FEATURE:
Still So Young
Suede’s Eponymous Debut Album at Thirty
_________
IF 1994’s Dog Man Star…
PHOTO CREDIT: Suede/Pat Pope/John Cheeves/Phillip Williams
is seen as their masterpiece and greatest work, then Suede’s fantastic eponymous debut album is a close second. I actually think that Suede is their most important album. It turns thirty on 29th March, so I wanted to spend some time with it. An album that is credited with starting Britpop, we do not think about Suede when we look back on the movement. Blur and Oasis get credit for popularising this genre – music that emphasised Britishness; it had Pop and grittier Rock mixed alongside one another -, but many do not consider bands like Suede and Pulp. I think there is a consistency and confidence from Suede that makes it a classic. With incredible songwritintg by their lead Brett Anderson and guitarist Bernard Butler, the band were completed by bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert. Produced by Ed Buller, I know there will be celebration around Suede turning thirty. I feel Dog Man Star is not as commercial or accessible as Suede. That 1994 reached number three in the U.K. and is a bit darker in feel, I think. Suede was a number one in the U.K., and iconic singles such as So Young and Animal Nitrate are still fresh and captivating to this day! I shall get to a couple of reviews for the 1993 debut album. Before then, there are a couple of features that are worth exploring, as they give us some background and context to Suede. Far Out Magazine revisited the album last year on its twenty-ninth anniversary:
“On March 29th, 1993, London alt-rock group Suede ostensibly kicked off the Britpop era with their eponymous debut album. The album has gained attention over the past three decades as one of the landmark releases of the 1990s, but at the time of its release, it wasn’t as impactful on a global scale as it perhaps should have been. It is generally noted that the failure of the album to push the group to international acclaim and recognition was due to the non-starting American tours of the early 1990s. The first tour in the US was impacted by internal conflicts in the group leading to early cancellation. Shortly thereafter, the second run of live shows in the US was cancelled following the death of guitarist Bernard Butler’s father.
In their stead, Blur and Oasis seemingly took the Britpop flame and ran with it hurriedly towards a distant finish line. All the while, Suede were somewhat sidelined as one of the background heroes of the Britpop era, competing with the likes of Elastica and Sleeper until the success of their 1996 LP Coming Up. Despite the failure to make an early impact in the US with their masterpiece debut album, it was a success in the UK. Suede entered the UK Albums Chart at number one and observed the biggest initial sales for a debut album since Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome a decade before. The album even won the band the 1993 Mercury Prize, and the group subsequently donated the entire £25,000 prize money to Cancer Research.
The album’s enduring importance and appeal comes from the unique, androgynous and yelping vocal style of Brett Anderson. The throwback to Ziggy Stardust era androgyny was fortified by the bold and memorable cover art featuring an androgynous couple kissing. The image was taken from the 1991 book Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, collated by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser. The cover art provoked some controversy in the press and prompted Anderson to comment: “I chose it because of the ambiguity of it, but mostly because of the beauty of it”.
The group’s sound came as a modernised take on the early 1970s glam style that David Bowie championed. The lyrical and vocal prowess was given its updated sound with Butler’s intricate guitar stylings that appeared to take inspiration from the Smiths legend Johnny Marr. Conceptually, the music depicted the darker side of life in London in the 1980s and ’90s, with references to poverty and drug abuse throughout”.
I will come to The Quietus’ examination of Suede in 2018. Twenty-five years from its release, they observed how the period in which it was recorded and released was very different to the Britpop era from 1995 to around 1998. The early-’90s was still lumbered with a Tory government, music that was not at its peak, and high unemployment. The swagger and glory days were a little way off! Suede helped to at least set off a movement that would ignite during more optimistic days. They were ahead of their time in some respects but, as you listen to the lyrics of Suede, they were very much reflecting the times too:
“In his autobiography Coal Black Mornings Anderson maintains that he was “documenting Britishness” all along, and it’s a claim that stands up: “The feeling of ‘Britishness’ that we were developing in our words and in our music and in our style was something exciting that we felt we had stumbled upon, and as such it felt brave and raw and beautifully out of step.” Contemporaries Pulp were doing something similar but weren’t attracting much attention at that time, and of course the Pet Shop Boys had already projected a Cowardian Englishness onto the pop landscape which had influenced Suede. When Bernard Butler answered Brett and Mat's ad for musicians in NME, the guitarist recalled his interest had been piqued by the diversity of the influences - the Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - which perhaps don’t look as variegated in the internet age as they might have when music fans were more tribal.
At another point in the book, Brett notes: “The point was to reflect the world that I saw around me and that world just happened to be Britain: a cheapened, failed world that had nothing to do with the laddish, jingoistic and frankly patronising interpretation that would follow”. Blur’s edgy sense of irony raised eyebrows a few months after Suede was released when they posed for the questionable “British Image 1” photoshoot with photographer Paul Spencer, featuring Damon in skinhead attire handling a dog. In the context of the moment it could have been construed as flirting with fascism, especially after Morrissey had brazenly brandished a Union Jack at Madstock in Finsbury Park the year before. Right wing imagery of any kind was anathema in alternative rock and the music press was hypersensitive to it. Suede would inadvertently play a part in changing that perception.
The notorious Select cover with Brett mounted on the national flag with the indefensibly xenophobic “Yanks Go Home!” strapline certainly caught the eye when it appeared in newsstands. It’s reasonable to suggest it’s where the patriotic bombast of Britpop all began, and yet the bands being championed within were far more diffident about what it meant to be British. “I don’t think there’s anything great about Britain as such,” said Luke Haines of the Auteurs. “I don’t have any great feelings of love towards this country. And I particularly hate all this kitsch retrospective stuff about Carry On films and the like, which were definitely not great. There’s not a lot to be patriotic about in a country that’s put up with the Tories for 14 years.” Jarvis Cocker from Pulp spoke of being ashamed of “hooligans: leftover from the days of Empire. People who really do believe that we rule the world or ought to. People who go to other countries and think it’s OK to be rude to the people there.” Lawrence from Felt meanwhile noted that the Union Jack was “just a flag like any other flag, a piece of cloth you hoist up a poll when you’ve won a war”, and St Etienne’s Bob Stanley declared, “I prefer France myself.”
The concept for the magazine campaign had come from Stuart Maconie, who’d recently jumped ship from NME, partly because he was tired of all the grunge coverage. Select’s cover feature was designed as a riposte to Uncle Sam, although not everyone was happy with the layout. “Suede, while enjoying the acclaim and publicity, were peeved with me, perhaps understandably, at being associated with a flag that at that point was seen as the preserve of the far-right,” wrote Maconie in The Mirror in 2014. “But within a few years, it was everywhere, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar to Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress.” Maconie justified it all by saying what came after was “about confidence in being British, a celebration of British life and a new-found love of our past, rather than slavish worship of America.” Brett for his part was happy to go along with the yank bashing: “I still don’t understand why people dress like that. Why English bands persist in Americanising themselves. I don’t understand why American music has to be so military and aggressive. Look at Henry Rollins; he’s like a Sergeant Major or something."
Suede really did bring sexy back to white guitar rock, and not in a straight or misogynist or objectifying way like, say, the Rolling Stones. Some might point out the fact Brett’s experimentation with gay sex only went as far in reality as being playful with his pronouns, though it still gave empowerment to many and moved the conversation on (it stands at no.27 in Attitude’s Top 50 Gay Albums of All Time). What’s more, it opened up a glorious portal that, via songs like ‘The Drowners’ and ‘Metal Mickey’, could transport you back to the heady glory of glitter rock. There were no three-day weeks or energy cuts, but it felt just as shit to be alive in 1993 as it did in 1973. Like the creme of early glam rock, and almost as a reaction to the coiffured prissiness of American hair metal, Suede brought with them a riot of drug fuelled escapism, and celebrated the bad teeth and the deviant sexuality, the androgynous pop and the glorious failures that make us proud to be British. It’s just a shame somebody brought along a Union Jack”.
I don’t think there are any plans for a thirtieth anniversary reissue of Suede. You can buy the original album on vinyl, but I am not sure what else is planned. The band are still going strong. Bernard Butler left the band after Dog Man Star. The legendary band released their ninth studio album, Autofiction, last year. The winner of thew 1993 Mercury Prize, Suede is seen as one of the all-time greats. Whilst it was successful in the U.S, it struggled in terms of sales compared to the U.K. Pitchfork revisited Suede when they reviewed the Deluxe edition of the album that came out in 2011:
“There is music on these albums. Obviously. The reason I'm saying that up front is that discussion of the first two Suede albums is invariably framed in a discussion of the bigger picture, both in terms of what was happening in British rock in the early 1990s and in terms of the discord within the band, particularly during 1994. There are good reasons for this. Suede were at the center of the conversation that gave us the Britpop narrative that so dominated the UK in the mid-90s. They were the band on the cover of the issue of Select that invented Britpop as a concept, they were massively hyped before they even released anything, and their debut album was the fastest-selling in British history. They were ignored in the United States and ridiculously had to change their name in this country to the London Suede after a lawsuit by an obscure lounge singer.
This stuff is all important to understanding who Suede were-- the music they made, especially on their first three albums, is tied closely to their story as a band-- but I really want to make sure that as I make my way through that story, the music doesn't slip to the side of the conversation. Stories and meta-cultural narratives aside, the music is what we have to listen to now, and there is a lot of great music spread over these elaborate reissues. The whole band, including once-estranged original guitarist Bernard Butler, was involved in putting together these packages, each of them a 2xCD/DVD featuring the original album, demos, unreleased outtakes, every contemporary B-side (plus one non-album A-side), music videos, interviews and live performances. The band's entire output, with the notable exception of three early unreleased tracks, "Be My God", "Art", and "Wonderful Sometimes", is now available on five very well-done reissues that include all of the original artwork for both the albums and the singles. They have curated their past well.
Consider the arena this band was entering when it debuted in May, 1992 with "The Drowners". The British rock world was dominated by two waning trends, shoegaze and Madchester, both of which emphasized sound and vibe over personality and pomp. And here Suede were, with a very bold, direct, and sexually charged song that had the swagger of glam rock and was focused on the voice of Brett Anderson, who was powerful and distinctive. Anderson's vocals had a little of Bowie and a little of Morrissey, but there was a lot more there than a simple swirling of influences. Here was a guy who could sing frankly about drug abuse and rough sex without plasticizing it or stylizing it-- actions had consequences in the world he created, and wild nights had mornings after, but he was careful not to tell you the moral of the story.
It wouldn't always be like that, but during the brief years Butler was still in the band, Anderson was at his best as both lyricist and vocalist. The band had a good rhythm section, too. Bassist Mat Osman is a subtle force in the band, playing melodic lines that keep the songs light on their feet, even when Simon Gilbert's drumming locks in on a stomping and otherwise heavy beat. When they matched up with Butler's guitar, they were nearly as charismatic as a trio as the guy who was singing for them. "The Drowners"-- which for all the early hype around the band (they were on the cover of Melody Maker a month before its release under the headline "The Best New Band in Britain") only charted at #49-- has a destructive energy to it that I can understand hearing as a clarion call in the musical climate of Britain in the early 90s. The opening drum stomp, soon joined by Butler's crunching, metallic riff, seems to announce the band as something different and exciting. It drips with sex before Anderson even opens his mouth”.
I wanted to spotlight Suede ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 29th March. An album that introduced one of the great British acts to public attention, its importance and genius is clear. So influential in terms how it shaped and changed British music, I don’t think it is reserved to that time and place. Because of Suede’s unique and compelling songs, it is a lot more enduring and relevant that a lot of albums released around the time. Take some time out today to listen to…
A mighty debut.