Suede - A glam resurrection

Foreword

Britpop yes. Britpop no. More than fifteen years after the rapid explosion (and equally rapid implosion) of what can be considered the last great mass musical phenomenon linked in some way to "rock", the dilemma keeps resurfacing, tragically unresolved. Is it legitimate or historically justified to grant Britpop citizenship in a hypothetical pantheon of historicized musical genres alongside beat, country, folk, psychedelia, hard rock, glam, punk, grunge etc.? Was it merely recycling and a revival of worn-out clichés? Was it an authentic musical phenomenon, endowed with its own specific stylistic movements and new social content, capable of imposing its own original lexicon and syntax, thereby broadening the expressive possibilities of rock language? Or were all those skeptics right who at the time considered it (and still consider it) a colossal media contrivance aimed at reviving moribund British music on the international scene, after years of unchallenged American hegemony?

We'll probably never reach an agreement, yet it's hard to dispute the impact that Britpop bands have had, for better or worse, on all subsequent rock production (both popular and melodic, as well as more independent, and, more importantly, not only European). Many bands deserve to be carefully reconsidered with a calmer, less suspicious eye, especially in order to more fully understand the aesthetic reasoning behind many groups, some of them significant, of the latest generation, who grew up and were shaped in the shadow of the small "myth" of that tiny segment of English musical history.

And perhaps the time has finally come to fully reassess the weight and importance of one of the brightest and most reclusive stars of that short-lived firmament: Suede. A significant band, which unequivocally demonstrates how Britpop was a far more fragmented and formally divergent phenomenon than is commonly believed today. It has in fact become an entrenched habit among certain critics to associate Britpop with the Beatles, thereby flattening all the bands of the movement under that cumbersome (and rather generic) aesthetic paradigm. Well, the novelty of Suede also lies in the fact that their experience is situated within a far more complex stylistic and cultural horizon, one whose formal center of gravity lies in a recovery and decisive revival of glam and the mastery of one of the undisputed protagonists of English pop music: David Bowie. From the Thin White Duke, Suede derived an intellectual, dandyish approach, the fundamental importance placed on image as an active and decisive component of their music and its spectacle, and a certain baroque, theatrical taste in phrasing and arrangements.

This was Suede's starting point, further enriched by numerous other equally decisive influences: the tender, aching melancholy of T. Rex's Marc Bolan, revisited through a rhetorical and scenic framework perhaps reminiscent of early Queen; the feverish melodic flair of the Cure, skillfully blended with the dark shades of an urban malaise poised between French decadentism and the Velvet Underground, combined however with evocative new-romantic fascinations. Not forgetting the indispensable contribution offered by the Smiths of Steven Morrissey, from whom Suede borrowed an uninhibited, sharp-edged songwriting style, at times capable of scratching and causing scandal by offering up themselves and their own fragile nakedness, provocatively displayed and recounted.

The beginnings and immediate success

The story of Suede begins in London at the end of the 1980s on the initiative of singer Brett Anderson, at the time an architecture student, and bassist Mat Osman. The project took shape when they were joined by Bernard Butler, then a history student (contacted through an ad in the NME), a skilled guitarist as well as violinist and pianist, and second guitarist Justine Frischmann (Brett's girlfriend and future founder of Elastica). The lineup was completed by drummer Simon Gilbert, who joined only in the summer of 1991. Thus Suave and Elegant came to life.

The band, however, didn't even have time to record a single track before Justine Frischmann left (perhaps due to friction with Butler), though not before suggesting a new name for the project: Suede (inspired by Morrissey's "Suedehead"). Suede then launched into an intense run of live shows, rewarded with a surprising level of public success that landed the band on the cover of Melody Maker as "The Best New Band in Britain" without having recorded anything yet.

Their recording debut arrived in May 1992 with the single "The Drowners", followed in September of that same year by "Metal Mickey", both produced and distributed by the newly founded Nude Records, set up by Saul Galpern, with whom Suede had in the meantime signed an exclusive deal. The actual album, simply titled Suede, arrived only in April 1993, preceded in February by the single "Animal Nitrate", and shot straight to the top of the British charts as no English rock band had managed in a very long time: Suede were fought over on magazine covers by the major British music press as the new icon of youthful transgression, their music drew the attention and feverish enthusiasm of an ever-growing audience, and the never-dormant rhetoric of British imperialism had finally found its new national heroes.

We are, as mentioned, at the start of 1993, and this date can very well be considered the official starting point of the Britpop phenomenon.

In truth, the album isn't actually all that innovative in terms of its musical offering (Suede themselves would go on to write pages of far greater depth in the years that followed) and it probably owes much of its success to the self-satisfied aura of damnation and sexual nonchalance that the band knew how to build and cultivate around their public image at the time (starting with the censored cover, which depicted two women kissing). However, it should also be added that the album follows a much more introspective direction than the singles taken from it might suggest. While the jagged, recalcitrant guitars of "Animal Nitrate" sound a little dated today, with their intoxicating carousel of overloaded glam driven by Anderson's dazed squeal, "So Young" (perhaps the album's masterpiece and the fourth and final single pulled from it) has a precise cadence and an undeniable structural coherence, with a beautiful widening of perspective in the chorus and Butler's guitar (co-writer of every track on the album) chasing Anderson's vocal flourishes in the finale. The tangled guitar lines of "The Drowners" likewise crumble into a mawkish, sing-song chorus that has lost much of its shine today, while the ethereal, caressing charm of the ballad "Sleeping Pills" remains intact, perhaps too close to its forerunner "Life on Mars?", brushed by gentle guitar arpeggios and stunned orchestral resonances.

Likewise, as an alternative to the guitar fireworks and mechanical chorus of "Metal Mickey", the album offers two thoroughly balanced compositions such as "Pantomime Horse" (a lukewarm existential watercolour embellished by an emphatic guitar solo that splits the song cleanly in two) and, above all, "She's Not Dead": Anderson explores and savours every expressive register of his wounded voice, while Butler carves out a whispering stream of notes that never lets his partner lose his footing. The track also stands out for the excellent way Anderson's pen manages to sketch splendid, complex female figures, with their often unresolved and suffering body language (and Suede's songbook is also, and above all, a rich gallery of touching female presences).

The rest of the album doesn't add much, and the music on "Moving" and "Breakdown" sounds rather breathless and limping, while the cloying "The Next Life" fails to be as conclusive or heart-wrenching as it aims to be. In the end, though, the carefree swagger of "Animal Lover" – with its bouncy wave cut very much in the style of Roxy Music – does its modest job well, and the circle closes in its own way.

Although the Bowie of "Ziggy Stardust" and the Lou Reed of "Transformer" come across as all-too-explicit blueprints, the album, beyond its assorted glitter and stage tricks, has a precise catchiness of its own, and Suede reveal a pop potential that's still not fully in focus and somewhat unripe, yet still remarkable, combined with an uncommon ability to depict certain adolescences grown up amid a thousand doubts and difficulties at the end of the Thatcherite decade.

Bernard leaves. Dog Man Star: an inescapable flop or a misunderstood masterpiece?

Suede ride the wave of success (the album wins the Mercury Music Prize) and head out on tour in the United States (where, for copyright reasons, they're forced to adopt the name London Suede), alongside the Cranberries. For Valentine's Day 1994, the single "Stay Togheter" is released, dedicated to Butler's father, who had passed away a few months earlier: a smooth, polished falsetto soul tune that brings to mind the Style Council, perhaps weighed down by an excessive melodic preciousness that eventually grows tiresome.

Meanwhile, recording begins on the hugely anticipated new album, Dog Man Star, which hits stores in October 1994, preceded in September by the single "We Are The Pigs". But the real news is something else: due to friction and personality clashes with Anderson, Butler leaves Suede in July of that same year to pursue a solo career. This will not be without consequences and repercussions for the band's future evolution. The then seventeen-year-old Richard Oakes is brought in to replace Butler. The album, however, fails to win much acclaim, and Suede's star now seems definitively eclipsed by overpowering new musical phenomena like Blur and Oasis, who in the meantime are racking up hundreds of thousands of copies sold and smashing record after record.

This album (which owes its title to Stan Brakhage's film "Dog Star Man"), seen in retrospect more than ten years after its release, looks very different from the wretched, self-indulgent symphonic mess that some sharp tongues scornfully branded it at the time. While it does pay a toll to a certain incurable aspiration to monumentality, Dog Man Star is a richly varied work in its ideas, pervaded by a decadent mood that draws deeply on the murky dark-wave imagination with a foresight that anticipates later musical trends by at least a couple of decades. True, here and there gratuitously formalistic moments crop up, along with an occasionally excessive taste for ornamentation, but nearly every song is bathed in a pleasantly exhausted, dusty light, at times even spectral, which in some way foreshadows the impending end of all the generational utopias tied to the great Britpop dream.

Suede thus stage their own personal farewell ceremony to youth, with an album that resembles a table left in ruins and disarray after a wild party that lasted only as long as an illusion. It opens with the robotic litany "Introducing The Band", which rolls out the opening credits of the apocalyptic epic to come in its chanting, psychedelic language, before arriving at "We Are The Pigs", a revised and philologically corrected version of "So Young", the last outpost of the old Suede sound amid the desolate wastelands of Dog Man Star. "Heroine" carries the conversation forward along lines of lacerated, battered yet still impeccable pop-rock, somewhere between Echo And The Bunnymen and Psychedelic Furs (both repeatedly referenced elsewhere on the album too). But what really stands out is the near-Shakespearean dramaturgical construction of "The Wild Ones" and "New Generation" (the second and third singles respectively), with Anderson standing before the great tribunal of conscience, plunging his voice into his own existential tragedies with relentless precision and an emotional incontinence bordering on parody, yet always perfectly credible. That credibility drops markedly, though, in the face of the hysterical little shrieks and unjustified clangour of "This Hollywood Life".

But to forget all that, the elegiac fragrance of "The Power" is more than enough, a perfect ballad in the mould of the more composed, inspired Smiths, ruffled by a warm breeze of restorative pop. Along the same lines, but on a more tormented path, is the equally catchy "Daddy's Speeding", fitted out among other things with a final coda thick with reverb and refraction.

The closing stretch of the album is also its most ambitious and experimental, and it played a decisive role in sealing its unfortunate reputation among a certain too-hasty strand of critics. "The 2 Of Us" chases the stately movements of the great voice-and-piano ballad under the protective shadow of Burt Bacharach, but lets itself be overwhelmed by an operatic, official grandeur that's prodded too insistently. Better, then, is the small inlay of dazed, lace-trimmed falsettos on the madrigal-like "Black Or Blue", which ventures into rural visions of Victorian England and Constable's skies, and then paves the way for "The Asphalt World", with its more choral structure, which instead glides along soft curves of electric guitar and Hammond organ, in its own way setting down the first canons of a classically "Suede" sound, before contradicting it all in the name of the most mannered incoherence with a jarring, not to say incongruous, progressive-rock coda.

"Still Life" closes out the record: it blows stardust into your eyes, drawing on a lavish forty-piece orchestra, but it rests on a storyline that's all too predictable in its cinematic grandiloquence.

Not far away, meanwhile, Bernard Butler (who, let's remember, actively took part in the writing of Dog Man Star) continues to deepen his explorations of Johnny Marr-style guitar work, and finds time to record a soul-rock album somewhere between Rod Stewart and JJ Cale, alongside singer David McAlmont ("The Sound of McAlmont and Butler", 1995), not particularly memorable. After a series of collaborations with the Pretenders, Bryan Ferry, Paul Weller, Angelo Badalamenti and Neneh Cherry among others, two more albums follow with a more singer-songwriter bent, released on Creation: "People Move On" (1998) and "Friends And Lovers" (1999). Both works stand out for a fairly straightforward, composed style, from which Butler reworks, with taste and sensitivity (and a good deal of academicism), his main points of reference: Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach, Simon & Garfunkel, but also the Faces, the Eagles and JJ Cale, mostly arriving at results that are bland or mildly predictable, further hampered by vocal performances that are far from flawless. But catchy, well-balanced pop songs like "Stay" or "Not Alone" (the first two successful singles taken from "People Move On") are always a pleasure to revisit.

Worth remembering is Bernard Butler's contribution to the soundtrack of Todd Haynes's glam-rock film "Velvet Goldmine", as part of the collective Venus in Furs, alongside Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.

After these experiences, Butler would go on to launch a fruitful career as a producer, rich in successes (the Veils, the Libertines…).

Coming Up and the peak of Britpop

The band, by now written off by many as finished, returns to the studio to begin recording their third album, Coming Up, released in September 1996 and preceded in July by the single "Trash". This is Suede's most successful record, one that puts the band back at the top of the UK sales charts at a particularly fruitful moment for British rock music, during which even lesser bands like Bluetones or Ocean Colour Scene achieve surprising results.

Britpop has by now fully exploded and is being followed with great interest across the rest of Europe too, and Coming Up completes an ideal constellation of records from this musical movement, alongside "Different Class" by Pulp, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" by Oasis, "Parklife" by Blur, "K" by Kula Shaker, "Everything Must Go" by Manic Street Preachers and "I Should Coco" by Supergrass.

Brett Anderson, who by now held the creative reins of the Suede project firmly in his hands, steers the band's sound decidedly toward sun-drenched pop territory, aided by the crucial contribution of new keyboardist Neil Codling. The record thus comes across as a devastating, unstoppable singles-producing machine (it would be milked to the extreme, with no fewer than five singles pulled from it in a progressive approximation of the ultimate pop song), and even today it retains its compositional verve and fluent, enchanting pop eloquence fully intact. It's a kind of meticulous, detailed poetic exercise on the concept of lightness, one capable of flooring even the most resistant listener with an impressive string of acrobatic compositional feats. The dancing is kicked off by "Trash", which immediately makes clear how the bombastic arrangements of past records have been stripped down and fully reabsorbed in favour of a pleasant open-air stroll along the well-trodden path of the traditional verse-verse-chorus structure. That impression is confirmed straight away by the following "Filmstar" (the fifth single pulled from the album), which after a stumbling, convulsive opening settles into a sleek, panoramic, beautifully measured chorus. Then comes the record's first true masterpiece, "Lazy" (the fourth single), a song built on a melodic line that's minuscule to say the least, yet capable of effortlessly lifting oceanic crowds of adoring fans off the ground.

The tone softens with the veiled cadences of "By The Sea", which returns to the long-sought piano ballad, though here padded with excessive orchestral upholstery and a rather too overt, at times obsessive, taste for Bowie-style melodrama.

Balance is restored in the lean delivery of "She", in which Anderson smothers his own erotic obsession as a loveless man, letting his mind be tormented by a new fierce female figure advancing over still-warm shards of new wave. Then comes "Beautiful Ones", perhaps Suede's most famous song and the second single pulled from the album, remarkable above all for Anderson's voice, which chases itself elusively along the harmonious ridges traced by Richard Oakes's velvety guitar, in a perfectly symmetrical game of vocal ups and downs, fragrant la-la-las and delightful arrhythmias. With "Starcrazy", the glossiest, most glittering and worldly strains of the Eighties burst in (and the mind drifts back to Bryan Ferry), paving the way for the following "Picnic By The Motorway", which also shows a certain admirable skill in letting thin, biting falsetto fragments drip over a strangled guitar soliloquy, before the sudden final burst of sunshine in classic Suede style.

The record then settles into the pastel colours of the power-pop postcard that is "The Chemistry Between Us" and the evening mood of "Saturday Night" (the third single), yet another gem from an inspired, mature and, above all, thoroughly successful record. The song moves at a slow, relaxed pace and gradually reveals the closing credits of an unrepeatable era in English music, lingering on the gestures of a woman caressed with the utmost melodic grace and a razor-sharp sense of desolation for time slipping away.

Meanwhile, in October 1997, a double compilation titled Sci-fi Lullabies is put together and released, warmly received by critics and fans alike, attempting to bring some order to Suede's sprawling thicket of b-sides (twenty-eight tracks selected, a true object of desire for the band's ever-growing fanbase), mixing rarities and various odds and ends, to the delight of every completist. The record digs up material from the by-now distant Anderson-Butler partnership, which had yielded so many considerable fruits, covering the whole first arc of the band's prolific output (among the gems worth noting are "My Insatiable One", "Killing Of A Flashboy", "My Dark Star", "Feel", "Europe Is Our Playground"), and it still holds a precise collector's value today.

Two years of silence and substantial inactivity follow this record, aside from the 1998 recording of the track "Poor Little Rich Girl" for a Noël Coward tribute album, "20th Century Blues".

Head Music and the return to electronics

In May 1999, Suede's fourth studio album, Head Music, hits record shops, carrying the heavy burden of providing a dignified and well-argued follow-up to the songwriting and inspiration the band had shown on the previous Coming Up. The album is preceded in April by the single "Electricity", and the band's "electronic" turn is immediately clear. This album (accompanied by a promotional campaign of colossal proportions, with no fewer than 91 Virgin Megastores proudly displaying the Virgin Head Music logo, and by a pirate radio station, Head Music 107.1 Fm, broadcasting nothing but tracks from the record!) represents Suede's last genuine, if not entirely successful, creative burst, and it's one of their most solid and sonically complex works.

As mentioned, the sound shifts decidedly onto more electronic tracks, while still retaining a strong and decisive pop quality that is by now inseparable from the band's identity. The record thus appears heavily influenced by bands like Happy Mondays, New Order, the Bowie of "Low" and that general area, Depeche Mode, Ultravox, Talk Talk and early Human League, starting with "Electricity", a perfectly pop song built on Anderson's vocal contortions and lit intermittently by destructuring electronic spasms. The album then continues with the highly refined, stylish divertissement of "Savoir Faire": the track has a pleasantly artificial, transparent aftertaste, and Anderson's voice slides, shrill and sly, across geometric surfaces of smeared beats that overlap one another in a continual game of cross-references.

The two following compositions (both released as the third and fourth singles) mark a partial return to more traditionally brit-rock territory: "Can't Get Enough" is a delightful glam proclamation, whose gruff chorus lets you grope its sculpted muscles with sheer pleasure, while the following "Everything Will Flow" is the least convincing moment on the whole album, its syrupy, arcadian orchestral flourishes making it a pastoral idyll bordering on parody. Fortunately, the four most brilliant episodes on the record arrive right after. It starts with "Down", a very slow ballad with a descending, cracked profile that recalls the most intimate Bowie, and which gives us a sublime display of Anderson's interpretive gifts (here playing a worldly, disillusioned crooner somewhere between Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen).

Next comes the luminous tapestry of "She's In Fashion" (the second successful single pulled from the album), striking for its vivid carnival of colours and glowing impressions, losing itself in a confused, dazzling play of small rhythmic shards that never quite repeat themselves. The ghost of Bryan Ferry then returns in the swaying, hip-rolling stride of "Asbestos", with its loosely relaxed cadences, framed by electronic effects and makeup that are anything but harmless.

The circle closes with the eponymous "Head Music", which manages to layer Anderson's doll-like voice harmoniously and convincingly over an unstable synthetic bed of crackling beats and sampled sounds: the track has an angular, alliterative progression and is embellished by a vaguely robotic chorus that's hard to forget. The electronic dominance is then briefly broken by "Elephant Man", yet another Bowie-esque cast — effective nonetheless — before resurfacing forcefully on "Hi-Fi", without a doubt the most ambitious and experimental track on the whole record, advancing in a mumbling, stunned haze of chemical reverb all the way to the grainy vision of the chorus: the song, steeped in murky, foggy moods, marks a significant evolution in Suede's sound, though one that would find no further development in the band's later work, largely prefigured instead by the record's closing stretch, entrusted to three songs that tend to flow back into a more straightforward pop-rock. These range from the thoughtful, neo-romantic postures of "Indian Strings", sung by Anderson as if teetering on a cliff edge, to the embroidered sentimentalism of "He's Gone" (yet another charming rococo sketch of a woman in love on a balcony), ending with the political invective of "Crack In The Union Jack" (nice cadence, but rather intangible fury).

The final verdict is that of a record only partially successful relative to its original ambitions, a work whose fundamental fault is that it failed to be — as it could have been — the artistic high point of Suede's by-then decade-long career. It's a record that fails precisely where, instead of concluding and handing Suede's musical story over to history, it opens up new expressive possibilities for the band that would, however, never be explored and pursued in all their radical potential.

A New Morning: chronicle of a perhaps foretold death

In September 2002, A New Morning, the fifth Suede album, hit the shelves, preceded by the lead single "Positivity". Due to yet another defection (Codling left for health reasons), the line-up underwent a further forced reshuffle with the arrival of keyboardist Alex Lee, formerly of Strangelove. The album passed almost completely unnoticed, and by now many people (including the band's own fans) were starting to doubt whether there was still any room, however small, for this group on the international pop-rock scene, while in Britain gentler, acoustic-minded acts like Starsailor, Travis and Coldplay were climbing the charts with little effort, and hardly anyone seemed to remember who Suede even were any more.

The record gives us the image of a band grown heavy and prematurely senile, which, despite numerous digital face-lifts and pounds of over-production and corrective make-up, cannot halt the inexorable decay of its own sound - disguised in every possible way, and precisely for that reason all the more obvious. Anderson's vocal cords sound strained, rusty and full of aches, and however hard he tries, he can no longer even brush certain high notes, now bereft of their once-proverbial elasticity. The songwriting, too, feels rather stiff and awkward, and as a whole the album resembles a portrait of Dorian Gray, its wrinkled mask bearing all the marks - bruises, scars, swellings, lines - of a decade of excess.

But Suede are a creature of noble and glorious lineage, and before falling silent, perhaps forever, they manage to summon a few last, faint roars. "Lost In Tv" is one of the last songs still worthy of their reputation, with its well-blended mix of guitars and keyboards and a touching chorus lost in a web of overlapping vocal harmonies. "Obsessions" (the second single) is also sharp and persuasive, venting all its tension in an equally solid chorus, with lovely decorative guitar lines weaving through the background. Everything else, however, is rather soft and sticky, and dangerously edges into the most degraded, debased side of the concept of "pop". "Positivity" hides its own thinness behind the artificial sparkle of annoyingly good-natured strings, "Lonely Girls" takes on a moralising, dreamy cadence that makes it sound like a parable or a harmless catechism lesson, and "Street Life" wants to scratch but, in terms of compositional ideas, is about as threatening as a scrawny, domesticated kitten. Faced with the glib sing-song of "Beautiful Loser", listening becomes rather frustrating, and the increasingly justified suspicion starts to creep in that the band is writing its own final epitaph. "Astrogirl" is a long avenue of sunset and disillusioned hopes, but at least it manages to float on a pleasant, if superficial, melodicism.

Things pick up a little further with the measured pace of the ballad "Untitled... Morning": distant and squeezed dry as it now is, the Suede star still lets a few exhausted golden glimmers shine through, on a record that resembles a scattered heap of discarded trinkets. The rest of the tracklist closes the matter off with episodes all too steeped in strained formalism and craftsmanship for its own sake ("When The Rain Falls", "One Hit To The Body", "You Belong To Me").

In October 2003, Sony released the complete collection of all the singles Suede had put out between 1992 and 2003. The album was preceded in September by the single "Attitude", which took the band back into the UK Top Twenty. This album, perhaps more than any other, manages to hand back to us the story of a band capable, like few others, of writing songs with an almost immediate grip and disarming ease, and it stands without doubt as one of the finest testimonies to the expressive and melodic potential of Nineties English pop. Although many of Suede's most interesting and significant moments are obviously left out of the collection, the record is an extremely useful tool for understanding the band's stylistic and formal evolution. Two previously unreleased tracks enrich the compilation: the already-mentioned "Attitude", a charming black-and-white fantasy teetering on its towering Eighties heels before melting, in the chorus, into richly layered backing vocals that are pure Bee Gees (genuinely delightful), and "Love The Way You Love", coarser and bouncier in feel.

In December of that same year, the band embarked on a farewell tour and announced its split.  

The Story Starts Again with Tears

In 2004, however, catching most fans off guard, Brett Anderson - having left his troublesome drug addiction behind him - made peace with his old partner and ally Bernard Butler and formed Tears with him, releasing the album Here Come The Tears on V2 in 2005. The album enjoyed decent commercial success, especially back home, and briefly revived the Suede myth, albeit in a new guise.

In truth, from the very first listen the record comes across as a fairly tidy set of notes and footnotes to a story whose key chapters had largely already been written. All the songs, while maintaining a dignified profile and reasonably solid structure and craftsmanship, testify to the now-irreversible creative autumn of Anderson and Butler, and cannot really push much beyond the bounds of an old photograph, tenderly stroked with a touch of emotion and bewilderment. Songs with a polished pop vocation like the singles "Lovers" and "Refugees" would even be pleasant exercises in style, were it not for the crushing weight of Dog Man Star and Coming Up bearing down on them, continually quoted and evoked throughout the rest of the album as well. So what we're listening to here is perhaps an endless search for lost time, one that greedily sucks on the theatrical, Bowie-esque flair of languid sweets like "Apollo 13" or "Fallen Idol", and clings to Butler's layered textures in "Beautiful Pain" just to avoid dying completely, in a work of memory that, at times touching, can still deliver the odd heart-skip ("Co-Stars", "Two Creatures"). A record that can't be credited with any great artistic merit, but one that retains, above all in the eyes (and ears) of those who followed the Suede adventure, an undeniable sentimental value. A kind of last, romantic farewell, made in the bitter awareness of the irreversible law of time.

From 2007 onwards, Brett Anderson then embarked on a solo career which, through ups and downs, kept old fans interested in his new musical output. Starting then with the hazy self-titled album of 2007 (in which the English songwriter tries to exorcise the ghosts of loneliness and past artistic failures), Anderson strings together a series of four albums, increasingly introspective and stripped-back in approach, shaping in the process a personal poetics fed by lyrical romanticism and understated Victorian-style orchestration, though often tending towards mere aesthetic decoration.

In 2010, to coincide with the release of a new double anthology (conceived specifically for younger generations of listeners), Suede's original line-up (with the sole exception of Bernard Butler) went back to performing live around the world. The venture was a triumphant success and served as a prelude to the reissue (in expanded editions, with unreleased material and bonus tracks of every kind) of the band's five studio albums, ahead of an already-announced return to the studio (with new material) in 2013.

The 2010s Trilogy

After writing an excessive number of songs, Anderson called back Ed Buller, the producer and great alchemist behind the band's first three records. And Suede's much-awaited comeback, Bloodsports (2013), is about as far as you could possibly imagine from the cliché of an album thrown together just to justify a famous band's reunion. In the words of the band's own members, this record would have been the ideal follow-up to Coming Up, had Suede never made the much-disowned electronic turn of Head Music.

The album features everything you'd rightly expect: from epic, no-arguments-allowed singles ("Barriers" and "It Starts And Ends With You"), to tear-jerking slow numbers ("What Are You Not Telling Me" and "Faultlines"), from album-rock anthems ("Snowblind", "Hit Me") to taut, psychedelic-tinged crescendos ("Always"), from mid-tempo tracks dense with thoroughly modern unease ("Sabotage") to spacious, multicoloured romantic ballads ("For The Strangers" and "Sometimes I Feel I'll Float Away") dominated by Brett's finally-recovered pathos and sensuality, and by the incredible flair of Richard Oakes, who may lack Bernard Butler's flamboyance but outdoes him for sheer creativity over the long haul.

Suede are back. Oh yes, they're back.

At the end of 2015 Suede returned once again, announcing Night Thoughts, an album whose very artwork already echoes old ghosts of the past and that same emotional and visual suspension we might compare to their absolute masterpiece, Dog Man Star. But it's not just a visual matter: the new album almost sets itself up as a successor to that baroque, glam-soaked epic, their most underrated and later rightly rehabilitated work. If the 1994 album opened with the turbulent "Introducing The Band", this time it's the evocative violins of "When You Are Young" that lead the way, with Anderson's voice fluttering while the drums march on triumphantly and guitarist Richard Oakes, in the background, draws out dark trajectories reminiscent of the good old days. "Outsiders", on the other hand, is new territory for Suede, an almost post-punk song, and while the gorgeous guitar line edges toward dream-poptextures, the chorus is heartfelt and classic. The other single, "No Tomorrows", invites comparison with the latter, and while it's less jagged, it may be even more direct.

"Pale Snow" makes little sense as a single, but it brings the album closer to the sound of the more subdued, reflective later tracks on Bloodsports, where the keyboards conjure an atmosphere both elegant and dramatic. "I Don't Know How To Reach You", on the other hand, is the moment Oakes bares his claws and impresses with the cleanness of his sound, helped along by a coda that borders on shoegaze. "Learning To Be" doesn't stray far conceptually, but this time it's the piano running the whole show. "Like Kids" arrives on tiptoe, and the mood is just right. Even though the drum intro is a touch too close to that of an anthem like "Trash", in the chorus Suede pull yet another rabbit out of the hat, a classic track with a contagious melody. Meanwhile "I Can't Give Her What She Want" has atmospheres similar to some more recent songs in their catalogue ("What Are Not Telling Me?" and "Sometimes I Feel I'll Float Away"), though without quite the same melodic purity, just as "The Fur & The Feathers" has skeletal frames almost out of a Tim Burton film: Codling on keyboards and Oakes biting down, before a final climax that returns to the mood of their first two albums.

Released alongside a short film directed by Roger Sargent, Night Thoughts is a reflective record, the least pop of the London band's career. Even so, standout elements and strong songs are not lacking this time either. "Bloodsports" had boldly sought to build new classics, while this latest effort is a hazier record, yet one that's just as easy to return to again and again — two qualities that have never been missing from Suede's albums, and which, after the reunion, they have no intention of giving up.

There's a particular moment that draws you into The Blue Hour, Suede's eighth studio album: a few weeks before its release (which came on 21 September 2018) we hit play on our tablets to watch the video for "Life Is Golden", a song that shows just how much Brett Anderson and co. are still capable of writing songs of unheard-of intensity, still able to move us the way they did back at the start of the Nineties. Few bands have preserved themselves this way, with their talent and songwriting ability completely intact. "Life Is Golden", that chorus, a blade that splits your soul in two, those unsettling images depicting an abandoned Chernobyl, a post-atomic account sharply at odds with the stunning beauty of the music and words. But the listening experience of The Blue Hour had already begun with the symphonic sweep of "The Invisible", Brett Anderson's voice cutting straight to the bone as a girl sways on a swing, and with the more abrasive "Don't Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You", with Richard Oakes' guitars front and centre. By that point, the wait to hear the whole of The Blue Hour had become almost unbearable, only partly eased by "Flytipping", over six minutes that condense much of Suede's many souls, including their faint noise leanings and grandiose structures. These four tracks alone would be enough to make The Blue Hour a monumental, deeply moving record that leaves you in disbelief, bolstered further by songwriting that reaches for cinematic scope. But the rest of the tracklist certainly doesn't disappoint either.

On one hand there's the melodramatic stride of their finest days, ushered in by the graceful arrangements present from the very first notes of opener "As One"; on the other, there's the love of britpop that easily morphs into anthem-rock, confirmed right away by the following "Wastelands". Chills, goosebumps everywhere, in the tremendous crescendos of "Beyond The Outskirts", in the arpeggios of "Mistress", in the evocative calm of "All The Wild Places". The emotional intensity hits all-time highs, reinforced by the precise work of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, which turns some tracks into veritable liturgies, as happens with "Chalk Circles", a kind of intro to the full-bodied "Cold Hands", one of those songs that would make the fortune of any emerging band on the other side of the Channel. Brett Anderson must have made a pact with the devil: you watch him and find him even more radiant and commanding than (sigh!) all those years ago; you listen to him and discover his voice has only grown richer in nuance with time. On The Blue Hour the band tells the story of twilight hour, when the red of sunset gradually gives way to the dark of night. Music that, at twenty, any of us would have killed for, and which still leaves you stunned today by its disarming beauty. One of the most surprising albums of the year and one of the best in Suede's entire discography. Not since "Dog Man Star" had they produced a collection with such a profoundly emotional edge. So much for those who, on at least a couple of occasions, had written them off for good. Songs like these are only written in heaven.

Having crossed the thirty-year mark and momentarily grounded by the pandemic, in 2020 Brett Anderson and co. personally got to work on an extensive retrospective (four discs in the CD edition, a full six in the vinyl release) designed to capture all the moments deemed essential to their brilliant career: Beautiful Ones: The Best Of Suede 1992-2018. The first two CDs parade through almost all of the London band's singles in chronological order, including "Stay Together", the last one released with Bernard Butler on guitar and never included on any of the band's albums. It's the brightest, most popular part of their story, packed both with the unforgettable hits that helped shape an entire generation ("So Young", "New Generation", "Trash", to name just a few of the best-known) and with the more recent, well-regarded compositions, among which the moving "Life Is Golden" stands out for its intensity.

The other two discs, meanwhile, house some of the band's favourite b-sides (with special mention for "Europe Is My Playground", already included back in 1997 on the essential "Sci-Fi Lullabies"), plus numerous other key tracks pulled from the seven albums released so far. Beautiful Ones takes flight on the wings of "The Drowners", their debut single, released in May 1992, and closes with the aching "Flytipping", the epilogue of their most recent album, "The Blue Hour". Among the various editions of this anthology, there's a "light" double-vinyl version on the market; for the joy of fans and collectors, a signed edition was also made available, limited to just 750 copies.

After their vivid trilogy for Warner, Suede signed with BMG; the first instalment, Autofiction, has the bite and vigour of a debut, a vigour signalled in advance by the raw, sturdy lead single ("She Still Leads Me On"), a song that once again places Brett Anderson's intense emotional relationship with his late mother at the centre of the narrative.

Having set aside the elegant orchestrations and silenced any potential theoretical pretences, the band assembles a vivid mosaic made up of eleven tracks oozing urgency and physicality. Brett Anderson has called Autofiction Suede's punk album, and listening to the mighty, almost hard rock riffs of "That Boy On The Stage" and the dark weave of the stormy "Shadow Self" (a speedy version of the Cure's "Disintegration"), it's hard not to agree with him.

Everything clicks into place on the band's new album: Simon Gilbert hits the drums with real conviction and unexpected precision ("Black Ice"), and even when the register shifts, without losing any power, to make room for scratchy guitar touches, the tension stays high ("Shadow Self"); for his part, Richard Oakes nails one of the most overwhelming riffs to bear the Suede stamp ("15 Again"), striking punk-rock emotional chords that seemed long buried (the harsh, cutting "Personality Disorder"). In putting themselves back on the line, Suede don't hide their uncertainties and existential doubts ("The Only Way I Can Love You"), throw themselves into the fray with abandon and reckless disregard for danger ("Its Always The Quiet Ones"), right up to brushing against the peaks of post-punk epic in the rich, ambitious sonic triumph of "Turn Off Your Brain And Yell" — all without ever falling prey to routine.

One last acceptable doubt concerns the two ballads on the tracklist, but the pleasant predictability of "What Am I Without You?" is promptly answered by the aching, corrosive "Drive Myself Home", a whirling emotional flood that Anderson delivers with a self-awareness and vulnerability that leaves you breathless.

The English band continues to carve out a refined, visceral strain of pop with a set of songs built to withstand the wear of time.

Contributions by Marco Bercella (“Bloodsports”), Matteo Trapasso (“Night Toughts”), Claudio Lancia (“The Blue Hour”, “Beautiful Ones: The Best Of Suede 1992-2018”), – Gianfranco Marmoro (“Autofiction”, “Antidepressants”)

The author wishes to dedicate this article to his father.

Special thanks to Emanuele Boncio for his material help and indispensable logistical support

Bibliographical references:

M. Melissano: Brit. La nuova scena inglese. Castelvecchi

L. Bonanni: Gli Oasis e il brit pop. How to feel alive in the nineties. Lo Vecchio

C. Villa: Brit pop. Piccola enciclopedia (1990-1997). Giunti

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