[ August 1, 2004 ]
Angloplugging: Golddiggas "Biog for 2004"
Biog for 2004
Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs /
Comments on each track by PDH
August 2004
by Stuart Maconie
Courtesy of Gina Dipper
Tricky subject: Johnny Cover version. Get it right and you're number one, top of the pops, garlanded with praise and plaudits. Just ask Gary Jules, the Pet Shop Boys and, of course, The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH. Get it wrong and you're poor old Duran Duran, still living down their brave yet foolhardy stab at Public Enemy's 911 Is A Joke.
The art of the cover version has fallen into disrepute over recent years. Plundering Pop Idols and Light-Fingered Fame Academics have taken the fun out of it and turned the delicate art of re-interpretation into a sausage machine where bygone classics are fed in and bland, gristly fast food hits are skinned up and spat out for mass consumption.
The new album by The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH though harks back to a time when David Bowie's Pin Ups was as essential a part of his canon as Hunky Dory or Ziggy (how many people still think Sorrow is a Bowie original?), when Elvis Costello turned a generation onto country music with Almost Blue, when Bryan Ferry could encompass Dylan and Tin Pan Alley with a sublime swoonsome vocal on These Foolish Things, when Lennon could play raucous homage to his roots on Rock And Roll. To this roll of honour, now add the unwieldy title 'Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs', the eleventh album by The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH and a celebration of the pop song in all its gorgeous, goofy glory.
That's eleven albums. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? It's now 15 years since the amicable dissolution of "the fourth best band in Hull" The Housemartins and the subsequent re-emergence of vocalists Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway as The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH, along with Dave Rotheray, Sean Welch and Dave Stead as the band's creative core. Throughout the 90s and into the new millennium The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH became a byword for the best in British pop: intelligent, sarky, ebullient, Northern. Along the way Heaton and Rotheray became the most successful British pop song writing duo since those two scousers with the little glasses and veggie burger sideline, Lennon and McCartney.
There are no Beatles tunes here on this splendid new labour of love from The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH but there are a dazzling personal selection of soul classics, glitter ball disco anthems, biker anthems and much, much more showing the good humour and good taste of a group that has always been a party waiting to happen. According to Paul Heaton, the songs are paramount. "We're not always fans of the particular band but we are always fans of the song. Our natural inclination is to be obscure I guess so we also wanted to put in a few standards. So I drew up a list and we all lived with a CD for while and then there was a whittling down process. We hadn't really done any of them live before so it was an interesting process. Some that didn't look promising turned out really well, others just didn't happen. We really wanted to do Rainbow's Since You Been Gone but it just never sounded right. But these are ones that really worked, arrived at sort of democratically."
Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs -- Track by Track
Here then, with the thoughts of Chairman Heaton, are the ones that they wanted; a cue for a song, surely.
YOURE THE ONE THAT I WANT The climatic, show-stopping black latex fairground dance number of the perennially silly and irresistible Grease, here re-invented as a smouldering, speakeasy duet between Paul and Alison Wheeler.
"I'm not a huge fan of Grease but I've always liked the campness of it. We decided straight away that we could never possibly out-camp the original so we took a different tack. I like the sultriness of it and it's not often we blokes in the band get accused of being sultry. To be honest whenever I used to see the original number I always thought, "Why don't those two stop dancing and just get on with it?"
LIVIN' THING From the heyday of ELO, this was The Brummie Beatles in tender mood, a vibe reflected in this gorgeous version of an unjustly overlooked gem. Dave Hemingway lacks Jeff Lynne's startling afro but matches him note for note for pathos.
"When word got around that we were going to cover an ELO song there was absolute horror amongst some of our fans. ELO have such a bad reputation because they were so unfashionable amongst the NME and such at the time. This is just a fantastic 70s pop song though with a truly great hook. We've given it a sort of country twang which really suits it I think."
THIS WILL BE OUR YEAR Very English late 60s pastoral psychedelia by the recently reformed Zombies beefed and buffed up for today.
"This was Sean's suggestion. He said "Have a listen to this, it's great". It was quite easy to do. I would have thought that basically we had just copied it but when I listened back to the original, which is quite tinny in a very 60s way, I realised that we've actually put quite a lot of ourselves into it."
CIAO After Madchester and before Britpop, a funny little indie scene called shoe-gazing briefly flourished around the student dives of London. Queens of this were Lush whose sweetly fuzzy pop had at least one Northern admirer.
"I liked Lush quite a lot at the time. I'd met them at some NME thing, met Emma, was it? And really liked them. I recently bought a Best Of by them and it reminded me that I liked this song. Lyrically, it's very much in our ballpark but musically it's not at all. This was the hardest song of all to do. One day it would sound great, then it would sound shit. Eventually we got it to sounding good about seven times out of ten and this is one of those seven. I hope Lush suffered as much as we did."
VALENTINE Willy Nelson's weathered face and cracking voice loom down like Mount Rushmore over modern American music. The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH bring their own bitter sweet flavours to a very Texan dish
"Willy Nelson is just one of the greats. But I don't like the fact that it's assumed that his early stuff is the best, that's he's treated like a legend whose best work is a long time in the past. This is from a 1993 album that is one of my favourites. Like late Johnny Cash, you can hear the pain and history in his voice. And the simplicity. And the black humour"
DON'T FEAR THE REAPER The bleakly toe-tapping light metal classic re-imagined as a Latin salsa. No, really
"Dave Rotheray was playing the riff in the studio and Damon, our keyboardist, joined in and, to be honest, I don't think he knew what the song was. So he just began to play this very Latin piano riff and Steady fell in and I wanted to say, no, let's stop this right here but it sort of suits it. Alison [Wheeler co-vocalist] had no idea what the song was. I always thought they were German because of that umlaut in the name but they were from New York. Great lyrics but no idea what he's singing about! '40,000 men and women every day'. What does that mean?"
THIS OLD SKIN Probably the most obscure selection here, originally recorded by those semi-mythical South Carolinians-via Germany, The Heppelbaums.
"I spend every New Year in Germany and this is a band I got to know via my friends out there. They're a group of blokes from the village called The Heppelbaums. It's a little like early Crass, a bit Grateful dead, hippy community thing. That's Chip Taylor doing the second verse. He's the man who wrote Wild Thing and Angel Of The Morning and, co-incidentally, Jon Voight's brother. We did this in New York with him cause we wanted an old voice."
DON'T STOP MOVING The jaw-dropping inclusion of this S Club 7, err, classic doesn't get any less surprising when you hear what the Southies have done to it.
"This is one of few we had done live previously and not surprisingly we had done it in a really 'up' fashion. But by the time we came to record it, we realised that this album had a very particular flavour and that our original version wouldn't have fitted in. So we slowed it down and tried to bring out a different meaning. It's a very well structured song though I can't claim to be a fan of else anything connected with it."
TILL I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE Old school deep soul of rare and delicious vintage.
"This is the kind of sing that picks itself really. Done by Ben E King and the late Ray Charles. One of those songs that any singer would want to sing."
REBEL PRINCE Typically louche and lovely tune from the second album by the currently feted Rufus Wainwright, a favourite chez Heaton.
"This is from the second album by Rufus Wainwright who I'm very into. His arrangements are fantastic and I really like his vocal style; he fits a lot of words in. I suppose there's a similarity there with Randy Newman, both very classy American songwriters. As far as our treatment goes, well, I love the original and I suppose we've copied it really."
BLITZKRIEG BOP The Ramones brilliantly dumb original re-visited in svelte, singalong mood.
"Like every sensible person, I am a big Ramones fan. They are, of course, one of the ultimate punk bands but I always think that the sweet, bubble-gum side of what they do is ignored. They're cousins of the Beach Boys really. It's traditional pop but a little rough around the edges."
STONE IN LOVE WITH YOU Like ELO, the Stylistics are another band whose records were ubiquitous in car and pub and bedroom in the 1970s but whose toothsome pop wasn't cool enough for the rock intelligentsia. The BEAUTIFUL SOUTH are re-writing pop history again.
"This is just a lovely song and the idea came from our last Christmas party when I sang it at the karaoke. I'd never sung falsetto for a whole song. It's an enjoyable thing to do but get it wrong for a second and you're lost. Another sentimental reason for including it was that the Stylistics was the first live band I ever saw. Fairfield Hall. Croydon. 1976."
Ahhh! And with that, and perhaps only a slightly wistful thought for the version of Since You've Been Gone that might have been, I'll leave you to put on your black spandex boob tube, skip back to Track One and start the party all over again.
Delores / Link to Here
|
