[ August 20, 2004 ]
Sony Music: Golddiggas
Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs
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."
Delores / Link to Here
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