Artifacts: The Beautiful South

Music It's 1996 and kids, The Beautiful South one of the biggest bands in the country, their filthy lyrics to a lyrical hum having slowly pierced the national consciousness over four albums. Their fifth, Blue Is The Colour is imminent and to accentuate their image as a working class drinksy operation, their advertising agency decide to re-brand a range of pubs throughout the country as The Beautiful South.

I'm 22 years old, something of a fan and I have the presence of mind to take some photographs:



This is, The Grapes in Mathew Street (as you can see from the windows), presumably chosen because of the existing geographic musical connection. This washed out photo doesn't really do justice to the blueness of the sign and connected stationary. The pub sign was replaced/covered with the album cover which included that child's face.



The album reached number one on 2 November that year with most of the singles charting pretty highly. The main track, Don't Marry Her had to be substantially changed for radio. The lyric "Don't marry her, fuck me" became "Don't marry her, have me" but I didn't notice until I just saw it on the primary source of all our knowledge that "sweaty bollocks" became "Sandra Bullocks".