FEATURE:
The Wild Ones
Suede’s Dog Man Star at Thirty
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ON 10th October…
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins
Suede’s Dog Man Star turns thirty. Although, in 1994, Suede’s second studio album was not as revered and celebrated as their eponymous debut, in years since it has been seen as a masterpiece. One of the best albums of that decade. A real classic that boasts some of their best work. If their debut was inspired by artists like David Bowie, there is a more varied and eclectic palette that goes into the sound of Dog Man Star. Reaching number three in the U.K., I want to celebrate thirty years of a tremendous album that I can feel inspiring artists to this date. Prior to getting to a couple of reviews for Dog Man Star, there are some features that explore the album in greater depth. On its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2019, The Quietus investigated Dog Man Star around the release of an anniversary reissue. There will be a thirtieth anniversary reissue arriving on 2nd October:
“From the moment Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler started to hone their songcraft, the seeds of Suede’s second album, Dog Man Star were being sown. "It was always an album we knew we could make," say Anderson now. Early compositions like ‘Pantomime Horse’ and ‘The Drowners’ B-side ‘To The Birds’ are supremely confident structures, swelling to operatic climaxes, shifting gears like mini-symphonies. On ‘Where The Pigs Don’t Fly’, the stop-start intro has an almost regal sense of presence. This was music with poise and purpose, music that demanded to be heard by a band that demanded to be seen. Onstage and in song, the pair had forged an almost telepathic, brotherly bond. According to Butler’s recollections in John Harris’ The Last Party, they smoked the same cigarettes, dressed identically, the concerned Butler would accompany Anderson home on the tube.
In July 1993, three months after the release of their debut album, Suede teamed up with Derek Jarman for an AIDS benefit at the Clapham Grand. The show was their most lavish spectacle yet, augmented by cellists, piano and guest singers Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux. Behind the band, the director’s Super 8 images flickered. Jarman had made visuals for Suede’s forebears, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys (both of them included, along with The Commotions on the Melody Maker ad Butler originally responded to). This wasn’t a gig. It was an event, the gesture a band entering an imperial phase would make. Their next release would be an eight-and-a-half-minute stand-alone single, ‘Stay Together’, that came wrapped in a gatefold sleeve. But just as Suede were ascending to that rarefied realm where commercial success keeps the company of ‘high art’, they started to fall apart…
Brett Anderson is hedonistically lapping up the shirt-shredding adoration that Suede are receiving in Britain and beyond. Like bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert, he is enjoying success. Anderson has gone from taking the occasional E and smoking the odd spliff to being quite a serious user. Crucially he sees a link between drugs and his songwriting. Bernard Butler, on the other hand, is panic-stricken, fearful of fame, irritated by the music biz treadmill and the clichéd rock star excesses his bandmates are indulging in. He’s also increasingly confused by the Brett Anderson character he reads about in Suede’s press.
As Suede tour the world, Anderson and Butler’s ideas for the band get bigger, just like the gap between them. Anderson hears Buddhist monks chanting in a Kyoto temple and decides he wants to summon a similar hypnotic sound to raise the curtain on Suede’s second album. Butler road tests new material at soundchecks, the booming sound of the riff and the drums fills empty halls. It’s a brutal beefy thud that he wants to recreate on the next Suede album. A visceral thump to the punch-bag of Suede’s public image, a fatal blow delivered to the debut’s top-heavy sound. It’s a raw, live noise that will tear through quiet songs and overdub-rich textures. Outside of the studio, those empty halls are the only places that will hear Butler play Suede’s new song.
As Suede embark on a second US tour in September 1993, tragedy strikes. Butler’s father passes away. He flies home for the funeral and then swiftly, insanely, returns to New York on a tour that, all will later agree, should be cancelled. Grief-stricken and missing the domestic anchor of his girlfriend, he moves further away from his bandmates. Too young, too drug-addled and too English, Anderson fears that trying to console Butler will only further damage their fragile relationship. Haunted by his own recent loss of his mother, he looks away. Butler travels with the road crew, gets stoned and composes continuously. Unbeknown to him, Anderson is writing furiously too, and onstage, Anderson and Butler are increasingly competitive. In New York, their last US gig is such a ferocious display of one-upmanship that only one record company representative dares approach them backstage.
Meanwhile back in London, Britpop has been gathering momentum since Anderson appeared on that Select cover superimposed onto a Union Jack with a not-so-graceful ‘Yanks Go Home’ headline. Suede’s touring has opened them up to broader vistas, from Kyoto’s chanting monks to Tinseltown’s casting couch atrocities. When their arch rivals Blur tour America, it concentrates their focus on a ‘British image’ (the mid-60s US blacklisting of heroes The Kinks triggered a similar Anglo-centric shift). Former Suede member Justine Frischmann has formed a new band, Elastica. ‘Car Song’ drives home the difference between her new music and that of her old band. An angular, perky two-and-a-half-minute backseat romp, it contrasts starkly with ‘She’s Not Dead’s languid foreplay, it’s motor tragedy romance.
Dog Man Star will be the most cinematic of records, peopled with James Dean, titles borrowed from Brando flicks, it even uses Marilyn as a Venus/Aphrodite archetype on ‘Heroine’. Butler’s music will be his most visual yet, "a song and a soundtrack", as Buller observed. Hollywood will worm its way into the album in the most random way. Both Anderson and Butler play movies in the studio, a constant backdrop, and a chance switching of a TV channel at the end of ‘The Asphalt World’ reveals the voice of Lauren Bacall in Woman’s World, a 1954 Technicolor drama.
Such heartstring tugs, such grand gestures reflect a band unafraid to think big. As weird as Anderson’s lyrical ideas are getting there’s also the desire, the ambition to write an American number one, to pen that evergreen anthem that sweeps the airwaves of daytime radio, a big broad stroke of genius that buries itself deep into the hearts of the kind of people he writes about. A song for lovers to marry to, a song to transport the housewife away from the drudgery of the everyday. It’s a song he always tries to write. One day he succeeds. After he writes the top line and lyric to ‘The Wild Ones’ he walks around Highgate in a gleeful daze. The only problem is that Butler wants to drag it from the realm of the morning show and into the outer limits with an extended outro that sticks Anderson through a Leslie cabinet.
Anderson’s new writing is rife with contradiction, just as Butler’s music zig-zags between euphoria and woe. The push of his acid-expanding imagination and of seeing new continents merges with the pull of old Suede themes and Anderson’s past, of suburban graves and housewives waiting by windows. No matter how far through America and Europe ‘Introducing The Band’ travels or how "far over Africa" and "endless Asia" ‘The Power’ glides, there is that inescapable impact of the suburbs on the English psyche. "Don’t take me back to the past," Anderson had begged at the end of ‘Stay Together’s rant, but it is forever present on Dog Man Star”.
I am moving on to a feature from GQ. They also looked at Dog Man Star on its twenty-fifth anniversary. I remember the album coming out in October 1994 and how it sat alongside other albums from the year. At a time of Britpop and other stands, Suede definitely stood out. They crafted an album that stands alongside the very best and most important of the 1990s:
“Second albums are often a disaster because bands have nothing left to say. If anything, Suede had too much left to say when they recorded theirs between March and July 1994. This difficult second album was difficult to make, difficult to sell and difficult for some to listen to. When it was released that winter, Dog Man Star caused a mixture of awe, confusion and sniggering. But the 25 years since have been kind to this imperfect masterpiece. It is the art of falling apart.
“It was our imperial phase,” Anderson tells me. “Everything we were writing felt like gold dust. But we knew people were listening and with that comes hubris.”
It was more ambitious but more masochistic than anything their contemporaries could conceive, let alone pull off. Suede didn’t quite pull it off themselves and yet Dog Man Star remains a remarkable achievement.
“The first album started Britpop but we didn’t get sucked into that cavalcade of nonsense and we wanted to go somewhere else,” says Anderson. “We saw other bands jumping on the British bandwagon and Dog Man Star was a reaction to that.”
“Dog Man Star fails quite a lot,” says bassist and founding member Mat Osman, “but it falls in a really interesting place. It’s a pretentious record, in the sense it’s reaching for something beyond its grasp. There’s something quite charming about that.”
The original version of Suede was formed in 1988 after Anderson and Osman met Justine Frischmann at University College London. Butler, an Afghan hound to Anderson’s poodle, joined the then Camden Town scenesters a year later after answering an advert in the NME, gradually replacing Anderson’s then-girlfriend Frischmann, who left in 1991 to date Damon Albarn and eventually form Elastica. Drummer Simon Gilbert had joined a year earlier at the recommendation of Ricky Gervais, of all people, who was their pretend manager for a few months.
Butler’s writing and playing has a uniquely dynamic melodrama and a sense of theatre that dovetailed with his partner’s. Suddenly labels were clamouring for a signature. Their first trio of hits on Nude and the debut album (which won the Mercury Music Prize in 1993) suggested Suede’s rise to national and then global dominance was inevitable. The grime of the Suede universe was in balance with a sense of seedy charisma that had been missing from British music since the Seventies. “Those early records were very on-the-cheap sexual glamour,” says Maconie. “It’s more about snogging than actual sex. Illicit, rushed, cramped and finding the glamour in that.”
“I look back on those days – until things really fell apart – with great pleasure,” says Osman. “It’s an amazing feeling, like you’re in the eye of the storm. To walk out into the streets and feel like this world was yours. We had money. We were young. With Dog Man Star it’s easy to think of it as this dank thing, but there are moments of pure joy in it.”
The volatility that powered Anderson and Butler’s collaboration soon turned into something as likely to destroy as to create. In the gap between the hype of Suede and the near collapse of Dog Man Star, the band did what successful bands do, although by the time of their biggest hit “Stay Together”, in February 1994, Butler, it seemed, wanted to resist the inexorable rush to debauchery. “You can justify drugs by saying you are trying to expand your ideas,” says Anderson. “We lived a pretty dissolute lifestyle. It was a mad blur of consumption. In between moments of hedonism we’d stumble into the studio and write songs and go on tour and I don’t know how we managed to get anything done. Every day was crazy.”
The mood of Dog Man Star changes so acutely from song to song it’s hard to get a feel for it at first, but eventually a broader narrative emerges in which each story complements the next. “Bringing ‘We Are The Pigs’ out as the first single may have been commercial suicide, but it’s still my favourite,” says Maconie. “It had everything about Suede distilled into that four minutes. Some of the reviews of Dog Man Star used the word pretentious, which makes me think, ‘Great.’ By and large, when a rock critic calls something pretentious it means it’s interesting.”
“The Wild Ones” is Anderson’s sweetheart song and it’s the epitome of his and Butler’s ability to communicate a kind of elated melancholy, with a chorus that conveys as much joy as pain. “‘The Wild Ones’ is pure romantic pop,” says Anderson. “It’s the most uplifting thing we ever did.”
After three months of barely contained animosity, the one-in, one-out arrangement became unsustainable and Butler quit before the album was completed. “I didn’t have the diplomatic skills to deliver what I needed to do,” said Butler, now a successful producer. “I’m full of apologies now.”
Session guitarists were brought in to finish “The Power”, a rousing sing-a-long about breaking free, Anderson’s most beloved theme. Now, Buller indulged the band in Butler’s absence. Some of the extended outros were cut. Brass and strings were added. A tap dancer was hired to record a percussion track. A zither was recorded and abandoned when they realised the zither player couldn’t play the zither. London’s Philharmonia Orchestra was enlisted for the last song. Just the usual rock’n’roll breakdown stuff.
“It was a strange period after Bernard left,” says Anderson. “There was a real sense of relief. I don’t mean to be catty but it had been very unpleasant for a long time and it felt like a weight had lifted. We had a few days in the studio when there was a weird sense of release. But then we suddenly realised we had work to do and we thought, ‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’.
I will end with a couple of reviews. I want to start with one from AllMusic. For an album that was recorded during a turbulent and trouble time for Suede, what resulted is something surprisingly cohesive and consistent. It is a credit to the band that they managed to write such affecting and timeless songs whilst their relationship was going through such strain:
“Instead of following through on the Bowie-esque glam stomps of their debut, Suede concentrated on their darker, more melodramatic tendencies on their ambitious second album, Dog Man Star. By all accounts, the recording of Dog Man Star was plagued with difficulties -- Brett Anderson wrote the lyrics in a druggy haze while sequestered in a secluded Victorian mansion, while Bernard Butler left before the album was completed -- which makes its singular vision all the more remarkable. Lacking any rocker on the level of "The Drowners" or "Metal Mickey" -- only the crunching "This Hollywood Life" comes close -- Dog Man Star is a self-indulgent and pretentious album of dark, string-drenched epics. But Suede are one of the few bands who wear pretensions well, and after a few listens, the album becomes thoroughly compelling. Nearly every song on the record is hazy, feverish, and heartbroken, and even the rockers have an insular, paranoid tenor that heightens the album's melancholy. The whole record would have collapsed underneath its own intentions if Butler's compositional skills weren't so subtly nuanced and if Anderson's grandiose poetry wasn't so strangely affecting. As it stands, Dog Man Star is a strangely seductive record, filled with remarkable musical peaks, from the Bowie-esque stomp of "New Generation" to the stately ballads "The Wild Ones" and "Still Life," which are both reminiscent of Scott Walker. And while Suede may choose to wear their influences on their sleeve, they synthesize them in a totally original way, making Dog Man Star a singularly tragic and romantic album”.
I am going to end with a review from the BBC. The more I read about and discover what went on during the recording of Dog Man Star, the more impressive the album sounds. Such a monumental release from Suede. It is sad that their central songwriting duo were fractured. Some might say that this mood improved the album or added something special:
“After the party – the hangover: One year on from the louche-but-rocking debut, Suede had begun to irrevocably fracture at their very core. Luckily, out of such travails are great works of art born.
By this point the chemistry (in all senses) was becoming a little strained. Retreating into a drug-assisted solitude, Brett Anderson’s lyrics were less concerned with the politics of modern love and more with the effects of the morning after. Solitude, paranoia and self-loathing were the themes here. When he sings ‘If you stay we’ll be the wild ones…’ it’s with a quiet desperation that’s clinging to a lifestyle that’s gone horribly wrong.
The downbeat mood pervades everything here. Even on peppier rockers like “The Hollywood Life” or “New Generation” the guitars of Bernard Butler here sound more spiteful, suffused with a vicious metallic edge. It was here that they formerly parted from the Britpop pack as well (‘I don’t care for the UK tonight’ sings Brett on “Black And Blue”).
At the heart of this album is the real-life drama of Anderson’s and Butler’s increasing alienation. Before the album had even been mixed the pair, once touted as a Lennon and McCartney for the post-E generation, had split. Butler subsequently told of how he turned up to the studio one day to find all his equipment outside the locked door.
Yet, while Dog Man Star stands as a testament to the destructive power of thrill-seeking love and ego-bloating drugs it remains a far deeper and sonically adventurous ride than its predecessor. There’s still a huge dollop of Scott Walker-meets-Bowie-in-the-streets-of-Soho-at-5-in-the-morning archness that can grate. And Anderson’s melodrama can be slightly over-egged on tracks like “The 2 Of Us”, yet with its reverb-drenched lushness and fabulously melancholy audio verite ambience (virtually every track is prefaced by or marbled with some low-key moodiness that recalls Talk Talk’s golden period) it’s an album that continues to fascinate and reward: It’s possibly their least dated work.
While the band struggled heroically (and succeeded) to consolidate their success after Butler’s departure the legend of the band’s lost potential really stems from Dog Man Star. Never had misery sounded so alluring, reaching out to all the lonely urbanites that ever woke up alone. For this alone it remains timeless”.
Turning thirty on 10th October, the stunning Dog Man Star was a real moment of crisis for Suede. Some critics in 1994 felt Dog Man Star was out of step with what was being released that year. Something pretentious or weird. Luckily, Dog Man Star is now seen as one of the very best albums ever. You can even hear the influence of the album on bands like Radiohead and Pulp. Adding a darker edge to their Rock template. Such a legacy and stature, Dog Man Star still feels so important and original…
THIRTY years on.