The Beautiful South - Gold Diggas, Head Nodders and Pholk Songs

THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH
Gold Diggas, Head Nodders and Pholk Songs Sony
****

Dilemma: The Beautiful South bring all their sarky musical intelligence to their cover of Don't Stop Moving, transmogrifying it from a mindless piece of plastic pop to a louche cabaret standard. But it's still an S Club 7 song and they are Satan's Spawn - so what to do? That obstacle surmounted, there are delights aplenty on this all-covers album from one of the most successful British bands of the last few decades. With their originals, The Beautiful South always played off the Bacharach/David and Jimmy Webb songbook, albeit with a bit more grit and grime, and here they superimpose their peerless sound over an expertly curated collection of soul classics, glitter-ball disco anthems and punk hits. There's courage aplenty as they squeeze the chewing-gum romance right out of Travolta and Newton John's You're The One That I Want before excelling themselves with an inspired reading of ELO's Living Thing. There's no particular rhyme or reason to their selection: a Lush song is followed by a Willie Nelson song, but holding it all together is the vocal understanding of main singers Paul Heaton, David Hemingway and new member Alison "Lady" Wheeler as they boldly go where no cover versions have gone before. Not everything works as it should: the Ben E King cover ('Til I Can't Take It Anymore) is always going to suffer from the fact that nobody can sing as well as Ben E King, and they never really get a handle on Rufus Wainwright's Rebel Prince. When they hit it, though, it's sublime: Don't Fear The Reaper is reclaimed with some panache from the horrid Blue Oyster Cult, while The Stylistics' Stone In Love With You is audaciously carried off. Pick of the pops, though, is their superb overhaul of The Ramones' Blitzkreig Bop, which is re-cast as a "doo-wop" affair and wouldn't sound out of place on an early Abba album.

www.beautifulsouth.co.uk