The fishing industry in Hull was once a competitive power. The docks were flourishing, the sea was teeming and Hull was holding its own against Iceland in the fearsome Cod Wars. ‘They’re run down now’ laments Dave Hemingway.
Hemingway was a drummer for The Housemartins, an integral component of the vocal duo (Hemingway and Paul Heaton) that defined the successful contemplative pop of The Beautiful South. He started playing drums at school, joined a band called The Gargoyles and found himself at the energetic Adelphi Club. There was a time, around 1983 when the Hull Docks were really alive. ‘Not so much now,’ Hemingway admits.
Even Paul Heaton, chief songsmith of The Beautiful South, felt the pull of that old scene. One of the most successful Housemartins albums was called ‘Hull 4 – London 0. His song, ‘Pretenders to the Throne’ compares ‘Paris with its bustling cafes’ to ‘Hull with its musical flair’. Maybe you had to be there, back in the early 80s, to understand what Heaton was really on about.
Hemingway describes the scene as if he’d never left it, a memory that success has never dulled. Even though the Greatest Hits of The Beautiful South sits in one quarter of British homes; even though, back in 1994, The Housemartins were supported by the likes of the little known Oasis; even though The South, Hemingway’s latest venture, sold out Hull arena at the start of their tour. He’s philosophical about his success: ‘some bands make it, some bands don’t, that’s the way it’s always been’.
Some of it seems pretty silly now. The Gargoyles wrote a spoken word song that has to be heard to be believed: ‘The Humber bridge is about a mile long / as it strides the mighty humber. And our foreign brothers across the sea / they just stare at it in wonder’. Chief Gargoyle Eddie Smith once performed a set naked on Hull Tower. ‘The Gargoyles were more obvious. Paul’s sense of humour was… wry, let’s put it that way’. Heaton’s celebrated humour shines through in ‘Liar’s Bar’, a popular Beautiful South track: ‘And the gravedigger’s smiling at his reflection in his spade … they’re singing whiskey, whiskey, so good they named it twice’ but it seems to develop rather than depart from the old Hull jokes.
Hemingway can’t stress enough that The Beautiful South were always ‘about the songs’, just shamelessly good pop. His latest project is a new incarnation renamed The South. They keep mainly to its back catalogue. But they’ve got a new bassist and fans of older music might not recognise Alison Wheeler’s voice, but she’s been with them for the last five years.
He remembers coming to Oxford. ‘Alison was at Cambridge, so we had a thing going with the crowd.’ This was in 2007, and there wasn’t a bad turn out: ‘it wasn’t embarrassing, let’s put it that way,’ Hemingway says straight up.
Something like that doesn’t come around often. ‘From the outside it must be quite hard to see’ he thinks, but at the time it was magic. The band piled into the back of a van, did the rounds of the North and the Midlands; they played the Rockgarden in London, and slept on floors. They’d take the names and addresses of their audience to build up a cult following. ‘Maybe something like this still goes on now, I don’t know’, he says. Actually, Hemingway’s fondness for sharing, for music, not just for making it big does seem different to us. They don’t seem spoilt. It might be that The Beautiful South have had their heyday. Like the docks, maybe they’ll never be quite the same again. But they weren’t about stardom. Listen to their songs instead: they’d always ‘Carry on Regardless’.
