There’s something odd going on with The Beautiful south. Paul Heaton used to be the singer with quite successful group The Housemartins, whose hits (like "Happy Hour" and "Caravan Of Love") established him as possessor of one of pop’s finest and most distinctive voices - like an anxious English Al Green. And now Paul’s the leader of the equally successful The Beautiful South, who have just had a number one single with "A Little Time", and have their second LP "Choke" out now.

That’s not odd. What is strange is that it’s not Paul Heaton’s voice you hear singing the duet on "A Little Time". "I’m just a backing musician on this," he says modestly. Nor is "A Little Time" an exception: throughout the new LP, he shares the singing with Briana Corrigan and former Housemartins’ drummer Dave Hemingway. So what’s going on? Whose band is it anyway?

"I’m the boss," admits Paul. He describes The Beautiful South as a "false democracy" in which he has the casting vote. "There’s me, right? I do vocals. Dave Stead plays drums. Dave Rotheray plays guitar, Sean Welch is bass guitar, and Briana Corrigan does vocals. Dave Hemingway used to play drums in The Housemartins, but he’s a singer now. He sings on "A Little Time"."

But why, when you’re such a good singer... "why do I use Dave at all? I think his voice is different to mine, though everyone says it seems very similar. I like his voice; also I like the idea of having him as a starlet instead of myself. It gets on me nerves being at the front all the time - it did in The Housemartins, and now we’ve got three of us at the front I can hide at the back for a while. When Dave’s singing I just usually stare at the audience and unnerve them. Dave has a problem what to do when I’m singing - he sits on the drum riser and sulks."

How do you decide who sings what? "Usually I just pick a song that suits Dave’s voice. And some songs just don’t suit mine. On "A Little Time" my voice did actually sound poor, and if you heard me sing "Song For Whoever", it just doesn’t sound the same."

• CENTRAL HEATON

Although he was flattered to be compared to Al Green ("I’ve got 26 of his albums"), Paul thinks of himself as a pop singer, not a soul singer. He taught himself by singing along to other people’s records, something he still does. "I force myself to do a bit of singing every day. I sing along to records which are too high or low for me, to see if I can extend my voice at all."

Paul attributes the clarity of his voice to a combination of vocal timbre, production, and microphone technique. "Where you put it depends on how low you’re singing: I sing at least nine inches away from it, maybe four if the band are playing too loud. It always causes problems at soundchecks, but I think we get a better vocal sound for it eventually. People would tell me to put the mike right against my mouth and I used to give them a really hard time - ‘Im not a rock singer, I’m a pop singer, I’ve seen Abba and they do it this way’."

Why else is The Beautiful South odd? Well, their words are more than slightly unusual. Play the records and you find yourself bowled along (I do anyway) by the bright breezy sound of a British pop group. But listen more closely, and the seriousness of the lyrics becomes apparent - subjects touched on across the new LP include domestic violence, shop-lifting as a symbol of the enterprise culture, and the distastefulness of dealing with big business - hardly standard fare for a chart act.

It’s this oxymoronic combination of jolly tunes with darker words that makes The Beautiful South, and Paul Heaton in particular, such an interesting prospect. Paul admits that there’s a conflict. "The lyrics are not really what you’d expect from myself. I’m a pretty uncomplicated person, I’m more like my music than my lyrics. But that’s how I see my strength, writing about things that perhaps other people don’t write about, in a manner of my own. I’d like to be able to write straight, good, love songs, but it’s not something I’m able to do, not without a twist at the end." He continues. "A lot of people have picked up on the fact that we’re dealing more with sexual politics now, rather than party politics, and they tend to think that women’s issues are somehow less political. But I think ‘I Should’ve Kept My Eyes Shut’, which is about violence against women, is political."

• A CAPITAL P

One of the strongest songs, both musically and lyrically on "Choke" is "I Think The Answer’s Yes", which describes Paul’s feelings about having to deal with multi-national record companies. Paul intended that song to answer his critics directly. "I wanted to include a song on the album that said this band is still political with a capital P, and to let them know how we felt about the structure of the business". You tend to meet a lot of scum en route/It doesn’t mean you’ve joined the other side/And because I still wear shorts and my smile is oh so cute/It doesn’t mean I’ll run away and hide.

Although some of Paul’s lyrics are obviously first person personal, others are written in character (including, he says, the shop-lifter’s song "I’ve Come For My Award"). I asked if he found it easier to write in or out of character. "I find lyric writing easy-ish, full stop. I don’t struggle with any type of thing I’ve done myself. I’d probably struggle writing lyrics for somebody else..."

So how have things changed for Paul since Housemartin days? Back then, Paul co-wrote songs with guitar player Stan Cullimore, putting words and tunes to Stan’s chords. Nowadays, he writes The Beautiful South’s material with guitarist Dave Rotheray. It’s no different really. Basically The Housemartins’ songs were written at one number in a particular street, while The Beautiful South songs are written at another - I’ve moved house".

It’s not quite as blunt as that. Paul admits that he used to limit The Housemartins through laziness, as he preferred not to work on Stan’s more complex chord patterns. "Though it wasn’t a conscious decision within the band. But I don’t think we ever made a noise that didn’t sound like The Housemartins anyway".

When it comes to writing melodies, Paul rarely resorts to the tape recorder, preferring to keep his initial ideas for tunes in his head. "You do tend to forget the worse ones. I’ve lost loads - including one really good one, but it doesn’t matter, does it? There’s loads which I’ve still got in my head now, probably ten to twenty, but I can’t be bothered to put words to them yet."

"I think the songs I write with Dave are better than the ones I come up with in my head. There’s a sort of clash between melody and chords that’s a bit more interesting. The ones that you come up with in your head are immediately catchy, but don’t grow on you".

Paul and Dave made a conscious effort to structure the songs on the new LP slightly less conventionally, although they realise that the end results are still easy to follow. That’s partly deliberate, says Paul, "and partly because we’ve always written around guitar rather than piano, and the guitar tends to lead the way in most of the songs which makes it a little bit more obvious. Also, I like the idea that a band sounds as if the music is just being sung for the first time. I thought The Housemartins’ songs sounded on radio like I was actually singing there at the time, inside the radio. The vocal sound was very natural on top of the chord changes".

Has Dave’s input changed your songwriting? "Dave’s got a different attitude - he’s keen to experiment with different instruments. And my attitude’s changed - I want to sound..." he pauses, "...different". "Which means singing lower, or using Dave and Briana more, in addition to experimenting with producer Mike Hedges on innovative arrangements".

Have you ever felt the need to make the songs more complicated to reflect the seriousness of the words? "I don’t think chord structure makes songs any deeper," Paul replied.

But some of the songs on "Choke" have very weird arrangements, with the normal Beautiful South pop group rush replaced by backwards reverbs and guitars - were you trying to make them sound more sophisticated to give them depth? "It wasn’t meant to give them depth - I think the songs have got depth anyway. Making them sound more sophisticated was intentional, though: some of the songs got to the three quarters stage - things like "Should’ve Kept My Eyes Shut" and "I Think The Answer’s Yes" - and it looked like they could easily end up sounding like mid-seventies plod". He smiled. "But with a few noises and a few synthesisers, they sound like mid-nineties plod, which is what we wanted!"

• PD JAMS

It’s odd, and heartening too, that The Beautiful South can allow their shortcomings as a group to dictate how they work. And be honest about it. Paul told me how the backing tracks to "Choke" had been recorded. "We played the whole album live". He explained why this was a difficult step for them. "We often play things too fast; I think partly it’s because we haven’t got the instrumentation to make it sound good without playing it fast. There’s only four or five of us playing so we tend to speed up to help fill in the holes".

"So when we played the album in the studio, we got the brass, and the piano player, and the percussionist, and we had everybody playing whilst we were recording the backing tracks so we could gauge how the song was gonna sound later on. The percussionist helped a lot, just fillings things out where we might perhaps have speeded up before".

The Beautiful South use two horn sections, either Peter Thoms’ Phantom Horns, or the Swinging Laurels. "We made a conscious decision to have brass on this album. It was mainly because we’re a bit crap live and we wanted another aspect to our sound which we couldn’t get out of any of the instruments we’d got - filling the holes a bit more. Why not? I’ll use anything me. There’s nothing we wouldn’t use in terms of instruments. Chord structures too, except if they was really crappy jazzy ones, like Dave occasionally comes up with. Anything as long as it doesn’t sound like we’re trying to be a type of music we’re obviously not".

"Choke" took ten weeks to record, which Paul reckons was a long time. "We were working pretty slowly at the start because the World Cup was on, which was a constant distraction - four hours a day in the television room". Despite stiff competition from Roger Millar and the rest of The Cameroon, The Beautiful South managed to record 12 songs, of which ten made it to the LP; the remaining two became single B-sides. Roughly half of the material had been part of the band’s live set, while other songs were new, and had to be arranged in the studio. "I think sometimes it’s good to go in there with no idea what the song’s going to sound like - we let "Love Speak For Itself" arrange itself."

This laissez-faire method seems to have lead to some unexpected results. "Lips" which starts the second side of "Choke" is one minute and 12 seconds of swirly noises with what sounds like a chorus laid over the top by Paul. And that’s all. What happened to the rest of the song? "Lips was only ever that long. It was written as a reprise of "A Little Time", mainly because I didn’t have anything to sing in that song. We tried putting it on at the end, but it just ended up as a song itself".

Decisions about who sang what were still being made during the recording. "My Book", the bouncy Smiths-like second scheduled single, was tried first by Paul, then given to Dave, then pinched back by Paul. "Should’ve Kept My Eyes Shut", with its subject matter of violence against women, was given to Briana at first attempted by Paul when she didn’t manage it particularly well at first, then passed back to Briana when it was realised Paul’s effort wasn’t any better. Briana’s version improved by the way.

• HEATON DUST

There’s more musical oddity lurking within "I Hate You" - honky tonk piano samples laid over the backing track with little regard for timing or tuning. Paul proudly informs that the samples come from the finest possible sources - Mrs Mills and Winifred Atwell. "It’s there to suggest a bit of madness on the part of the person telling the story. The original idea of that song was a bloke who wrote an autobiography of his suicide and then sold it to the press. But he’d made the whole story up".

The LP ends with an instrumental, "The Rising of Grafton Street". Where did the vocals go, Paul? After trying the Cocteau Twins line of , "It’s left to people’s imagination, they can make their own words up", Paul gave me the real story. "We recorded the backing track, and it sounded incredibly like the Housemartins; so we slowed the drums down to change the drum sound and obviously we changed the pitch of the guitar and bass, which made it much too low to sing the melody in a decent way. So we decided to keep it as an instrumental. It was originally a song about school titled "The Runners-Up".

Mike Hedges has produced both Beautiful South LPs, and Paul regards him as "pretty important" to the group. Apart from simply knowing his way around the studio, Mike proved himself a useful source of session musicians, a good decision maker in times of argument, and a shrewd risk taker - "he tends to like to be cheeky with an arrangement". Would the Beautiful South ever want to produce their own records? "We’re probably on the verge of being able to do it ourselves," said Paul, "but we’d need a strong-willed engineer!"

I surmised that Paul might be taking more of a back seat with the group because he was interested in trying production work himself. Definitely not, he says. "I’m interested in having a hand in my own work, but not anybody else’s. I really believe that people should do it themselves, that they should know exactly what they want. I’ve got a clear view of how I want any music to sound, and I think people should have that of their own music".