(#558: 2 November 1996, 1 week)
Track listing: Don’t Marry Her/Little Blue/Mirror/Blackbird On The Wire/The Sound Of North America/Have Fun/Liars’ Bar/Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)/Foundations/Artificial Flowers/One God/Alone
From guilty but solvent middle-class streets, we travel to innocent but ceaselessly-punished working-class terraces, or get marooned in some gaudily polite halfway house. Why The Beautiful South’s affable rancour hits when Simply Red’s angry consolation can do little more than tickle might have its roots in a shadier but more defiant defensiveness against those who strive to hide or minimise what they see as smug assaults on “their” music.
Dave Hemingway spells it out in the sourly-melancholic anti-capitalist tirade “The Sound Of North America”; it is all about keeping those countenances, whatever their personal cost to personal happiness, remaining in strict line with unwritten but understood societal contracts. You can be as “wacky” as you wish, but as the song indicates, God help you if you sing out of key or fail to follow the script – and that goes for everyone, even if you happen to have been Presley, Garbo or Ali.
It is the international system of capitalism which determines the totality of anti-life on the dulled planet of Blue Is The Colour, The Beautiful South’s fifth and darkest studio album (cf. Paddy Chayefsky via Ned Beatty). Blue as in sad, blue as in the Conservative Party who at this point were barely clinging onto power, blue as in a post-Derek Jarman haze which refuses to dissipate.
Blue Is The Colour, much like Scott 3 had done for a wider cast of characters half a lifetime previously, focuses principally upon one unhappy couple stuck in one of those terraces. He is a chronic alcoholic, she has been frustrated into dullness. They both want something better but lack the capacity or courage to do anything about it, other than self-destruct in unwitnessed defence.
Where The Beautiful South score over Simply Red is that you cannot really avoid or avert yourself from what some might perceive as ugliness. If the voices of Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott sound ostensibly “unattractive” (although they certainly do not sound as such to me) then in many ways that is the music’s point. They have unattractive things to say about the kind of situation you’d dive into the Pacific to avoid (San Francisco Bay?). Those charmed or cumulatively bored by the relatively harmless radio version of “Don’t Marry Her” may have been startled on the recorded version to hear Abbott casually toss “fuck me” onto the song’s central hook as though darning another needle (“Those blackbirds look like knitting needles”; cue an atonal onomatopoeic piano descent), as though it were a big deal; just do it, the song seems to demand.
The subject matter of “Don’t Marry Her” is identical to that of the Specials’ “Too Much, Too Young,” but Abbott’s brashly amiable insistence trumps Terry Hall’s grumpy mouth-foaming. The sentiments sound so much more convincing coming from the woman’s point of view. Here, she says, don’t settle for boredom and premature, wilting death, let’s have fun instead…
Cut to the song “Have Fun,” which Heaton reckons is the saddest song he ever wrote, and which he and Abbott perform as a duo, with its closely-miked acoustic pickings reminiscent of…blackbirds pecking. The song pitilessly documents a mock-relationship built on mutual loathing; he is literally too drunk to fuck (“I’ve had a life of booze, but that’s all I’ve ever had”) and in both of their minds lurks a ghost, of someone who actually has possession of their hearts – and this could be a Sliding Doors scenario where the man does run off and fuck her…but then they discover, too late, that fucking is all they will ever have in common.
Over and over this album talks of “graves” and “whores” in ways which aren’t that far away from (but work considerably more effectively than) Nick Cave’s contemporaneous Murder Ballads. Abbott even sings “Mirror” cast as a prostitute, wanting more than this rotten world is ever prepared or even programmed to offer to her – the chorus of “So imagine a mirror bigger than the room it was placed in/Imagine my wish for a future that cannot hold my wish” is one of the most tragic lyrical passages in all of the group’s catalogue. A victim who may well be repeatedly visited by the travelling salesman (or is he just a glorified wino?) of “Liars’ Bar” or the pissed-off pisshead of “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere).”
These two latter songs form both sides of the same coin. As a regular, Walkman-bearing commuter between London and Oxford at the time, I associate the opulent emptiness of “Rotterdam” with the point past the huge open tunnel of chalkface cliffs, just before the Lewknor turnoff, where London, or the notion of London, decisively ends and Oxfordshire begins. The eerie one-note high-C string line piercing each chorus like the most courteous of lances, or the most poisonous of cocktail cherries, encapsulates the song’s essence of irreparable, icy isolation, as Abbott sings Heaton’s words about an alcoholic wreck stumbling into a bar, only to be angrily told that he/she can’t just have a drink and be done with it, and silently scolded for not blending in with the anonymously international clientele. Heaton used to escape on the ferry from Hull to the Netherlands whenever he felt bored – although, as “Alone” direly points out, loneliness and boredom can in certain circumstances prove interchangeable – and “Rotterdam” is actually a calm diatribe against the international capitalist standardising of things, and humans. Everybody everywhere the same…the whole world as The Village.
Whereas “Liars’ Bar,” ostensibly a funny, extended Tom Waits pastiche, could be talking about the same person several glasses or bottles down the line. Actually it stops being funny about halfway through and patiently mutates into something a lot more sinister – Heaton’s growl is too harsh and leonine to mimic that of Waits and when he slurs and machine-guns lines like “He's missed a hell of a lot of buses for a man who wants to roam” he starts to scare. The use of the Glaswegian term “pish” suggests a sozzled Patrick Doyle, the self-destroying anti-hero of Kelman’s A Disaffection; his next logical step from weaving in and out of traffic islands, hiccupping and joking to no laughs.
The personal and political aspects of Blue Is The Colour reluctantly coexist in simmering parallels. “Foundations,” sung by Hemingway with an entertaining horn section/organ introduction which sounds quite like…The Foundations…knows that capitalism is going to destroy everything but warns in Heaton’s pet lyrical trick of piled-up similes, that trying to do anything about it (implication: that does not involve blood and violence) will frankly be akin to farting against thunder. Meanwhile, in “One God,” Heaton cautions, in words worthy of Richey Edwards (“Well, if Peter is a prostitute, then what does that make me?”), that the world has been shrunken to global Disney plastic.
As far as looks of love are concerned, “Little Blue” (sung by Hemingway) is a canny “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” variant, exhausted by pretence – they might seem happy to the outside world, but her eyes roll with different clouds of thunder. But “Blackbird On The Wire,” as sung by Heaton – and we do not really hear directly from him at all on this record until its fourth song – is the album’s masterpiece, a vast canyon of electronic melancholy fully worthy of Older (and George Michael may for all I know have kicked himself moderately hard for not having thought of the song first). It is as if he sees this other woman – you know, the one who urges him not to marry her (1) but fuck her (2) instead (or does the whole of “Don’t Marry Her” only happen on the inside of Heaton’s head?) – and…he doesn’t know what to do. He knows, or anyway thinks, that she’ll be able to take him away from all of this domestic hell.
But he’s not going to do anything about it. The song bears an underlying bitterness – do “the people” who “actually come and ask me how I feel” (the “actually” accented to imply the prefix “they have the nerve to…”) really have a “tongue built from quicksilver and the character of steel” (the latter phrase gives rise to Heaton’s most outwardly angry vocal phrasing on the record), or by “the people” does he mean the one person that he’s with? Yet he knows himself only too well…no, he will sacrifice his own happiness, he will not be one of the “thousand other guys who'd say they loved you with all the rest of their lies” (cf. The Association), he will play it cool and inelegantly walk away (as Matt Monro had already done in the pop charts when Heaton was still only two years old); his tears, much like Matt’s protagonist, will “fall unnoticed…down below,” and the emphasis Heaton places on the phrase “down below” leaves no doubt as to what he means by it. Who knows – as with the object of Eddie Kendricks’ affection in “Just My Imagination,” she might not even be aware that he exists. But putting others above oneself with salvageable dignity. That’s socialism.
Thus Heaton is left unhappy and the album ends with the deceptively harrowing Heaton/Abbott duet “Alone.” Deceptive, because…well, a lot of the time with the scenarios of Beautiful South songs I think not quite so much Gilbert O’Sullivan or Jake Thackeray as I do of…Victoria Wood, or Mike Leigh. Or, keeping it in the should-be-beautiful North, Alan Bennett. Christgau approvingly considers Heaton’s art as that of the music hall entertainer, singing to and for the economically disadvantaged, and makes the excellent point that, as Ray Davies does, Heaton scrupulously avoids the slightest hint of sentimentality in his observations (“Alone” works in part because it comes packaged as a jaunty jazz ballad or vaudeville lament, rather like Davies’ double-edged sword of “Sunny Afternoon” and “Dead End Street” - perceptions of how the poor live versus how the poor are actually forced to live).
And then there is The Beautiful South’s interpretation of “Artificial Flowers.” The song was written for the 1960 Broadway musical Tenderloin, which was set in the red-light district of Manhattan at the end of the nineteenth century. A worthy clerical social reformer determines to “clean up” this district and its Spanish practices. The latter constantly hinder his efforts, but a scandal sheet hack gets intrigued by the affair and decides to infiltrate the Reverend Brock (for that is the worthy clerical social reformer’s name)’s church.
This he does by coming up with and performing a song called “Artificial Flowers” which he intends as a deliberate send-up of weepy, melodramatic Victorian-era parlour ballads with an improbable lyrical scenario (girl loses parents aged nine, has to make artificial flowers for “ladies of fashion” in her cold, squalid tenement room, is discovered frozen to death). The song was probably interpreted most famously in August 1960 by Bobby Darin, who treats it like an uptempo Rat Pack stomper in the “Mack The Knife” vein, presumably steering a steamroller of irony while doing so.
There is no irony in Paul Heaton’s reading of the same song. Here the personal and political are indivisible. He grasps the essence of what “Artificial Flowers” really is about – cheap and nasty child labour – much as Alex Harvey understood the essentially squalid nature of the song “Delilah.” It’s the fucking system that killed her, he seems to imply, the same self-satisfied fashionable system from which you, guilty middle-class streets who buy my records and never listen to the words, profit so wonderfully. Cue Anne Reid’s monologue about the one-pound T-shirt in Years And Years. If red is ever to be the colour, simply or otherwise, it might have to make itself apparent in the form of blood.
