This Is The Thread Where We Anticipate The Beautiful South's Covers Album

The S Club 7 one? The mind boggles.

I like the Beautiful South. I presume I'm in a minority with this though (on this board at least).

Vive le difference!

Are Bush the Foghat of the 90's?

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.

To whatever flack for the band who wrote this: that's WILLIE you stupid fucking PR-writing fuckwad!

Covering Rufus Wainwright = pouring salt on the slug that is me.

It might have been mis-spelled on the website by a Java-writing fuckwad, however.

Wait, but it doesn't actually better the original, does it?

I reckon it tonks it, though.

'Don't Fear The Reaper' is extremely classy too. Possibly disregard the whole 'salsa' thing, though, it doesn't go much beyond the keyboards.

I like the album, anyhow, but I suspect I'll be alone...

You quite probably are, yeah.

At this I point I should confess the only songs on the album whose originals I was familiar with are You're The One That I Want, Ciao!, Don't Stop Moving and Blitzkrieg Bop, so I can't really say how good they are relative to the originals. I've always had the feeling I should get myself an ELO compilation of some sort. Have to wait till I'm a bit less skint than I am now.