The slice of tomato is dangling over an ashtray between the thumb and forefinger of Dave Rotheray, guitarist with The Beautiful South. In the other hand is the tuna sandwich whence it came.

"Can I put it in the ashtray?"

"NO!" cries Paul Heaton. It’s the only time that Heaton, the band’s frontman raises his voice all afternoon.

Dave: "Well, where shall I put it then?"

"Give it here," sighs Paul. Then looking around for somewhere to deposit the offending slice, he impatiently eats it.

I’m in the Mainbrace, a large pub near the centre of Hull with Paul and Dave. The other four member of The Beautiful South - including vocalist Jacqueline Abbott, who replaced the soon-to-be solo artiste Briana Corrigan - are enjoying a well deserved rest. Despite its relative notoriety as drinking hostelry to Hull’s most famous sons (the only other contender, Philip Larkin, is dead - and even if he wasn’t, 2.5 million sales of the "Carry On Up The Charts’ greatest hits CD would clinch it anyway), this is where the group continue to meet.

"The funny thing", begins Dave after a suitable pregnant pause, "is that I like tomato-flavoured things and food with tomatoes in it. It’s just tomatoes on their own that I can’t stand".

"Do you like bolognese sauce?" enquires Paul.

"Yeah," nods the guitarist frankly.

Paul: "How about salsa?"

Dave: "Great".

"Remember when we snorted those chillies?" asks Paul. "We wanted to get high and, well... it sort of worked, actually".

What happened, then?

"Me eyes started streaming and I got a sort of tingle around me nose. We were on tour, and the same night the barman taught us that trick. Do you remember? Sambuca, weren’t it? You set light to it in the glass and then you put your hand over the glass to put the flame out, so it sticks to your hand and you can lift up the glass because of the vacuum inside. The you just let a little gap come out of the corner of the glass so it escapes and you snort the drink up through it".

What? Literally snort it?

"Yeah," confirms the gently Humberside brogue, "I think the air rushes in and pushes it up".

Anyone who bears a passing familiarity with The Beautiful South’s canon will know that alcohol, pubs and the people who frequent them loom large in Heaton and Rotheray’s outlook. It’s this tendency - as evinced in songs like "Old Red Eyes Is Back", "Throw His Song Away" and "Woman In The Wall" - that leads detractors to contend that The Beautiful South are parochial small-town curmudgeons.

"Yeah, I’ve heard that said about me," sighs Heaton, gazing affectionately into his pint, "all this "he must really despise the world" mentality. People just hate me because I say things with clarity. Not like REM. People think they’re dead moving, but their lyrics are so vague. They could be about anything. Anyway, reveals Heaton, "my new songs show an interesting development. Admittedly, I’m writing about drinking, but it’s a whole new direction. A different type of beer altogether".

Self-effacing cracks aside, there’s a humanity to be mined in those songs. Paul Heaton’s ability to home in on the unlikeliest targets goes a long way towards explaining the colossal affection in which the public hold The Beautiful South. From "Prettiest Eyes" - a beguiling evocation of love between elderly people - to "36D", a cry of sheer boredom at the vacant marionettes that clog up the Sun, the Sport and their fetid ilk - Heaton’s words and Rotheray’s melodies sparkle with compassion where most bands too easily get lost in crass rock and roll rhetoric. Not that this stops The Beautiful South from occasionally hitching a one-way ride down Rock’s Lost Highway of Oblivion. Well, kind of...

"It always surprises me when I hear about how rock’n’roll we’re not and other bands are" observes Paul.... "I was reading a music paper the other week, and there was a story about how EMF shouted at a copper from their hotel window in Bayswater and didn’t even get arrested. And the way it was written. It was like "EMF In Big Police Scandal!". That’s nothing. Me and Dave were staying in the same hotel. We’d been moved to that hotel from another one next door which had a 24-hour bar. So me and Dave are wondering if there’s any way we can sneak into the hotel with the 24-hour bar, and we notice that there’s some scaffolding going up the side wall. So we climbed up it and I started to crawl in and tip-toe through the room. Next thing I know, there’s this woman screaming..."

Paul registers my shock, as indeed does Dave, who is, by now doubled up with laughter...

"Don’t worry," reassures Paul, "She were fully clothed and everything. Anyway, she must have been some Arabian princess or something, because the next thing I know this bodyguard appears out of nowhere. Massive, he was. And he’s threatening to throw me off the scaffolding. So I’m on this scaffolding shouting, "Dave! Dave! He’s got me!" I spent the night in a police cell".

Deep in the recesses of Hull, these stories tumble off Heaton’s tongue with all the nonchalance of someone who’s forgotten that normal people don’t climb up hotel walls for the promise of a pint. Deep in the recesses of Hull, alcohol is a rock of stability in a world of constant flux. And The Beautiful South can’t get enough...

"I heard recently, ‘purrs a wonderfully unruffled Dave, "that Hull has more pubs per square mile than any other town. But then I went to another town and someone there told me the same thing about theirs. Then I went to Ireland, and discovered that everyone in Ireland thinks that Ireland has more pubs per square mile. So I now don’t know what to think".

"Still", prompts Paul, "we do hold a few records down here, eh?"

Dave: "That’s right, Paul. Biggest housing estate in Europe. Biggest single-span suspension bridge. Smallest window in Europe too..."

Sorry?

"It’s true! There’s a little window in this pub in town. Apparently it holds the record for smallest window. I mean, there must be some reason it qualifies as a window, but I’m not familiar with the technicalities of defining what a window is..."

The only reason, I offer, you’d need to define it, would be in order to establish a record.

Dave: "That’s right. Or to sue somebody. Like, if you made an agreement to build so many windows or something".

Paul: "And that definition wouldn’t include doll’s house windows, car windows, or the windows you look through on your boiler to see if your pilot light’s on..."

The conversation grinds to a studious pause.

"Is that a window though?" ruminates a clearly troubled Heaton... "I’d be tempted to include car windows".

Suddenly, Dave perks up: "I bought a car today! A Jag!"

That it’s taken Rotheray an hour to tell his best mate that he bought a Jaguar XJS this morning tells you a lot about The Beautiful South’s sense of priorities. That the relative merits of window semantics and extra-curricular chilli snorting take considerable precedence over newly purchased Jags...

"It’s quite scary owning a Jag," he continues tugging thoughtfully at his receding hairline, "Sort of big. And fast. Long too. I hit something earlier on today - on the side - but I’m too scared to look". Then, apropos of nothing: "Later, I realised, that my wing mirrors were made out of plastic. I hit something else and they snapped back into place".

Wing mirror technology has come on so much in the past few years.

Dave: "Ah, but do you think wing mirrors will ever get so good, that it’ll be better to sit backwards while you’re driving? They could never get them that good, could they?"

Well I counter, there’s no motivation to make them that good, is there? Technnology has to reflect our needs. And there’ll never be a need to drive backwards.

"You’re right," concedes a mildly penitent Dave. "You can’t let technology dictate your needs can you? Mars have got the right idea. They invented Twix to fill the snack gap. You know, "Whenever there’s a snack gap, Twix fits".

A week on Saturday, The Beautiful South play their biggest-ever-gig, the Fleadh in Finsbury Park - predominantly an Irish festival - yet they’re virtually the only non-Irish band appearing there. So why have six, relatively anonymous, thoroughly English habitués of Hull struck such a chord with the Irish and Irish-lowing population of London?

"Erm..." Paul Heaton grins his customary mildly embarrassed grin - a wonderful grin, symptomatic of a worldview that constantly resides just right of whimsical and two stops short of surreal. "We just got asked".

"It’s not just Irish though is it?" chips in Dave. "Are you sure?" Well I’ve got two Irish great grandparents".

Paul: "Anyway, I don’t suppose they can have Van Morrison headlining it every year, can they?"

Ever eager to stir the gossip pot, I relay to Paul and Dave the completely unsubstantiated rumours that Van Morrison threw a fit when he found out he was second on the bill to them...

Paul: "Really? That’s a shame. I like Van Morrisson".

Dave: "Don’t like "Astral Weeks", mind".

"Aye, it’s not great, is it?" agrees Paul with nary a further consideration for Van’s conceptual masterpiece. "Bit off the wall. Goes on a bit. The Van Morrison album I like has got sheep on the front... summat "fleece"."

You mean "Veedon Fleece". It’s got dogs on the cover.

"Dogs? Really?! I think I might have a rare import then. Australian import".

Dave: "There’s no need for "import" and "export", is there?"

Sorry?

"I mean, it’s the same thing innit? You know when you get a beer and it says "export"? It’s not. It’s over here. It’s been imported.

Yeah but what they’re saying though is that they exported it.

"But then, you can also get beers that say "import". There’s no different.

Perhaps it depends who wanted it. If they wanted to give it to us, then it’s export. But if we wanted it then it’s import.

Huge pause. "That’s a good explanation actually," concedes Dave, but Paul’s not having any of it: "What about if you’re not sure?"

Dave: "Yeah, or if it’s mutual?"

Partially for my own mental welfare, and partly because I have to drive back to London, I make my excuses. Driving from London to meet The Beautiful South, I tell them, is a bet like that Guinness ad where you begin your odyssey just outside the universe and carry on flying inwards until you home in on a single bubble in a pint of Guinness, at which point, the whole thing begins all over again.

"I’ll tell you what, Pete" smiles Dave, evincing a touching air of compassion, "If you had "Foreign", that would avoid trouble. Like, "Carlsberg Foreign". Don’t worry yourself. It’s not that important...."!