Pop music - Grease with a country twist? Alex Gibbons is charmed by the Beautiful South's latest album

Having perfected its own brand of inoffensive pop music over ten albums, the Beautiful South has finally decided to do something new: cover versions. Lots of them. Golddiggas, Head-nodders and Pholk Songs, an album of the most incompatible tracks since the London Underground, might seem a foolish undertaking. Who on earth is going to buy a compilation featuring Willy Nelson, the Heppelbaums and S Club 7? But Paul Heaton and the rest are clever souls. As long as it sounds like the Beautiful South, it will sell and be loved by the same thousands who bought the last album.

The Hull-based band formed out of the break-up of the Housemartins at the end of the 1980s. The Beautiful South's name is a gibe by its founders, Heaton and David Hemingway, at their dour northern image, and re-flects the sense of humour prevalent in many of their records. The group was successful from the release of its first single, "Song for Whoever", in 1989. The band wanted the cover of its debut album, Welcome to the Beautiful South, to depict a suicidal girl with a gun in her mouth, but the record company didn't judge this the best marketing strategy. The image was changed and the sales rolled on.

In 1991, the single "A Little Time", a catchy yet subversive duet by Heaton and the Irish vocalist Briana Corrigan, was spiced up by malicious lyrics and a memorable Brit-winning video featuring a fighting couple, a trashed house, a load of flour and feathers, and a teddy bear's head impaled on the end of a kitchen knife. Suddenly everyone knew about the Beautiful South. The band peaked in 1994, when its greatest hits album, Carry On Up the Charts, hit the number-one spot and remained there for six weeks. It sold more than 2.5 million copies and became the UK's third-fastest-selling album of all time, behind Michael Jackson's Thriller and But Seriously by Phil Collins.

The group's distinctive sound is what appeals most to many fans, but what makes the band stand out is Heaton's lyrics, whose targets range from the footballer Peter Beardsley to topless models. Corrigan did not look favourably on the latter. She quit the band, claiming that lines such as "You cheapen and you nasty every woman in this land/But you're so handy" were open to too many interpretations. She was replaced by Jacqui Abbott in 1994.

A decade later, and Alison Wheeler's mellifluous tones can be heard alongside Heaton and Hemingway, backed by folky guitars, jazzy piano and pop arrangements. And the contrast between jolly tunes and often bitter, sarcastic lyrics has been compromised by the use of other people's songs. However, from the opening track - a slow, sexy take on "You're the One That I Want" from Grease - to Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper", you cannot help but be charmed by the audaciousness of it all. Sure, the band is having a bit of fun - "the perfect opportunity to ruin songs we liked and turn songs we didn't into masterpieces", according to Heaton. But as with the Irish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, even if it sounds the same every time, people will still love it. The best moments are the pure pop songs: the first single, ELO's "Livin' Thing", could have been written by the Beautiful South; and S Club's "Don't Stop Moving" is bubblegum pop ripped apart and recast as catchy country and western.

It takes gifted songwriters to pick up on what makes other compositions work, and Golddiggas, Headnodders and Pholk Songs is full of the hooks and melodies that made the originals so popular, without the stigma that normally accompanies them. Hull never sounded so good.

The Beautiful South's Golddiggas, Headnodders and Pholk Songs is released by Sony on 25 October

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