Night-time downtown Chicago "Moneytown USA". Home to the mythology of Al Capone and the reality of guns’n’crack’n’millions of pink neon skyscrapers blocking out the moon and the single tallest building in the world thrusting its spiral straight through the rings of Saturn with superlative gusto.

A shifty, tinted-windowed, dusky blue van cruises smoothly down the main street seeking out the bar with the biggest screen showing the baseball World Series. Inside the smoothmobile the singer with the pop group flicks the volume to 11, with measured cool, and lets Chicago have it...

"Mistah Custard! You’re a fooool!" That’s Frank Sidebottom to you, "dude", for you are on The Beautiful South US Fall Tour ‘95 (sub-titled Carry On Touring) and they’re putting the wind up the Windy City in the only way they know how; by being their preposterous selves. An that means Frank Sidebottom, the wearing of flares, 3 000 gins’n’tonic before breakfast, breakfast being more gin’n’tonic, with pint of lager chasers. And having the rules of baseball "explained" to you by the spectacularly-refreshed form of the happiest main in the world, Paul Heaton. And he holds no truck with your deciphering of his highly idiosyncratic, metaphorically codified speech patterns claiming that baseball is "rounders with a bit of ballet". He does have concussion, mind, falling on to his head, as he did, from the great height of the third floor tour bus bunk bed yesterday. He wrote a lyric about this sort of thing once: "Carry on regardless". Hur hur.

If it’s Chicago it must be day eight of a 14 day tour of America and the South are in finest form, as they should be as the oft-remarked "fastest-selling pop group in history!!" via last year’s "Carry On Up The Charts" greatest hits sensation. Not that you’d know it, of course; they might as well be Half Man Half Biscuit on tour in Preston promoting their first EP which sold 12 copies from a basket in Woolies to their mums.

The Beautiful South touring cavalcade consists of nearly 20 people, all blokes, all life-long pals (new singer Jackie is at home being eight months pregnant - Dave Hemingway does a sterling job as understudy); band, horn section, merchandising, crew, mates. And in the course of a three-day jaunt from Chicago to Seattle we will learn that being in The Beautiful South is a lot like being in an endless On The Buses school trip of banter-fuelled, 24-hour party tomfoolery led by the boundless energy of Paul Heaton and his gin-flavoured cartoon reality.

Firstly, there’s this season’s catchphrase - "big idiot". Said like a Canadian farmer which means it’s one word, fast, and goes up at the end: "bigidiot! And furthermore: "fuckin’ bigidiot!" Which will metamorphose into "FBI!" and become as addictive as crack. Then there’s the nicknames. Everyone’s got one. Some people have three. Some will have a new one every three hours. Take Phil for example. He’s Good-looking Phil who looks a bit like Andre Agassi (or, insists Paul: "Jimmy Corkhill. When he’s tired.") becomes Andrea Gassy. And Braveheart. And Weak Bladder. We will see him later in a hotel bar with his eyes doing the scarlet fandango weeping "I’ve never drunk so much in me life!".

Paul is Bagpuss "saggy old cloth cat", but he’s gone off that and adopted his American/Italian current favourite of Chips Spaghetti. Co-songwriter Dave Rotheray is Cass (Castle Rotheray). Co-singer Dave Hemingway is Hamster.

They’re a three-Daves band and drummer Dave Stead is not only Steady but Lord Fondleroy, too. They’ve been known to give themselves reggae nicknames like Utter Tosh. Or handsome nicknames like Gregory Kek. Then there’s the tour bus songs, rescripted versions of the classics dedicated to the failings and occasional triumph of each member. Classics like "Magic Moments" and the Dad’s Army theme tune, and "Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear" (or, indeed, "Disappear! Every time Cogs is Near!" - the rest is unprintable), "Dirty Old Town" (or indeed "Dirty Old Tone!") and several thousand others including one about Paul to Oasis’ "She’s Electric" deemed "far too disgusting" for rendition. Current favoured victim: Paul "Bambi" Thompson, manager.

They make them up out of thin air, endless rapid-wit excursions into genius word play/association which go something like this: to the tune of Ottawan’s "D.I.S.C.O" except it’s "B.A.M.B.I" - "He is B! Big! He is A! Anormous!" and so on until it becomes the somewhat more surreal "I.D.I.O.T." - "He is I! Idiot! He is D! Diot! He is I! Iot! He is O! Ot! He is T! Tih! Treeeeemendous!!" "Anything is hilarious, " howls Paul "if you say it enough.."

Bambi, incidentally, used to be the monitor mixer for the Housemartins and spends many hours doing phone interviews pretending to be Paul and Dave and the other Dave when their plots have left the building. Justifiably, then, his hair is grey.

Not for nothing is the ‘South’s back-catalogue awash in the culture of booze: they drink for the solar system. And no-one jumps off ‘scrapers in psychotic alcoholic delusion or anything. They just get funnier. And sing louder. They don’t even have the decency to have hospitalisation-worthy hangovers. Dave Rotheray’s never even been sick in his life. Not once. Clearly, then, we are dealing with professionals...

In a glitter-balled, 750-capacity Chicago cocktail lounge, Paul Heaton is proving himself not only our finest exponent of mesmeric soul, quavering with the angels perched atop his tonsils, but a bit of a stand-up comic too. There is no "irony" barrier here as the audience guffaw at jokes about his bunk-bed mishap, persons in Pearl Jam falling off balconies, gins’n’tonic and the "white trash" involved in the OJ trial. In between, the ‘South’s formidable collection of twisted popular paeans to life’s complexities are greeted with blazing warmth and instant recognition. By the encore, they’ve propelled themselves into a wig-out, free-form celebration soul combo of funkadelic class with Paul’s voice hurtling round the glitter-ball and up through the roof to the skyscrapers an beyond.

Later this month, the ‘South return to a British arena tour and nothing will be quite the same. "It’ll be a sea of blank faces," decides Paul, "in small places like this you can have a laugh ‘cos at least you can see the first 20 people reacting. I feel like we’re too small as people for the big places. I really do. I feel like we’re nine little boys and one little girl in a playground that’s two hundred miles long and it’s too big to play in. And we haven’t go a ball".

The Beautiful South almost never made it here in the first place. In the previous months, Paul gave up drinking for - "gulp" - five months due to being on antibiotics for psoriasis. He thought the booze might be making it worse so he sacked it, "lost some weight, became dead boring," and started questioning his entire future.

"Me and Rotheray had a discussion before we came away about my commitments to the band," says Paul, matter-of-factly, "I was feeling a bit unconvinced about me own future in music. Because I just feel a bit old for it. Now I’m here I realise I can still do it. I’ve been drinking heavily again and I’m still able to perform to a half-decent standard. Bit if I had a divorce from The Beautiful South I’d lose all these beautiful daughters(?), not just the name. We’re that close, my personal Dream Team. We might as well all sleep in the one big bed".

You were actually thinking about going solo?

"I was just thinking how I’m not sure, as a singer-songwriter in a band, how long you can go on in the pop industry," says Paul perusing his nails, "there are four songwriters I can think of, and they’re all better than me, who started off in bands and went solo; Paul Weller, Neil Young, Elvis Costello and Van Morrison. If I was gonna be like that I’d have to be a long stronger in terms of personality and security than I am now. Right now I can’t even imagine going to New York by meself. I’m just Paul Heaton, I’m not able to do it, I haven’t got the confidence."

Did "Miaow" (the last "proper" LP) not selling too well have anything to do with it?

"It didn’t sell particularly well," he muses, "but it didn’t worry me at all, not one iota. Perhaps it should’ve - and then I’d be Phil Collins! But I’m not. Sales figures certainly aren’t important to me, that’s a dangerous way to think. It’s not like I can shadow Blur and Oasis, I’m 33! People know what I look like, they still like me and that’s more important. It’s not a disaster if me last album didn’t sell, no-one in the bar’s saying ‘gerrout, you bigidiot your last album didn’t sell 12 million copies!’..I’m genuinely happy I’ve enough money to go into a bar, buy another gin and tonic and people have enough time to give me a smile - that seems like a fair enough agreement. If the next one sells a million copies or if it sells ten, who gives a fuck, I’m me. And I’m alright".

Right now he’s never been less alright in his life because he’s in a seat on a ‘plane and is convinced he’s about to die because he’s always believed that he will die one day on a ‘plane. He’s been in the pub since 9.30 am - it’s how he "copes". "I warned you", he blubs, "you couldn’t have picked a worse person to sit next to ..." He rakes through his belongings for the objects that will save him from the inevitable plunge to an early death. Observers of the Heaton psyche may be aware of his famed lucky charm-related in-flight behaviour; watching it in action is one of the most terrifying sights in the history of fear itself. He wraps the following tightly around his fingers: one Simon Le Bon "calling card", one lucky watch, one laminated pass with a picture of Russell Grant on it, one badge bearing the words ‘No Grapes’, a magic trinket box which no-one knows the contents of and a Magic Pixie. The Magic Pixie is dangled face outwards to the world while Paul tells it to "do your stuff" and crosses himself again and again with his head bowed towards his knees.

"If you look into the Pixie’s eyes, we’ll crash," says Paul and your correspondent has an immediate coronary seizure by catching the piercing blue eye of the Pixie from side-on. Aaaaargh! That’s it, it’s all over, The Beautiful South and the NME are dead in the water.....

"It’s alright!" insists Paul, "side-on doesn’t count. But the last time I looked straight into its eyes we had to do an emergency landing in New York when one of the engines blew out."

Help. Once airborne, the fear subsides and Paul gets on with the job of ordering 47 gins’n’tonic and wailing mightily on the four-hour duration he will spend without the aid of his fags. If he wasn’t this pissed he’d play his favourite in-flight game: peanut golf - where you try to land a peanut on the "green" of a bald head somewhere in front of you, the further away the better. He pings his table down to reveal some white granules fallen from a crevice in the seat-back in front.

"Look!" he grins "cocaine!" and chops the granules into a line before licking the lot up with a dampened finger. Salt, of course, probably left lurking there since 1971. He may have fear of flying but, as a man who has previously eaten flies and drunk elephant’s wee-wee just for the experience of it, festering germs he actively encourages. Once, he wore the same pair of draw-string trousers every single day for a year. He snorted Parmesan cheese the other day to see if he could get "that big cheese high" He didn’t, he just got Parmesan cheese stuck up his hooter for two hours instead.

Seattle. Home of the Bill Gates Microsoft emperor, and legendary suicides. Paul Heaton is marching through the streets wearing a checked dressing gown, pyjama bottoms, a scarf and a stupid hat. "Now does that look like an eccentric English pop star to you or what?" ponders Tony witheringly. "Nah!" chirps Paul, "I look like an eccentric bigidiot!"

It’s his Sleepless in Seattle joke, you see. Paul loves his stupid jokes. Like the one about a band called the Laura Love Band: "Cilla Black’s band". Like the one about the whale that gets lost on some rocks and says "could you be a bit more Pacific?". He has a flip-top head at such times and laughs his lungs out with his hands covering up his face. He has the most extraordinary hands you ever did see: small, smooth, porcelain white and profoundly female. With white, squared-off, long nails that people pay good money to have artificially sculpted. He holds things like women can, too, with a few fingers dangling around in the air.

"They’re one of the few things I ever get compliments about," he notes, perusing the remarkable digits, "them and me bum for some reason. An me eyes. Everything else is all over the place".

Today is a day-off so The Beautiful South are going to get "totally pissed" Paul will hold court in the hotel bar shouting about golf, belt his elbow accidentally and repeatedly off the table and say "Shagger’s elbow" to a typhoon of guffaws. Coggie, merchandising bod, officially the sweetest-natured human being who ever breathed, had bought a hat. It’s a fisherman’s affair with a stringy blonde wig attached and deemed fitting for wear in the home of grunge. Everyone has a go and shouts "Steppenwolf, maaaaan! You guys kiiiiil me maaaan!" and roll around in glee.

They will singe a "tribute" to Nirvana which Paul makes up to the tune of "Teen Spirit": "We’re Nirvana! From Seattle! We fuck sheep and we fuck cattle!" (Sounds like ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic - Ed.) Don’t look here for your reverent PC cobblers. Indeed, when Paul discovers you can’t purchase a drink anywhere in Seattle after two am he will boom, "No wonder ‘ee fookin’ topped himself!" (Letters to the usual address).

We learn that Dave Rotheray is a scientific boffin who can tell you everything you need to know about the origins of the universe. He gets The Independent crossword faxed to him every day "because this lot drag me down into the intellectual sewer". They play cricket with Paul’s permanent on-the-road cricket bat and ball and scoff "Germolene-flavoured" chewing gum (no lie). Tonight, they go to a bar where Paul puts 25 songs on the juke-box: Prince, Johnny Cash, Otis, TLC, everything else. the profoundly heterosexual Tony is chatted up by a block who insists they should go back to his hotel room "just for a cuddle, nothing else. We don’t have to tell anyone!". He will be ribbed for days.

Clearly the members of The Beautiful South do not suffer jaded, endless tour syndrome. They look for drugs and aren’t concerned when they cannot find them. Flirt with the entire female population of Seattle and aren’t concerned when they sleep alone. Paul as ever, has a theory. "Everyone I work with is world-class," he notes, "we’re map-starers, we like travelling and we don’t complain when we get there ‘cos we’re just so delighted, time and time again, after.... six years, is it? Six years and still not rockin’ - that’s our motto."

In New York he cancelled five interviews because "I’d rather be in the bar then seek publicity. Which is why I’ll never be famous in New York. It’s my mission to drink in 2 000 bars in New York instead of being Keith Richards and being chained to the hotel. I bet you anything I’ve drunk in more bars in New York than Keith Richards. I’m not bragging about drinking, it’s about how you see yourself. And I see myself as living in the real world. So I’ll have another gin’n’tonic please, pardon".

The view from Paul Heaton’s mind appears to be a bewildering horizon of bingo balls leaping akimbo in no discernible direction, each one an individual shape in the way that snow-flakes are. He’s as sharp as a scalpel, as vague as a cloud. In equal measures earth-bound and surreal, specific and confused, charming and crude, beguiling and simple, hilarious and morose, a seven-year-old soul with the wizened wisdom of a 33-year-old champion bare-fist fighter. And a small man with great big blue eyes full of simultaneous laughter and woe who is not always in the pub because sometimes he’s out watching the other kind of birds as a professional bird-of-prey-spotting enthusiast. He’s traversed the globe for hundreds of miles following the migration trails of vultures and falcons and eagles - has done since he saw Kes as a boy (one of "about three films" he’s ever seen, the other two being Jaws and Die Hard, apparently). It’s their "freedom" he loves, as a man who values freedom above all else.

Which is why he’s seen as a "political warrior", of course, still running his business affairs as a socialist co-operative. Why he’s no use at conventional relationships which compromise your life into a match-box. Why he always thought there’s "something rotten" at th core of society’s confines. He’s always thought these things and always written things down. It started when he was 16 and by the age of 26 he’d written 76 books.

"And they’re all absolute bollocks," breezes Paul, "but now I’m writing a book of all the books I wrote when I was a kid and I’m getting better. They’re 76 exercise books of about 90 pages each. Just short stories, daft things, but I’m finally finding a way to say what I really mean. There’ll be ideas there for new lyrics ‘cos I’ve decided I’m gonna be less specific ‘cos I think I’m too straight-forward. I’m going to start getting subtle ‘cos I think people understand a lot more of what I’m on about than they’re given credit for. Like on the new song (the sumptuous jollity of the piano’n’strings-soaked "Pretenders to the Throne"), it’s just a pop song with me singing on it but it’s about me favourite place in the world, that I’m not telling anybody about in case they go there and ruin it."

Well cheers!

"It’s a good song though!" he grins, "but here, look I’ll show you what I’ve been doing.."

Paul gets out a hard-backed book of jottings, some of which hold the kernel of ideas for future lyrics and are as such not for public consumption. His stories, poems, thoughts, are written from the back to the front. They’re titled and they’re extraordinary. Bitter, hopeful, wise, hilarious, devastating words about people and low and lies and sex and disappointment and pain and why he hates joggers - all resounding with the deafening gong of unmistakable truth. Not a cliché in sight. Mortifyingly enough, your correspondent is reduced to a very small pile of snivelling emotional rubble within the hour. Thanks very much, mate.

"Is it the gin?" enquires a completely unfazed but genuinely concerned Paul.

Bloody Nora, man, it’s not the gin, it’s you! You and blasted unmistakable truths.

"Everything about me is true" says Paul Heaton, "and it’s alright y’know, I was crying me eyes out when I wrote that stuff, too. I just let the tears roll down my face".

There’s a few things Paul Heaton would like to unburden from his soul and in the Seattle hotel bar, he bundles his stand-up comedy persona behind the optics along with the sensitive poet and gets stuck into "3 000 gins and tonics, please, large ones". (The reason he thinks people drink? "To break down the Berlin Wall we build around ourselves.")

"I’ve never been one of the lads," he begins, fag aloft in womanly hand, "never, ever, and it’s something I’ve resented since The Housemartins ‘cos it made me lose the plot, definitely. All these people came up to me and said ‘you’re just like us, you’re one of us, you just like a pint down the local’ and I’d sit there for hours listening to that so I ended up saying ‘you’re right, mate, I’m just like you’ and became this ‘alright mate’ character and it’s macho bullshit. But anyone who knew me respected me for being an individual ‘cos I was a bit different. And I know I am."

"Actually, I was a nutter. I wasn’t one of the lads, I was the bloke sat in the corner by himself with the holes in his socks and shoes. I hung around with the disruptive lads ‘cost I was shit at school but am I fuck down to earth. And it’ll be the same now for Oasis. Anybody who forms a band, writes their own songs, writes their own lyrics, are they fuck just like everybody else, are they fuck one of the lads, they’re artists! Eccentrics! I don’t think they’re down-to-earth, either, they’re individuals and they don’t wanna be losing that. So, stay a nutter! Stay eccentric! Same with Blur. Let us all be what we want to be and we’ll all flourish off our own backs."

As for the Britop phenomenon...

"Britop, shitpop," he froths, "I’m not fucking British - I’m from fucking Brombery, I’m from me mother’s womb, d’youknowwhatImean? I’m not proud of Britpop, I’m proud of Dorispop. Doris! Me mother’s name. And me dad’s name’s Horace."

Paul’s "eccentricity" is not something he sees as a hindrance to the South’s ascent in the eyes of the American public. In fact, it’s go nothing to do with it "because if I’m singing about loneliness that’s the one word everybody in the entire fucking universe understands. How the fuck can you not understand something like "Prettiest Eyes"? I put my little placard up and it’s a placard for the lonely and the loved and the lost."

And are you lonely?

"Am I fuck," he guffaws, "but I have been, like everybody else. The only downer here is when you come offstage and all the bars are shut. Anyway, I can’t talk properly to anyone and maybe that’s why I’m better understood in me lyrics, I can translate from French to English, that’s all it is. I practically taught meself to read and write. Not that’s its my fault the education system’s fucked."

Paul so-called ‘Heato’ Heaton. There’s at least one fan he knows of who wants to be buried with his lyrics, but he couldn’t blow his own kazoo, never mind trumpet. Always intimating he’s fat and ugly. Going on about how his singing’s no use and his tunes are piffle and the ‘South are not as famous as Go West.

You’re far too hard on yourself, Mr Heaton of Hull.

"I’m not hard on meself at all!" he lies, "Nah. I’m starting to write really good lyrics now, I’m starting to get proud. But I’ve spent me pop career in third gear. I’d never describe meself as a good songwriter, a good singer, nothing like that, because I’m not. Because I’m not Otis Redding and I never will be."

The first time Paul realised he could sing "alright" (i.e. with the angels perched upon his tonsils) was when he was 21 in 1983, walking across a field in Nîmes in France after being thrown off the motorway for hitch-hiking. They wouldn’t let him back on the roundabout so he was forced to walk across the field. The sun was setting and he started singing Aretha Franklin’s version of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ at the top of his voice: "I never knew before that, now way. I thought ‘I can get into third gear here!", came home and just went for it."

Today he can perform "a Stars In Their Eyes impersonation of Mick Hucknall which is so exact it’s embarrassing." He thinks Mick has a "beautiful voice but it ain’t that special. The difference between me and him and Marti Pellow is I’ve got a message. It’s much easier to sing soulfully when it’s just ‘you know I love yooooo!" so I’ve got that against me. But I do think Mick Hucknall’s new tune’s beautiful, spot-on. And he knows it, too, ‘cos if he didn’t he wouldn’t go on TV in such a stupid fucking ridiculous leather outfit!"

He’s been a pop star for ten years now and his complacency is precisely nil.

"I can’t take it for granted or be obnoxious or a bigfuckin’idiot, he slavers, "this job is well paid, well travelled, well looked after, well looked up to. If you can’t behave with dignity in this job you can’t behave with dignity anywhere."

Paul Heaton thinks The Clash, The Jam and The Sex Pistols should be "knighted", unfeasibly enough, for their services to "cynicism - which is the start of thinking about left-wing politics. Which is a part of the process The Beautiful South is in. It’s all a question of putting people on the right train, telling them to watch out, there’s things in people and society to be angry about."

So he knows he’s done something relevant. He’ll even go as far as saying he likes himself. At last!

"I do like meself, yeah", he chirps, "I think I’m a big cynical, clinical idiot out to make records that get in the charts and fuck off and I’m not, y’know, I do give a fuck. The people who like our records I give a fuck about ‘cos they’re the ones who’ve confirmed to me that the things I’ve always thought about were right - ‘cos I never really knew if they were right before. D’youknowwhatImean? Oh God I’m too pissed to speak!"

Dave Hemingway is too pissed to sing. Half an hour later he’s still in a coma backstage at the venue. Miraculously, he will arise in the zombie killer position to wobble spectacularly through the entire show with his voice intact. Professionals, see. And Paul’s gelled his hair back with something called Jam Pudding Gel into a gangster’s all-smooth, sophisticated look. His hair turns black. His shades are on. Tonight he really is Chips Spaghetti, some handsome younger brother of Robert De Niro. Not that he’s having any of that "handsome" business.

"Robert De Niro?" he chokes, helping Hemingway stumble on stage, "Robert Giro...."

Bigidiot