Music news travelled slowly in 1994. The Internet barely existed, and copies of English music weeklies like the NME and Melody Maker took weeks and sometimes months to arrive via surface mail. To find out the latest music news, I’d usually drive to the Magazinno in the Levene Extreme store in Newmarket about once a fortnight, which was one of the few places that stocked airfreighted magazines.
By the time I found out that Suede had split (via the Melody Maker) the news was probably already almost two months old. They’d been my favourite band for more than a year – I’d tracked down all their hard to find import singles, gleefully relishing each new b-side, and feeling excited about the direction they were moving in with the Stay Together single. (Laughably, I remember one of the weeklies referring to Brett’s spoken word tirade at the end of that song as being ‘a rap’.) That, I figured, was that. No more Suede. The article mentioned an unfinished album, but I assumed it’d never see the light of day. How many bands survive the departure of a principal songwriter and mercurial genius like Bernard Butler?
Walking home from university usually involved a cursory look in the windows of at least a couple of music stores and, one November afternoon, I discovered that Suede, my favourite band – a band I assumed no longer even existed – had a new album out. An album with a sickly green and enigmatic cover and one that, I would soon discover, contained some of the most compelling and beautiful music I had ever heard. Over the summer of 1994/1995 I played that album almost every day, against the backdrop of massive relationship angst and probably the worst part-time job I’d ever had. I felt trapped, sad and stuck and, clichés aside, that record was one of the few things that made life feel a little more bearable.
On October 12th, 2004, my friend Andrew and I decided to commemorate the release of Dog Man Star by playing it in its entirety as we drove around some of the North Shore’s grittier industrial bits at night. The next day, I wrote the following in my old LiveJournal account:
It’s funny to think back about when that album came out. I was 19, and just finishing up my second, hated year of architecture school. My musical diet at the time consisted almost entirely of the back catalogues of The Smiths and Morrissey and the first Suede album. I was 19, clumsy and shy, and working an awful job in a factory in South Auckland unloading boxes over the summer holidays. “Dog Man Star” spoke to me then, and still does, about escape … about leaving the city, of dreams, of celebrating the small things in a dead-end suburban existence. Other than Andrew, who I’d introduced to Suede a few months earlier, I knew no one else remotely interested in the band. In those pre-internet days of the early 90s there was no global community and no message boards to post on. It was just me, trying unsuccessfully to grow a floppy fringe, and a pile of tatty NMEs and Melody Makers in the cupboard.
Fast forward 10 years, and I still think it’s a flawless album. Brett’s lyrics were so brilliant then, a Council Estate Lord Byron, singing songs about housewives, lonely lives and rough sex. His voice sounded like the perfect cross between Bowie and Scott Walker, and like nothing I’d heard before. Bernard Butler’s guitar playing and song writing had reached their zenith, and the palpable tension between the two mercurial front men crackled with electric energy.
There’s little I can really add to those thoughts from seven years back. I still love the album, although I probably listen to it less than I used to. And, like the debut album, it’s just been reissued as a 2CD/DVD deluxe edition featuring all of the (absolutely spectacular) Butler-era b-sides, a bunch of four-track demos and some other obscurities. Of most interest are unedited versions of The Wild Ones and The Asphalt World - the new, seven-and-a-half minute version of The Wild Ones is particularly brilliant – transforming the ballad I’ve loved for so long into a slinkly, vaguely Neil Young-esque groove, giving an enticing glimpse as to how the album would have turned out had Butler not walked out. And then there’s We Believe in Showbiz – an unreleased song that has inexplicably never seen the light of day until now. For the die-hard Suede fan, these reissues are an absolute treasure trove.
[...] navel-gazing, but it’s a form of writing I really enjoy. Check out the two posts in question here and here – and then have a flick through his other posts, it’s full of good stuff. His [...]