with a massive rocket and said, 'I've found this on my balcony!'"
Fireworks, says Heaton, are the band's way of letting out their "glee". I rest my case.
Delores / Link to Here
[ December 18, 2001 ]
NME: Fat Chance
NME
Biscuit Boy aka Crackerman : Fat Chance
December 18, 2001
by Andre Paine
Biscuit Boy is none other than Paul Heaton of The Beautiful South in solo mode. Heaton has announced that this album came about because no one would be interested in an album from The Beautiful South. Which isn't much of a fanfare. What biscuit would Paul Heaton be - As ever, he'd like to be seen as something classic which continues to be the nation's favourite teatime nibble. There's a twin layer of the deliberately contemporary (mention of asylum seekers on grimy ballad 'Last Day Blues') and Fifties flashbacks (name checking Marilyn Monroe's The Seven Year Itch on Humberside funk number '10 Lessons In Love'). Heaton may still be the Philip Larkin of pop - profound yet seedy - but if he were a biscuit he'd more likely be a United. Once tasty but now obsolete. Even his socialist ire, with lyrics like "You don't beat recession forming orderly queues" on the plain-speaking honkytonk of 'Man's World', sounds out of place in today's apathetic political culture.
Which doesn't mean that Heaton can't write a decent tune. Perhaps, though, it's time he started writing them for people more in touch with pop culture. So he can stay on the settee with his packet of Hob Nobs.
Rating: 5
Delores / Link to Here
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