Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/10/04
Label: Sony Music

Crikey! Is that a song from “Grease”? An S Club 7 hit? Done completely differently by someone else?

The filter of irony now being a universal component of the pop experience for mulleted Hoxtonite and Midlands headbanger alike, it’s been some time since revisionist covers of well-known songs felt ticklesomely subversive. Long before Scissor Sisters’ “Comfortably Numb”, or Travis’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, or Mike Flowers’ “Wonderwall”, certainly. Consequently, a whole album’s worth of revisionist covers of well-known songs by The Beautiful South – a band admittedly smart enough and musically well-equipped enough for the double-bluff, sideways-wink task – isn’t exactly news.

Indeed, the very nature of the undertaking means that band’s greatest strength – Paul Heaton’s twisted-and-bitter lyrical brilliance that has always cut the band’s MOR honey with waspish vinegar – is missing. Once you’ve accepted that fact, “Golddiggas…” has much to recommend it beyond Paul’s always-gorgeous sodden-choirboy voice. It’s a tribute to the South’s lush way with a buttery patina of sound that this is much more than a semi-smirking novelty makeweight record between a greatest hits and the next studio album. Throw in the band’s observation that hate as well as love has driven their playlist choices, and you’re in for a treat.

To the menu, then: a tender, sleepytime take on Willie Nelson’s “Valentine”, a sweetly cap-doffing run at Rufus Wainwright’s “Rebel Prince”, an accordion-brightened, summery waltz through The Heppelbaums’ “This Old Skin” and a game, gospelly, horn-graced run at southern soul in Ben E King standard “Till I Can’t Take It Any More”. All lovingly done, all beautifully turned out, all tracks that stand on their own eminently-listenable merits. Bigger on the “crikey” factor, as it were, are an amblingly unrecognisable and perhaps not even spiteful “Don’t Stop Moving”, a flittingly croonsome doo-wop improvement of ELO’s “Living Thing”, a slow, thrillingly dramatic “You’re The One That I Want” – probably the obvious calling card for this album – and a rubbery, folky, strangely Fifties-ish inversion of The Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop”, all scrubbed innocent faces and harmonies.

Perhaps fittingly, the two best moments here suggest a dead heat in the two-horse race between musically nimble mischief and unabashed affection. Blue Oyster Cult’s magnificently daft proto-goth/psychedelia epic “Don’t Fear The Reaper” is shanghaied into a delicious, weirdly apt samba as Paul Heaton and Alison Wheeler drip angelic menace, and The Stylistics’ “Stone In Love With You” is played straight, and pretty as an I-heart-you picture.

Job done, then. Now bring back the Heaton pen.

    by Jennifer Nine