Suede imploded with the gravity of this dense and dramatic dark star. The band had spawned a Britpop movement with their eponymous debut ; but the death of guitarist Bernard Butler's father delayed the start of their US tour with The Cranberries. It was on this tour that Butler took to travelling with the other band to avoid the heavy drug use of his own bandmates. Other tensions arose as the band was forced to adopt the name The London Suede due to a lawsuit from an American lounge singer. At one point in the tour the success of their opening band in the US overshadowed their own and they were forced to open for The Cranberries. The rest of the dates were cancelled. In the meantime, they released the single 'Stay Together' which became their biggest success yet, peaking at number three on the UK pop chart.
Back in England, singer and lyricist Brett Anderson hid away in a Victorian mansion in North London where he worked on a new vision under the influence of psychedelic drugs: "We wrote about drama and sex, poverty and passion: subjects that hadn't been touched in pop music for years and years. I wanted as many people as possible to hear it and, fortunately, I just happened to be a larger-than-life figure, which undoubtedly helped the process. I'm sure a lot of our detractors were convinced it was all contrived, but it was never a mask. I wasn't able to switch between caricatures. This was me. Basically, I was a very strange human being... We absolutely didn't want to celebrate Jimi Hendrix or The Beach Boys or any American. Instead, we wanted to pick over the minutiae of British life, and celebrate it. I don't think anybody could deny that we pretty much kicked off what became Britpop, and for a very limited time we were proud of that ... I had always been fascinated by suburbia and I liked to throw these twisted references to small-town British life into songs. This was before we had that horrible term Britpop. We were never really at the party, and Britpop was like a big party: people slapping one another on the back and getting beery and jingoistic. We could not have been more uninterested in that whole boozy, cartoon-like, fake working-class thing. As soon as we became aware of it, we went away and wrote Dog Man Star ... We wanted to tap into something entirely different... I was doing an awful lot of acid at the time, and I think it was this that gave us the confidence to push boundaries ... I became a bit of a wild boy. I was trying to keep my world together enough to document it. But I always felt that I couldn't document it unless I was in the middle of it. I felt that it would have been patronising to be sitting behind my typewriter, writing about unhinged people, if I wasn't slightly unhinged myself. Although I'm sure that, deep down, it was also a good excuse to take lots of drugs ... We were competing with the great records of the past; that’s what we had to prove with it. I was trying to write without any boundaries. I was living in a bizarre house in north London, taking lots and lots of hallucinogenic drugs, and writing in a stream of consciousness about anything I wanted and pushing myself as an artist. Dog Man Star
'Dog Man Star' was recorded in London at Master Rock studios with producer and engineer Ed Buller. Tensions between Butler and the rest of the band were such that he left the sessions and even recorded some parts in another studio after his guitar was left in the street and he was locked out of the original facilities. 'Dog Man Star' features Brett Anderson on vocals; Bernard Butler on guitar and keyboards; Simon Gilbert on drums; and Mat Osman on bass guitar; with Phil Overhead on percussion; Simon Clarke on trumpet; Roddy Lorimer on saxophone and flute; Richard Edwards on trombone; Andrew Cronshaw on cimbalon and ba-wu flute; Tessa Niles and Children from The Tricycle Theatre Workshop providing additional vocals; and orchestration contributed by the seventy-two piece Sinfonia of London (arranged and conducted by Brian Gascoine).
Before the album was mixed, Butler had left for good. Butler looks back: " Every band hated you because you were getting all this attention. Frankly I hated us as well because the focus wasn't on the music. It was on all this stuff that I didn't understand. I just found it embarrassing to be honest ... I always used to get frustrated waiting for the engineers to set up and in Suede, we could wait for hours for them to try different set ups. Once you have waited for four or five hours the moment can be gone. Your mum is never going to listen to a song on the radio and say nice mic technique. It is very important to use the artist’s energy and hunger and to get on with it early in the sessions ... When I look back at Dog Man Star, I don't regret for a moment that I didn't compromise about it. I still say to this day that the producer made a terrible shoddy job of it...When I said that at the time, they fired me."
'Dog Man Star' went to number thirty-nine in Japan, thirty-five on the US heatseekers chart, thirty-two in France, five in Sweden, and number three in the UK.
http://www.suede.co.uk/ "We Are the Pigs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxtIwh1Nz0k "The Wild Ones"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0SuX1IvJys "New Generation"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkSlV8nAuCs VIDEO All lyrics written by Brett Anderson, all music composed by Bernard Butler.
1. Introducing The Band 00:00
2. We Are The Pigs 02:39
3. Heroine 06:59
4. The Wild Ones 10:21
5. Daddy's Speeding 15:12
6. The Power 20:34
7. New Generation 25:05
8. This Hollywood Life 29:43
9. The 2 Of Us 33:34
10. Black Or Blue 39:20
11. The Asphalt World 43:08
12. Still Life 52:34
Suede spent a year generating considerable media hype with a series of singles before delivering the androgynous suburban glam of this pop phenomenon and unwittingly spearheading the Britpop movement. The group started when University College London students Brett Anderson and Justine Frischmann became involved and decided to form a band with Anderson's childhood friend Mat Osman, who was studying at the London School of Economics. The trio put an ad in NME for a guitarist and found Bernard Butler who was studying history at London's Queen Mary College. Butler had written many songs and had been submitting them with little success after flunking out of school.
Butler recalls: "They were very cool; very in-their-own-world. And I wasn't." He sings: "In those days, my dreams were pretty much all that got me off. To have a nice place, a little studio, a car... and a woman, which evaded me for many years (unhappy twang)... "Osman remembers: "Brett was different, even at school. He was a well-known face around town. He had a reputation. I knew of him before I knew him, because he was an oddity. The first time I met him, he was wearing a pink suit, a raincoat, and he had on a shirt and tie with a tiepin. And he had a long-legged girl hanging on his arm."
Anderson considers: "It was Bernard who left a week before his exams. He didn't do anything for three years and then he left when we went on tour. We'd never been on stage before Suede. Been in bands, but nobody saw 'em. We're not professional musicians who suddenly found the, er, lodestone...I was quite numb; didn't think of being in a band. I wanted to be abrasive, so I bought records which I felt expressed something important in myself. Late punk that was – Discharge, Crass and crap like the Exploited...I did feel angry. I was brought up in that environment – y'know, the same old thing. You got no space to express yourself, so you took it out on the football field. It was like living in two dimensions, and then, suddenly, someone shows you the third, which was music. But records weren't enough. It wasn't until I discovered I could play music as well … I started playing my sister's guitar. But Bernard plays it on the album. What he does is quite beautiful, even though he can't play it properly." Butler would keep drawing from the many songs he'd already written: "They'd say, Aw, no, don't like that one. So I'd just give them back six months later and it would be, Great song, let's do it! I'd play all sorts of games. You have to, you know...Brett basically came around to it very slowly. Very closed in, he is. Very difficult to get at. It took a long time for him to trust me and trust my music." 'Wonderful Sometimes' won on the Demo Clash radio show five weeks in a row and led to a deal with indie label RML. While they were still looking for a drummer, Mike Joyce of the Smiths actually recorded two songs with the group: 'Be My God' and 'Art' . Frischmann would leave the group after breaking up with Anderson. By that time, they signed a two single deal with independent Nude Records and were featured on the cover of Melody Maker as the "next big thing" before they'd even released one of them. The success of the singles and the media hype that surrounded the group led to massive anticipation for an album. They secured a distribution deal with Sony Records and went into the studio with producer Ed Buller. 'Suede'
'Suede' 'Welcome to the Pleasuredome' 'Suede' Anderson exclaims: "We are part of a procession of English bands who trampled their way through history. It's just what we do. We're singing about our lives and where we are. We're not anti-American, but our culture seeps through. We hate that sort of 'Brits music school of excellence' mentality. Rock's not a fucking community centre. A lot of great music is the byproduct of not being shepherded around, of being left out in the cold on your own, of a certain desperation; some people wanna treat it like the social services. That's pathetic."
http://www.suede.co.uk/ "The Drowners" was their first single on Nude Records, going to number forty-nine in the UK.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nWJQStqrfw VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FBmYOB9WkA VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vwZOoc1El0 VIDEO "Metal Mickey" was their breakthrough hit, reaching thirty-nine in Australia, thirty-three in Sweden, seventeen in the UK, and number seven on the US modern rock chart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rbw5FaCAzw VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCESKpijirg VIDEO "So Young" made it to ninety-eight in Germany, twenty-five in Ireland, and twenty-two in the UK.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twoO3xYRsz0 VIDEO "Animal Nitrate" reached eighty-nine in Australia, twenty-one in Sweden, eleven in Ireland and New Zealand, and number seven in the UK.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7mEB2wnDLQ VIDEO "She's Not Dead"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFeK_ETmx20 VIDEO "Moving"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P66ehzBM9U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNqXnzkgJbc VIDEO "Pantomime Horse"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKUSlZnpujs VIDEO "Sleeping Pills"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2wozV7QAU0 VIDEO "Breakdown"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv4eGLt6KvM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Kw2m5xNYo VIDEO "Animal Lover"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv47e3JUPWk VIDEO "The Next Life"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBsKxFrPmBA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36VSCWpTI0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Webc3P6vB20 VIDEO 'Suede' full album:
VIDEO All lyrics written by Brett Anderson; all music composed by Bernard Butler.
1. "So Young" 3:38
2. "Animal Nitrate" 3:27
3. "She's Not Dead" 4:33
4. "Moving" 2:50
5. "Pantomime Horse" 5:49
6. "The Drowners" 4:10
7. "Sleeping Pills" 3:51
8. "Breakdown" 6:02
9. "Metal Mickey" 3:27
10. "Animal Lover" 4:17
11. "The Next Life" 3:32
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