Nobody ever confused real life for a pop song. This is because pop songs are thrilling and gaudy and juiced with emotion and real life tends mostly to be grey and pointless. The day you find yourself trapped inside a James Blunt ditty or inhabiting a 50 Cent lyric is the day you ask a close and trusted relative to pump you full of sedatives and summon a shrink.
To Paul Heaton, frontman for the past 16 years of the morose and very English MOR troupe The Beautiful South, the disparity between the world beyond his front-door and aural glitter sluicing from the radio has always felt absurd.
Film and literature have profited by embracing and celebrating the quiet glories of honest living. Why must musicians constantly feel under pressure to embellish?
“In pop music, everybody is good looking and you get the girl,” says Heaton, here to promote The Beautiful South’s 11th album, Superbi. “Or else it’s exactly the opposite. Everything’s crap and everybody’s depressed. Both are actually a distortion of reality. What I’ve constantly attempted to do is write songs that are set in reality. That are about grow-ups faced with grown-up situations.”
By his own admission a ‘bloody-minded sod’, Heaton has a great deal for which to thank his curmudgeonly streak.
To begin with, there is the small matter of album sales of 15 million. Yes, it’s an over-egged statistic, but one worth repeating: Carry On Up The Charts, the Beautiful South’s 1994 retrospective, remains the UK’s best-selling greatest hits (one in seven British households is reputed to own a copy).
Platinum box-office has, among other things, afforded Heaton – not nearly as grumpy in person as you might imagine – a platform from which to vent his avowedly old-school brand of Marxism. Surely though, he feels a twinge holding forth on the rights of workers from his millionaire perch?
“We get paid too much in this industry, without a doubt,” admits Heaton. “The thing is, you’ve got to accept those ground-rules and carry on. We’ve always run this band as a collective – everybody gets an equal share of the profits, which doesn’t happen very often let me tell you. I got my head around what it meant to be relatively well-known and successful with the Housemartins [Heaton’s previous band]. I’ve made my peace with being wealthy.”
For all of The Beautiful South’s commercial heft, critical approval has always appeared teasingly out of reach. Put simply, hip young things cannot bear to admit a liking for Heaton’s laconic balladry, no matter that it gives voice to a wit no less caustic or tormented than that of Morrissey.
“We’re fated not to be loved,” Heaton grimaces. “I’ve been an awkward outsider since I was a kid. I’ve never fitted in. In Hull, I remember turning up to school in a Scotland jersey during the World Cup. I’m the eternal difficult soul.”
Funkier and rather more loose-limbed than previous Beautiful South dispatches, Superbi is, says Heaton, the sound of a band belatedly summoning the confidence to try something different.
“It sounds silly considering how many records we’ve sold, but I think we needed to work with a new producer [Ian Stanley, once of Tears For Fears, oversaw the sessions] to encourage us to try a new direction. There’s a lot of slide guitar and rhythm on the album. Maybe we didn’t have the confidence to go there before.”
Still, that old Beautiful South grit lingers like a familiar comforting odor. Superbi may have aspirations towards funk – if so, it’s surely one of the glummest party albums you will encounter. This is clear from the cover, featuring a shot of a battered bus by British realist photographer Martin Parr.
“It’s a kind of metaphor, isn’t it,” laughs Heaton. “If you were to describe this band, you could say we were a bit of a battered old bus. We’ve outlived our usefulness, but we keep on going.”