Coming Up

Suede: a retro-flection, ACT THREE

The parallels are striking—almost blatant. A singer and guitarist, the former serving as the lyricist and the latter as composer, create what appears to be a preternatural, symbiotic songwriting partnership. Their sound builds upon the musical pillars of their youth, an amalgam of indie rock, shimmery pop, and a dollop of punk’s DIY ethos. Lyrically, their songs skew more brooding than their contemporaries; a moody mix of winsome wit and carnal desire wrapped in narratives and examinations of modern working-class struggles, peppered with references to sex and pharmaceuticals. An early demo piques the curiosity of a successful indie label, which signs the band and releases its debut single. That song gets the attention of the weekly inkies, who recruit the band to join a tour of up-and-coming artists. Four years and two albums later, the songwriting partnership and band dissolves, going into hiatus for over a decade before re-emerging for a live appearance and the promise of new music.

There was a sense of déjà vu in 1996 when Scottish band Geneva signed to Suede’s label, Nude Records, and released their debut album, Further, a year later. The hype and discord around Geneva (who also stylized their name in all lowercase) had echoes of Suede’s ascendancy in the UK music press in 1992. At the tail-end of the 90s, with whatever Britpop was fading into the sunset and Suede in between album cycles, Geneva must have seemed like a gift sent from the music gods to fill a void for the music press that was entirely of their creation.

Parallels between established and emerging acts, however slight or significant, were routinely and blatantly amplified by the UK music press in the last quarter of the 20th century. As hype and novelty around one band waned and dissipated, the press scrambled to find their replacement in a battle of one-upmanship that feels like an Olympic event, coming around every four years or so. And, like the good little lemming I was, I often bought into these hype cycles (earworm) hook, (jangly guitar) line, and sinker in my restless pursuit of the next best band. Before Geneva, there was Strangelove. And before that, Longpigs. And Gene, and Echobelly, and Denim, and the Auteurs before that. Point made? In 1994, every music journalist (and more than a few music fans, myself included) was busy trying to suss out which up-and-coming band would claim Suede’s throne; no one had any idea it would be Suede themselves.

Though regularly hailed as their high-water mark now, Dog Man Star was still something of a question mark in 1994. After Bernard Butler’s departure, and with the responsibility of touring a new album that had their former guitarist’s fingerprints all over it, Suede had the unenviable task of recruiting a new member quickly and trying to get as much distance between their Butler era and whatever was to come next as soon as possible. Enter Richard Oakes, 17 years old, who essentially got the gig as Suede’s new guitarist by sending his application (a demo tape of his playing) to the band through the mail. Weeks before Dog Man Star’s release, Oakes was announced as the Butler’s replacement and debuted in the video for “We Are the Pigs” before heading out on a world tour for his first foray into public performance.

It’s wild just how bonkers Oakes’s story sounds now; how incredible it was that a band at the height of their fame and influence could lose such a key figure in their sound and style and then find a replacement of equal skill and finesse and immediately elevate him from anonymity to instant fame. For Suede circa 1994, it all tracked. Nothing about their story at that point had followed any traditional narrative arc, so why start now?

Anyone who heard Oakes play during the long and gruelling Dog Man Star tour can attest that he exceeded expectations. While not as dynamic a performer as Brett Anderson, he more than held his own as the singer’s musical foil on stage, and found his place amongst the fold of the four-piece. Live, Suede were every bit as exciting and electric as they had been with Butler. The next test would be the studio. Oakes’s first songwriting contributions were solid B-sides for “New Generation” (“Together” and “Bentswood Boys”), but could he handle the pressure of co-crafting the follow-up to Dog Man Star?

In the end, he didn’t have to do it alone. One fortuitous day, while in the studio working on what would become Suede’s third album, Coming Up, drummer Simon Gilbert’s cousin, Neil Codling, dropped by to pick up a suit he was borrowing from Gilbert (so the story goes). Codling hung out for a bit, sat behind a keyboard and started jamming with the band. After chastizing Gilbert for not mentioning (and in his defence, not knowing) that his cousin was a polymath musician who could play multiple instruments, Codling was offered a permanent position in Suede, playing keyboards, rhythm guitar, and providing backing vocals and songwriting contributions on Coming Up.

If Dog Man Star was a pendulum swinging away from the stompy, bratty glam rock of Suede’s self-titled debut, Coming Up was an equally abrupt face on its predecessor’s dark, dystopian proggy epicness. With the music press’s attention focused on Oasis, Blur, and Pulp, Suede were just about relegated to the has-been bins in the wake of Britpop frenzy. The prospect of a Butler–less third Suede album being as well-received as its predecessors was low, as no one seemed interested in hearing Dog Man Star 2.0, least of all Brett Anderson.

“Dog Man Star was such an extreme album,” Anderson recounted to Suede biographer David Barnett for his 2003 book Love and Poison, “that the last thing we wanted to do was do something even more in that direction.” With the new line-up feeling essentially like a new band, Coming Up became a palate-cleansing record, streamlined and slimmed down to more straight-ahead three-minute pop songs that didn’t reject and disown Suede’s aesthetic as much as reinvent and reinterpret it. They still couldn’t get away from the Bowie comparisons (as the review in the Daily Telegraph likened the album to Suede’s Ziggy Stardust), but Coming Up still managed to connect with their core fans who recognized themselves in the damaged, glamorous protagonists of its ten songs, while expanding their appeal to those who would have found Dog Man Star too dire a prospect to dive into.

Any question about songwriting lightning hitting twice was laid to rest immediately with Coming Up’s first single and opening track, “Trash.” Like “We Are the Pigs,” ”Trash” is a first-person-plural rallying call, positioning Suede and their fans as members of a gang, “the lovers on the streets” and “the litter on the breeze.” Posing as disposable pop, “Trash” is anything but throw-away. In typical Suede fashion, “Trash” works on multiple levels: it is both a defiant V-sign to detractors who had written them off as deitriutus discarded to the sidelines in the battle of Britpop and a call-to-arms for anyone who doesn’t identify with Oasis’s laddism, Blur’s cockney caricatures, or Pulp’s plastic pop kitchen sink dramas. “Trash” is gritty, dirty, yet still glamorous and dangerous, a celebratory anthem for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.

More importantly, “Trash” signalled how strong Oakes and Anderson’s songwriting partnership was. It’s one of many examples of Oakes’s innate songwriting sensibility, matching Anderson’s lyrical style note for note. “Filmstar” feels just as divinely ordained as “Trash.” A more muscular take on the stompy glam attitude of “The Drowners,” “Filmstar” puts the rhythm section of drummer Gilbert and bassist Mat Osman front and center, breathing life into what is essentially a pretty basic pop song. “Lazy” (the fourth single off the record) doesn’t get nearly enough credit for continuing Coming Up’s “all-killer-no-filler” opening sequencing; I love it for its simplicity and style, and it’s essential scene setting for the rest of the album’s narrative arc.

“Lazy” is one of those songs whose tempo is always much faster in my memory than on record. It still feels sluggish when I first put it on, but it always ends up perfectly paced as it dissolves into “By the Sea,” one of my all-time favourite Suede songs. Both “Lazy” and “By the Sea” were Anderson compositions that predate Dog Man Star, which he held off using, telling Barnett, “I just wanted to save them because I thought they were too good” to be used as b-sides. The former luxuriates in the druggy hedonistic lifestyle Anderson was living in London; the latter is a fairytale about two lovers escaping the pressures of expectation and articfice in favour of a simpler life. “By the Sea” is a beautiful ballad that showcases each band member’s work evenly. It grounds Coming Up early on, its “touch grass” moment before diving back into the drunken, drug-induced joie de vivre for another round.

The second high of the night is never as good as the first, though. “She” is a decent song and “Beautiful Ones” (the album’s second single) ranks among the band’s very best, but there is a feeling of diminishing returns as Coming Up comes to its midpoint. Don’t get me wrong: any lesser band would have killed their granny to come up with “She,” but it’s too similar to “Filmstar” (the album’s fifth single) to stand out amongst the album’s tracklist. “Beautiful Ones” is the prefect choice to kick off Side B, much in the same “this is our gang” revelry of “Trash,” but “Starcrazy” (the album’s first Anderson/Codling composition) and “Picnic By the Motorway” don’t feel as canonically significant as many of the album’s other tracks. They’re not without merit, but on a 10-song album that spurred five hit singles, they inevitably take a backseat to Coming Up’s finer moments.

Which brings us to the album’s penultimate song, my favourite, “The Chemistry Between Us.” Barnett calls the Anderson/Codling composition “the album’s epic centrepiece.” I wholeheartedly concur. At over seven minutes, “The Chemistry Between Us” is a multi-layered mini-suite featuring some of Anderson’s best lyrical wordplay. “That song is about the emptiness of it all,” Anderson told the Telegraph in 1996. “It’s like one day you wake up in this haze, lying next to some person you don’t even recognize, in some altered state, not being able to remember the past year, and you think ‘what’s going on?’” “The Chemistry Between Us” is the ultimate come-down song, a hard look at oneself in the cold light of morning that mirrors the band’s history up to that point. Fame, like the euphoria from an E, is fleeting, and while it feels great in the moment, at some point, the high will wear off, and you’ll find yourself right back where you started. And so the cycle begins again—another night out, another hit of whatever mind-altering substance is on hand, another morning after. “I’ve taken drugs in the past,” Anderson said to the Telegraph, “but anyone who thinks that by dropping a tab of acid they are going to write ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ has got another thing coming.”

It may not be “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but “The Chemistry Between Us” is the perfect step down for Coming Up, languid and romantic in only the way Suede can make a song about emptiness sound. Its string-laden extended outro suggests “The Chemistry Between Us” would be the perfect close to an almost flawless album, but Suede still has one more ace to play. Most bands don’t usually anchor their albums with a single, but Suede have never played by anyone else’s rules. Anderson describes closing track “Saturday Night” (the third single, if your’re keeping score) as “a celebration of the simple pleasures of life” inspired by “wonderful, alcoholic winter London evenings that [he] had spent with [then paramour Sam Cunnigham] nursing pints in pubs and staning in foyers of cinemas.” Unlike previous album-closing ballads “Still Life” and “The Next Life,” “Saturday Night” feels like an intentional bookend to Coming Up, like a final stop on a metro line map that started with “Trash” 43 minutes earlier.

On the surface, the odds were clearly stacked against Suede in 1994. Between falling out of favour with the press and the musical flavours of the moment, a new line-up yet to be tested in the recording studio, and a high degree of scrutiny, the conditions suggested that Coming Up could very well fall flat. And yet, those same odds offered Suede an unheard-of second opportunity to make a first impression. It’s extremely rare for a band to get a chance at making a second debut, and Suede made the most of that with Coming Up.

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