Paul Heaton is sitting back with what you would swear is a glint in his eye and a wry smile. His manager, meanwhile, has taken what we are pretty sure is a sharp intake of breath.
Heaton has just finished an eloquent diatribe on the recent Live 8 event, one that has shown him to be a good deal more informed than most we question about it over this Oxegen weekend.
He has however, finished with a comment that is a touch controversial – he suggests the London bombers should have targeted the G8 meeting in Scotland – and one that provokes a quietly anxious phone call the next day from the sharp breathing management team.
Political insight and provocation has always been one of Paul Heaton’s great skills. The other has been making music that is both simple and complex at the same time, first with the Housemartins and for the past 17 years The Beautiful South.
Late in the day for a band to make any great shifts you might think, yet Heaton & co have recently moved from long time home Go! Discs to Sony.
“It does feel like a new chapter,” he concedes. “To work with new people is a refreshing change. Plus we’ve been writing new songs, it is a bit of a fresh start. It depends on how it’s received. If it’s with low interest then it becomes just another album and we’d be disappointed. We’ll see”.
The first fruits of this new relationship was a covers album taking in everyone from ELO and The Ramones to S Club 7 and Rufus Wainwright.
“It was designed to steady the ship and ensure we didn’t drift off the radar altogether," he says. "The songs were quite carefully chosen. We didn’t just want an album of our own favourites, that would have been really boring.
“I wanted to mess around with our interpretations. There weren’t really many songs that we loved, it was more a chance to restructure ones that we thought were good but could work better”.
There’s no better example of that than their startling reworking of ‘You’re The One That I Want’ from Grease.
“I found that song really depressing as a 16 or 17 year old, just the fact that me and my mate were always on the edge of the dancefloor and it never said anything to us. We took it off the dancefloor and put it back towards the edge. The original was quite camp and our version is quite stalkerish.”
The new album then – a change of direction, maybe jazz metal? He laughs. “Oh how I wish. That would really be the last record. It builds up a fantastic image. No jazz metal just yet but it’s given me a fantastic idea for the follow up. Dave and I are limited in a way by our simplicity. We look for hooks in songs, things that we like – a good melody and a strong lyric”.