POPFESSIONS

Andy Welch

Most music lovers have an epiphany; a moment when the Panini stickers or Sylvanian Families are put away to gather dust in the corner, and bedroom walls become more than essential features that hold up a ceiling, but vehicles to display pictures of popstars your parents with hopefully disapprove of. 

For those of a certain age, that moment might have been Mick Ronson putting his arm around Bowie on Top Of The Pops. Cor, homoeroticism!

My eureka moment also arrived while watching Top Of The Pops, but it wasn’t Mick and The Dame’s extra-terrestrial flirting that did it – it might have been had I been born then – nor was it John and Paul shaking their moptops, or even His Mozness limply waving flowers around with his shirt open to the navel.

My ears pricked up when I heard Dave Rotheray proclaiming his love for the girls of his dreams, Jennifer, Alison, Philippa, Sue, Deborah and Annabelle too.

I was eight when The Beautiful South performed Song For Whoever on Top Of The Pops. It’s a song I’ve since come to realise is about a songwriter who falls in love solely to provide songwriting material.

Back in 1989, I didn’t understand that, I just thought the idea of someone loving from the bottom of a pencil case was funny (funny odd, not funny haha), but I did wonder why the singer sounded so sad if he was getting the attention of all these ladies.

This wasn’t my first encounter with music – my Beatles-obsessed dad wouldn’t have allowed that – or even my first musical memory. (That, dear reader, is me, aged four, rosy cheeked having stolen a sip of my mum’s unguarded sherry, standing on the front window ledge serenading the gathered family with Paul McCartney’s No More Lonely Nights. What a Boxing Day that was.)

Crucially, though, The Beautiful South were the first band I’d encountered by myself, and that felt very important to me.

Anyway, fast forward a few years and my obsession with the ‘South was at fever pitch thanks to getting their greatest hits collection Carry On Up The Charts for my 13^th birthday, a tape I went on to wear out.

I played it each and every night on my twin cassette player, side one one night, side two the next. My archaic cassette player had a volume control for both speakers, so if I bored of the album – perish the thought – I’d listen to just the left channel to see what was happening there, and the same with the right side another night.

I wouldn’t say I know Carry On Up The Charts like the back of my hand. I know it far better than that. Every note of every instrument is in my head, lyrics, phrasing, and gaps between the songs. If I hear, say, I’ll Sail This Ship Alone in isolation now and it’s not followed by the opening glissando of A Little Time, something doesn’t feel quite right with the world.

I still love the kitchen-sink element to the songs, the oh-so-British sardonicism, the feeling no relationship is ever going to work out quite to plan, and the way Paul Heaton always wrote at the top of each vocalist’s range. The slight strain somehow adds to the melodrama and sense of desperation in each of the characters he wrote about. 

I’m not embarrassed about ‘The Beautiful South Years’, and it’s hard to argue with songs as perfect as Prettiest Eyes and Bell Bottomed Tear. If anything, I like the fact I was almost certainly the only 15-year-old in North Wales concerned the band wouldn’t be able to match the quality of Blue Is The Colour again. (And I was right, the follow-up, Quench, is a poor record by anyone’s standards.)

I now write about music for a living, and have interviewed Paul Heaton a few times. I don’t think he suspected he’s to blame for my ongoing infatuation with music, and, considering his voice was the last thing I heard each night for the best part of five years, it’s probably best he never finds out.