Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: The Beautiful South “0898 Beautiful South”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Beautiful South
Album Title: 0898 Beautiful South
Year released: 1992
Year reissued: 2018
Details: black vinyl

The skinny: Last week, I posted about how I purchased a reissue of The Beautiful South’s debut album, “Welcome to The Beautiful South“, without a second thought when I saw it became available for pre-order. This week, I’m back to admit that this was maybe a fib. I actually did have a second thought and that was that I’d also would love to be ordering their third record, 1992’s “0898 Beautiful South”, at the same time. Luckily for me, this very same album was also reissued a few short months later and I wasted the same little amount of time before getting on the pre-order train. “0898” was the first album by the British alternative pop group that I purchased and was in fact one of the first handful of CDs I ever owned, so it found itself getting played a lot. My only knock against this reissue is that they went a little cheap on the packaging. The photos jammed onto one side of the inner sleeve (that you can see above) were each on their own page of a multi-page booklet that came with the original CD. It’s a shame because the image for each song is, in and of itself, a lovely piece of surrealism. All I need to do to forgive the record company, though, is put the record on and turn it up and I’m transported back to the early 90s.

Standout track: “36D”

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: The Beautiful South “Welcome to The Beautiful South”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Beautiful South
Album Title: Welcome to The Beautiful South
Year released: 1989
Year reissued: 2018
Details: black vinyl, fluffy toys cover

The skinny: If you missed it, I started a new series back on Monday – I’m counting down my 10 favourite albums from 1989. That first post gave a taster – albums 10 through 6 – and in a couple days I’ll unleash my fifth favourite album from that year. The Beautiful South’s debut album, “Welcome to The Beautiful South”, hit the number eight spot for me with their dichotomy of bright sounding alternative pop, complete with mind-blowing vocals by Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway, against dark lyrics and heavy subject matter. This reissue of that album came out two years ago and was a no brainer to snap up. However, I had no idea when I pre-ordered it that I would get this updated cover art. The CD I had back in the day (see Monday’s post) was the Canadian version that was already scaled back from the original, somewhat controversial cover you can see in the video below. The ‘fluffy toys’ cover is almost too cute for words… but I kind of think that’s the point.

Standout track: “Woman in the wall”

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1990: #15 The Beautiful South “A little time”

<< #16    |    #14 >>

Being that I grew up in small-town Southern Ontario, Canada, in an age before the wonders of the Internet, it often happened that I came upon a band’s more popular and successful material, long after I did their less successful work. I discovered The Beautiful South’s “A little time” and their second album, “Choke”, years after their debut and third albums had become close friends. Truly, by the time I came across this song and the album on which it appears, I had listened to “0898” countless times (had written all my first year university essays to it), was intimate with each song, and knew most of the lyrics therein, like I knew every acne scar on my young twenty-something face. I never knew then that their third record was seen as a bit of a letdown after “Choke” and that none of its singles had reached as high on the UK singles charts as did “A little time”, their only tune to reach the number one position.

None of this is really surprising given that the band never achieved the same success here in North America. However, I was super eager to follow them as soon as I learned that they were an offshoot of 80s indie pop group, The Housemartins. Formed around the vocals of Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway, The Beautiful South added Briana Corrigan as a third vocalist for “Choke” after she had guested successfully on their debut, “Welcome to the Beautiful South”. And it was the interplay between the three vocalists, especially the male/female sparring, that marked the group’s sound, set them apart, and along with their smart and jarring lyrics, was the likely reason for the modicum of success they achieved over their nine-album career.

“A little time” is a perfect illustration of the band’s magic. Featuring Hemingway and Corrigan on vocals, it jingles and jangles and tells the story of a relationship that sours after the male decides he needs “a little time” to, as he puts it, “think things over” and “find himself”. But when he decides he’s ready to settle down, he learns that the female didn’t sit by the phone to wait for him.

You had a little time
And you had a little fun
Didn’t you, didn’t you
While you had yours
Do you think I had none?

It’s not a little. It’s lots of fun. “A little time” plays the Brechtian-irony card well, pitting the dark and cynical vocals against the rays of the sunshine in the instrumentation.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1990 list, click here.