Blue is the colour --- The Beautiful South --- 1996 (GO! Disc Records)
The only album I have from this band in my collection, and why? Well, one sunny afternoon the doorbell rang and there was the figure we all dread to see, the door-to-door trader who has such great bargains that he simply can't live with himself if he lets you go without making a sale. I mean, it would be rude! These guys are, as you probably know, should you have the bad judgement or luck to open the door to them, notoriously intransigent and relentless. If you don't buy something they keep dropping the price, pushing, pushing, trying to wear you down. Normally I just make some excuse --- bedclothes? Nah, just bought a whole new set thanks! Perfume? Don't use it mate! --- and eventually, after a decent effort to try not to be impolite, close the door in their face. Nothing says "No sale!" quite as well as a slammed door.
But this once I found myself mildly interested. This guy was selling CDs. Hmm. Mind you, my hopes didn't get up too high: usually when someone's selling CDs door to door they're a) cheap knock-offs and b) chart rubbish. And so they were. Albums I wouldn't take if he had been giving them away. But then I noticed this album in his voluminous bag and I thought, well, you know, I've heard a few singles, they're popular at the moment but still cool enough to be credible: what the hell? Give it a go.
So I didn't really expect too much once I got around to playing the disc (this was back in the nineties, before I ended up downloading far more music than I could ever expect to listen to, and discs being a physical item tended to get played more or less right away) but I was impressed. It didn't make me a fan of theirs, didn't send me scurrying out on a search for their other albums, but it was decent enough that even now I sometimes play it through, forgetting how good it is.
The opener is well known, with its upbeat acoustic guitar intro and Jacqui Abbot's lilting vocal sweetly singing
"Don't marry her, fuck me" as it was a hit single for them, one of four from the album. Nice bit of piano and organ with electric guitar then coming in too, and it's a sarcastic, bitter and yet engaging song that had everyone singing the chorus with drunken glee, a tale of the dangers of getting tied down with a wife and two-point-four kids. Another acoustic effort in "Little blue", this time with Paul Heaton taking the vocal, very laidback but with a dark tone underpinning it, and "Mirror" has a more folky feel to it on the guitar, the percussion from Dave Stead helping it along and it sort of presages the big hit "Rotterdam" later. There are some fairly surreal lyrics:
"Imagine a mirror bigger/ Than the room it was placed in/ Imagine a rod / That cannot hold the fish." Jacqui takes vocal duties here again and does well with them.
One of the standouts then is next, as with a lovely flowing piano line "Blackbird on the wire" becomes the first real ballad. Heaton sings this one with a soft, crooning voice, accompanied by Damon Butcher on the piano. Butcher is not a part of The Beautiful South, and is credited as an additional musician on the album, but he's indispensable for this track which it completely built on his keyboard melody. Slightly more upbeat then is "The sound of North America" with bitter recrimination in the lyric ---
"The sound of North America / Isn't the sound of Christians praying/ It's the sound of shuffling feet/ That don't know where they're staying" --- and some lovely strings programming and horns. Then the inappropriately-titled "Have fun" is a lovely soft mid-paced song with both Abbott and Heaton singing, with sarcasm and irony dripping from every line ---
Have fun/ And if you can't have fun/ Have someone else's fun/ Cos someone sure had mine."
You know something? For all the yelling, screeching and cursing punk spat at us, sometimes it's the simple songwriting craft of a normal band that gets the message across more effectively. I mean, what can you say about a line like
"I'm the lighthouse-keeper/ To the owner of this shipwrecked heart"? Lovely rising keyboard lines here and more strings, ending on a nice high guitar passage. Superb. Heaton then emulates my hero Tom Waits in the wonderfully sleazy "Liar's bar", doing a passable imitation of the gravel-voiced music icon, even writing a lyric Waits would probably be proud of:
"I'm a stand-up comedian/ But I'd sit down if I could/ The world just seems to want/ People like me to stand." Again great piano work from Butcher --- what else would you have in a Waitsesque song? Strangely though this was released as a single. This is never single material: it's a great album track but the record-buying chart-loving sheep would never entertain this.
The final single, and the biggest hit from the album, is of course "Rotterdam (or anywhere)", which hit a chord with pub audiences everywhere with its upbeat, devil-may-care lyric and party atmosphere. Carried mostly on guitar and keys it's a toe-tapper for sure with Jacqui back on vocals. A real jazzy number next, replete with horns and rockabilly guitar, not one of my favourites on the album to be honest. "Foundations" is a short track, the shortest on the album in fact at just over two and a half minutes and coming closest to their previous incarnation the Housemartins. Another ballad, "Artificial flowers" appears to be a very old showtune and the only cover on the album, driven again on Damon Butcher's lonely piano and warbling organ. Sad little song, along the lines of the Little Matchstick Girl. "One god" is led in by Butcher's soft organ and a sort of tripping percussion, with Jacqui back on vocals, joined by Paul later for a rather touching duet as the song reaches its climax.
Another tip of the hat to Waits in the shuffling closer, "Alone", which gives you the definite impression of a man in a shabby overcoat wending his way home under guttering streetlights, clutching a brown paper bag from which he takes another swig before tossing it into the street, not watching where it lands as he attempts to cross the street against the traffic. Thank you, and goodnight. Great little closer to a pretty unexpectedly great album.
TRACKLISTING
1. Don't marry her
2. Little blue
3. Mirror
4. Blackbird on the wire
5. The sound of North America
6. Have fun
7. Liars' bar
8. Rotterdam (or anywhere)
9. Artificial flowers
10. One god
11. Alone
So I suppose in the end I should be more tolerant of those hawkers, shouldn't I? After all, without that interruption to my day and knock at the door I would in all likelihood never have thought of buying this album, and if I remember correctly (which is never a given by any means) I brought it into work and everyone there wanted to hear it or have a copy of it. So being a pirated copy itself, it got replicated several times. How's that for self-propogating?
But then, when an album is this good you really do want to spread it around as much as you can, which is what I did. The difference being, of course, that I took no payment for the copies I made (yer honour!) --- the appreciation of the music by my workmates was all the reward I needed or wanted.