The postman bought me a bit of a treat today. Waiting in my mailbox was a shiny new copy of the soon to be released album from randomness' favorites The Beautiful South. I'm more than a bit apprehensive, though. This write-up on their website certainly is fun and clever. I'm not sure that the lads can live up to it anymore, though. Sad, really.

THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH 'Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs'

Tricky subject: Johnny Cover version. Get it right and you're number one, top of the pops, garlanded with praise and plaudits. Just ask Gary Jules, the Pet Shop Boys and, of course,

The Beautiful South. Get it wrong and you're poor old Duran Duran, still living down their brave yet foolhardy stab at Public Enemy's 911 Is A Joke.

The art of the cover version has fallen into disrepute over recent years. Plundering Pop Idols and Light-Fingered Fame Academics have taken the fun out of it and turned the delicate art of re-interpretation into a sausage machine where bygone classics are fed in and bland, gristly fast food hits are skinned up and spat out for mass consumption.

The new album by The Beautiful South though harks back to a time when David Bowie's Pin Ups was as essential a part of his canon as Hunky Dory or Ziggy (how many people still think Sorrow is a Bowie original?), when Elvis Costello turned a generation onto country music with Almost Blue, when Bryan Ferry could encompass Dylan and Tin Pan Alley with a sublime swoonsome vocal on These Foolish Things, when Lennon could play raucous homage to his roots on Rock And Roll. To this roll of honour, now add the unwieldy title 'Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs', the eleventh album by The Beautiful South and a celebration of the pop song in all its gorgeous, goofy glory.

That's eleven albums. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? It's now 15 years since the amicable dissolution of "the fourth best band in Hull" The Housemartins and the subsequent re-emergence of vocalists Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway as The Beautiful South, along with Dave Rotheray, Sean Welch and Dave Stead as the band's creative core. Throughout the 90s and into the new millennium The Beautiful South became a byword for the best in British pop: intelligent, sarky, ebullient, Northern. Along the way Heaton and Rotheray became the most successful British pop song writing duo since those two scousers with the little glasses and veggie burger sideline, Lennon and McCartney.

There are no Beatles tunes here on this splendid new labour of love from The Beautiful South but there are a dazzling personal selection of soul classics, glitter ball disco anthems, biker anthems and much, much more showing the good humour and good taste of a group that has always been a party waiting to happen. According to Paul Heaton, the songs are paramount. "We're not always fans of the particular band but we are always fans of the song. Our natural inclination is to be obscure I guess so we also wanted to put in a few standards. So I drew up a list and we all lived with a CD for while and then there was a whittling down process. We hadn't really done any of them live before so it was an interesting process. Some that didn't look promising turned out really well, others just didn't happen. We really wanted to do Rainbow's Since You Been Gone but it just never sounded right. But these are ones that really worked, arrived at sort of democratically."

One listen, however, and I'm more than just a bit afraid. Their attempt to turn "You're The One I Want" (yes, that one) into a slow, sultry burn totally misfires. Trying to turn "Blitzkrieg Bop" into a pop ditty? Not very wise. Adding a bit of twang to a otherwise standard take on "Livin' Thing?" Hardly interesting. Giving "Don't Fear the Reaper" a salsa twist? Dreadful. Taking on the Stylistics was, likewise, a bad call.

Covers of much less familiar tunes work much better, though. A take on Willie's "Valentine" works quite well. I'm sadly familiar with the British dance smash "Don't Stop Movin'" as originally recorded by S Club 7 and the Southies slow it down to a nice slow groove. A Rufus Wainwright cover is a curious decision but I quite like it. Finally, a cover of a song by an obscure German band called The Heppelbaums is perhaps the album's highlight.

All of it, though, makes me want to listen to this sublime cover from their first album.

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Or perhaps this one, from their fourth.

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I'll spare you the over-the-top covers of Bobby Darin's "Artificial Flowers" and the Doris Day chestnut "Dream a Little Dream of Me." Unless you really want them..

(addendum: Um. Actually, on a second listen, "Don't Fear the Reaper" is actually really effing brilliant. Launch.com probably summarizes my reservations even better than I could have...

Indeed, the very nature of the undertaking means that band's greatest strength - Paul Heaton's twisted-and-bitter lyrical brilliance that has always cut the band's MOR honey with waspish vinegar - is missing. Once you've accepted that fact, "Golddiggas..." has much to recommend it beyond Paul's always-gorgeous sodden-choirboy voice. It's a tribute to the South's lush way with a buttery patina of sound that this is much more than a semi-smirking novelty makeweight record between a greatest hits and the next studio album. Throw in the band's observation that hate as well as love has driven their playlist choices, and you're in for a treat.)