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

Q Review

The remorseless ascent of The Beautiful South's double Best of, Carry On Up The Charts, to current British sales of well over two million has been the most gobsmacking success story of the last two years.

After all, their previous studio album, Miaow, wasn't exactly chock-a-block with hits and even the odd new singles release from the new collection did little more than tap politely on the Top 20's door and then make a swift and apologetic retreat. A smattering of radio play, the odd TV appearance and a handful of gigs well after the album had taken off didn't amount to a Thriller-style promotion campaign either. No, the inarguable truth is that an awful lot of people like The Beautiful South. They like the bloody-minded ordinariness of the band themselves, they like the perverse sense of humour that drives their videos and artwork, they like their mordant pessimism but, most of all, they like their songs.

No matter that several songs here tip their hats to the American barroom tradition (most notably on the absurdly Waitsian Liars Bar, in which the perennially sweet-voiced Paul Heaton strains his pretty instrument into a tortured approximation of Tom Waits's grit-and-gravel style for nearly six agonising minutes), the Broadway blues and old-style country & western are all grist to their music-hall/back-of-the-pub aesthetic; The Beautiful South have never sounded more defiantly, self-laceratingly (Nothern) English.

Vapid foreign parts get a kicking on the charmingly bilious first single, Rotterdam, the Romanesque cruelties of the United States in general and New York in particular are lanced in The Sound of North America, and Disney culture is seen off in One God but mostly Heaton is nastiest about people. The opening Don't Marry Her has the sweetly appealing Jacqueline Abbott launching a savage attack on a rival and completing the title with a throwaway "Fuck Me", while Little Blue is a sickeningly cute ballad whose sweet subject is eventually revealed to be full of bile. As usual, Dave Rotheray's tunes are uniformly either pretty or jolly with built-in singalong accessibility, the aforementioned Liars Bar excepted, the trio of Heaton, Abbott and Rotheray sing like angels, and Heaton's lyrics rage wickedly at the human condition.

Towering above all these spleenful singalongs, however, is one beautifully poised ballad, Blackbird On The Wire, which finds a silver-voiced Heaton weak but rapt before an object of his affection and which deserves to become a standard. Business as usual then for The Beautiful South, Britain's biggest and best pub band, who remain blessedly incapable of drinking away their sorrows.**** (4 STARS)
Mark Cooper