Welcome To The Beautiful South

Product Information

The Beautiful South's 1989 debut would be important if only to mark the partial continuance of the Housemartins' legacy. But when vocalist Paul Heaton and drummer Dave Hemmingway greeted the world with Welcome to the Beautiful South, the handshake came with a Cheshire grin. Nothing in the Beautiful South was as it seemed. Where there was jaunty, jazzy pop, crossed fingers warned of murderous lyrics. If a single featured a fluttering flute, it was filled with familial terror. "Woman in the Wall," featuring one of the year's most memorable melodies and Heaton's plaintive lead vocal, also featured lines like "He'd enjoyed the thought of killing her before" and "when the rotting flesh began to stink." But even in the album's most gruesome moments, the streak of cynical, caustic sarcasm running through it was as clear as crop circles. This fact only made Welcome's twee goodness that much more fun, for with each well-placed barb it further proved what the Housemartins had started: pop didn't have to be stupid” – AllMusic After a band meeting on 30 January 2007, the Beautiful South decided to split. They released a statement on 31 January 2007, in which they joked that their reasons for splitting were "musical similarities"—an ironic reference to "musical differences", which are often cited as the reason for a band's split. "The band would like to thank everyone for their 19 wonderful years in music", the statement also said. [2] Taylor, Stella (14 June 2007). "A poignant musical dissertation on student life and dreams". Gazette and Herald . Retrieved 1 November 2019. If you never knew you could bop your head to lighthearted songs about murder, well, welcome to The Beautiful South. After politically minded Hull-based indie pop outfit The Housemartins went their separate ways in 1988, vocalist Paul Heaton and drummer Dave Hemingway formed The Beautiful South, the name being a glib nod to Southern England from a band with Northern roots. Their first single—a deeply cynical love song called "Song for Whoever”—was released in September of 1989 and laid out the band’s musical framework of pairing darkly tongue-in-cheek lyrics with jazzy piano riffs and sprightly melodies. The band’s first foray climbed to No. 2 on the charts and their equally bitter romp, "You Keep It All In", with vocalist Briana Corrigan providing a sweet counter note, followed suit. A month later, they released their debut, Welcome to the Beautiful South, sharing their caustic musical humour with fans who were in on the joke. Their peppy breakup anthem "A Little Time" from their 1990 album Choke went to No. 1 as fans related to its spurned lover’s revenge theme, and the singles compilation, Carry on Up the Charts, which they released in 1994, was so popular it reportedly could be found in one in every seven UK households. Over the course of the next 10 years, the band released a steady stream of albums that told grim stories and bleak romances all wrapped in jaunty tunes, as well as jazz-pop covers of songs like Pebbles’ “Girlfriend” and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”. The band broke up in 2007, spinning off into solo acts and other iterations. On their way out the door, they released a statement saying they were splitting up “due to musical similarities”—a fittingly cheeky farewell. HOMETOWN Hull, England Erlewine, Stephen Thomas (9 October 1995). "Carry on Up the Charts: The Best of the Beautiful South - The Beautiful South". AllMusic . Retrieved 28 February 2014.

years later and “Song for Whoever”, with its subverting and brilliant pulling apart of love song tropes, is still my favourite Beautiful South song. So why didn’t I buy Welcome to The Beautiful South at the earliest opportunity? Because I was ten years old when it came out, that’s why. A few years later there would be a copy of the The Best of The Beautiful South: Carry On Up the Charts compilation in our house. This compilation opened with “Song for Whoever”, and contained pretty much every Beautiful South number that I had any affection for, and as a teenager with very limited disposable income, I never really investigated The Beautiful South any further, outside of being partial to their tunes when I heard them on the radio.There are some songs from your childhood that you clearly remember hearing on the radio for the first time. It was summer 1989, and it was a period of change in my life which my ten year old self was feeling pretty optimistic about. My family were about to move house, I was about to go up to senior school, both big life-events for your average ten year old. I was sat in our old kitchen, my mum was cooking tea with the radio on, something which she habitually did despite the fact she wasn’t a huge fan of late 80s pop music, when suddenly this piano feature was punctuated with a line which I now consider among the greatest opening lines in the history of popular song “I love you from the bottom of my pencil case”. As opening lines to songs go, it’s an absolute winner. Except this just wasn’t any old song. This was the debut single by The Beautiful South, and therefore the first time the public had heard anything by this band. As opening lines to your career go, “I love you from the bottom of my pencil case” may very well be the greatest ever, and is certainly in songwriter Paul Heaton’s top five. As what was to become their usual modus operandi, Welcome to The Beautiful South included unreleased material on the B-sides of the singles taken from their albums. [11]

Find sources: "The Beautiful South"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( November 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)It's All Two Beautiful". NME. 23 November 2000. Archived from the original on 29 January 2009 . Retrieved 14 August 2008.

Clark, Graham (8 August 2022). "Interview With Dave Hemingway - Ex Beautiful South Singer". The Yorkshire Times . Retrieved 30 August 2023. Why it took a little time for The Beautiful South's Jacqui Abbott to find her voice again". Belfast Telegraph. 24 October 2014 . Retrieved 27 April 2016.The album Quench (1998) was released with similar commercial success, again reaching number one in the UK album charts. " Perfect 10", the first single to be released from the album, also provided the band with further singles chart success. The album is also notable for being more uptempo, and being the first on which Heaton and Hemingway's former Housemartins colleague Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) was used in a consultancy role. [14] Painting It Red release and Abbott's departure [ edit ] Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. So here we are 30 years after its release. Is Welcome to The Beautiful South as good as the band's arresting debut single would suggest?