Product Description

Formed from the ashes of the Housemartins, The Beautiful South became one of England's most successful bands. Released in 1989, their debut, WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH, introduces the band's style. Musically, the songs are often deceptively sweet sounding, while lyrically brutally sardonic, even cruel. This combination keeps their records extremely edgyand sometimes uncomfortable, though there's no denying the band's skill.
A perfect example of this is "Woman in the Wall", which is musically energetic and triumphal, though its lyrics owe something to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", telling a horrifying story of spousal abuse that results in murder. Other standouts include "Song for Whoever", which starts as a sweet love song before the narrator confesses that the song was written for at least 10 different women, "Straight In at 37", which takes a couple of memorable potshots at popsters Simon Le Bon and Paul Young, and the epic "Love Isa", featuring three different vocalists, including Briana Corrigan, who eventually became a full-fledged member of the band.

Track Listing

1. Song For Whoever
2. Have You Ever Been Away
3. From Under The Covers
4. I'll Sail This Ship Alone
5. Girlfriend
6. Straight In At 37
7. You Keep It All In
8. Woman In The Wall
9. Oh Blackpool
10. Love Is...
11. I Love You (But You're Boring)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9805 in Music
• Released on: 1991-04-30
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 50 minutes

From Amazon.com
The Housemartins used crazily bouncing melodies to sweeten their political pop. After they broke up after just two albums, P.D. Heaton tried a similar technique with the Beautiful South--lush melodies, rolling piano, and beautiful voices sugar-coating delightfully subversive lyrics. Only where the Housemartins railed against bankers and unthinking sheep, the Beautiful South moved from the political to the personal (except for some delicious swipes at the music biz), writing gorgeous love songs to dull partners ("I Love You But You're Boring"), gruesome murders ("Woman in the Wall"), and conversation fear ("You Keep It All In"). Funnier still is "Song for Whoever," which reveals the man behind the love song: "Oh Shirley, Oh Deborah, Oh Julie, Oh Jane/I wrote so many songs about you/I forget your name." --David Daley

Customer Reviews

Welcome to the Liars Bar....
Something from the pen of Paul Heaton is always a cause for interest and this debut from the six-peice from Hull is certainly an album of interest.
"You Keep It All In" and "Song For Whoever" are intelligent pop-classics. "From Under The Covers" and "Woman In The Wall" are two other very examples of Heaton and Rotheray's excellent song-writing.
What lets this album down is its cheap production sound. There is no bass to the sound on this album and some of the other songs don't quite cut the mustard. However this album showed enough potential for you to buy their second one.

An excellent intro
An excellent introduction to The Beautiful South. Check out Paul Heaton's earlier incarnation in the Housemartins too...

Lyrical and musical, something for the 30 to 50 year olds only... probably.

Perfect pop... a Pet Sounds for the 80’s.
This is one of the finest albums I’ve ever had on my CD player. Welcome to the Beautiful South is 50 minutes of pure pop perfection, as Heaton, Corrigan and Co. croon along to infectious jazz beats with literary pop hooks, tales of marital abuse, alcoholisms and the moribund exasperation of modern-day relationships. If this were Radiohead or Lou Reed, the band would have had us reaching for the razor blades by the end of track three. Instead, song-writing duo Heaton and Rotheray take a leaf out of Morrissey’s song book and inject their morbid musing with a satirical wit and comedic depth.

The result is how you would imagine Noel Coward sounding if he’d lived through the eighties recession. Bitter, bile-spewing though utterly charming; lifting the spirits for those unwilling to pay attention, whilst giving the rest of us a lesson in how to create substantial pop. The biggest hits are the best of the bunch, with Song for Whoever and You Keep it all In representing not only two of the finest tracks of 80’s pop music, but two of the finest works of pop music ever. They may be deceptively downbeat and cynical to the full, but still somehow, as romantic and beautiful as music can get. However, it is not just the jazzy piano ballads that impress, oh no, there’s also some wonderful guitar work on display... most notably on the rocking Girlfriend and the somewhat trivial, though always entertaining, Straight in at 37.

The closing numbers are as different as you could possibly get to the majority of pop music being created at the time. Love is... begins in a way not too dissimilar to the rest of the album with it’s melancholic tales of middle-class love; before transforming into a wild and raucous sing a long corker, with more than a passing nod to The Beatles. Whilst the closing number, the wonderfully titled I Love You (But You’re Boring) is truly, unlike anything else on the album. Here a solo acoustic guitar leads us through sound effects, vocal passages, hidden voices and a whole lot of distortion as Heaton screams about a love that was too busy listening to Carousel, to bake a phallic cake.

This really is one of the best albums ever... and a debut to boot. The music is catchy, memorable and always intelligent, whilst the musicianship of the band is absolutely faultless. Though the future line up would change, and the band as a whole would go on to explore further lyrical dimensions and more experimental sonic textures, this is still the greatest example of band’s undiluted creativity. A must own for every household.