Soup (The Housemartins and the Beautiful South album)
2007 album by The Housemartins and The Beautiful South
Soup is an album released in November 2007 by The Housemartins and The Beautiful South on Mercury Records. It is in effect a greatest hits album for both of the bands, the first seven tracks bracketed together as "The Housemartins Condensed" and the remaining fifteen as "The Cream of The Beautiful South". All twenty-two songs were released as singles by the bands, and the track listing runs in chronological order by year of song release from 1985's "Flag Day" to 2003's "Just A Few Things That I Ain't". An associated DVD of the bands' music videos was also released.
Background
The album came into being as two of The Housemartins, Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway formed The Beautiful South upon the former's breakup in 1988. The Beautiful South therefore were seen as the next guise of The Housemartins. Both bands had already had two greatest hits albums: The Housemartins in 1988 (Now That's What I Call Quite Good) and 2004 (The Best of The Housemartins), and The Beautiful South in 1994 (Carry on up the Charts) and 2001 (Solid Bronze).
The sleeve of the album contains an introduction to it and a brief history of the band by long term friend and fan of the bands, journalist and radio DJ Stuart Maconie. It also contains artwork from throughout the bands' careers and gives the names of all the members of both bands throughout their duration.
Reception
A BBC review of the album stated "Often misunderstood and overlooked by the barometer of cool, Heaton and his minions have beavered away nevertheless and become two of the finest exponents of pop Britain has ever had", while the Manchester Evening News declared "the early work shows them as being a jewel in our pop heritage."
Chart performance
The album reached number 15 in the UK Albums Chart and was certified double platinum.
“Soup (The Housemartins and the Beautiful South album)” enters the record as 2007 album by The Housemartins and The Beautiful South. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Soup, Housemartins and Beautiful can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7565037. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1985, 2003 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soup (The Housemartins and the Beautiful South album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.