Suede: Part 2 with Miranda Sawyer

In the last episode, we were Introducing the Band and exploring the question: did Suede kickstart Britpop? This episode, Yasi keeps making her case alongside longtime British music journalist Miranda Sawyer. Listen along as they unpack the band’s imperial phase at the height of the Britpop era — from Dog Man Star (1994) to their dispirited split, until they eventually decide to Stay Together. EPISODE PLAYLIST: Listen to the songs we talk about HERE. CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Miranda Sawyer @msmirandasawyer Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Did you know the first half of Kendrick Lamar's "Mr. Morale" and "The Big Steppers" is a mirror image of its second half? And that this mirror symbolizes how each human being is a reflection of the whole of humanity? Hi, I'm Cole Kushner, and these are the kinds of concepts I discuss on Dissect, a podcast that examines the lyrics, music, and meaning of one album per season, one song per episode. The newest season of Dissect is breaking down Kendrick Lamar's "Mr. Morale" track by track, and it's available to watch or listen now on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 1:19Speaker 04

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:58Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is part two of the story of the band Suede. Listen, we left off, we've just put out our self-titled album. We are riding high, babe. The reviews are fuego. We've maybe just invented a brand new genre called Britpop, where the talk of the music weeklies. But as always, with fast fame and fortune comes band friction, drama, tea, goths. Let's see what happens with the boys of Suede.

• 2:39Yasi Salek?

  Joining me again today, the inimitable Miranda Sawyer. Hi, Yasi. So Suede is embarking on a European tour to support the album and tensions with Bernard, they're starting to arise, you guys. This is Chekhov's gun, okay? It's, it's entered the picture and at some point it's gonna have to go off and kill someone. Brett said, "The first gig was Finland, which was okay. And the second gig was Stockholm, which was absolutely brilliant. I met a Swedish girl called Pernilla and she came to a gig in Barcelona and we had a couple of days off and I was hanging out with her. And I remember Bernard in the hotel or something and he was in a really bad mood. I said, 'Oh, how's it been going?'

• 3:20Yasi Salek?

  And he says, 'I've been working.' What have you been doing?' And I was like, 'Oh, well, I've been enjoying myself.' And I got the sense that I was maybe enjoying myself too much." So Bernard was basically like, "This is a job, babe. We're clocked in at the office. I'm toiling away in the hotel room, writing sick riffs and you're off with Pernilla?" Okay. Which is not really a rock star vibe.

• 3:47Speaker 06

  Serious.

• 3:49Yasi Salek?

  He's like the youngest one and he's like, we're at work. We need to be sitting in the hotel room. And Brett is like, I'm sorry, have you seen my face and my cheekbones? I'm going with Pernilla and you do whatever you want noodle away. Brett also says in a couple of interviews that maybe Bernard didn't handle the fame part of the Suede project as well as the rest of them. Cause the other ones seemed to quite like it. Miranda, I wanted to ask you because while they were a band for a while, they got famous pretty much overnight. What did it mean at that point to be like their level of famous in London? You know, in the music scene?

• 4:26Speaker 06

  Okay. So in the music scene, they're big. I mean, generally in life, they're not.

• 4:31Yasi Salek?

  Like your, your mom wouldn't see them on the street and be like, oh my God, Brett Anderson of the band Suede.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  No, they wouldn't. But then they do look like a band. Do you know what I mean? You know, this is very rarely going to happen that they're all walking down the road together.

• 4:44Yasi Salek?

  Not Bernard and Brett. Bernard's in the office.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  But they do look like a band. And I mean, they admitted it later that really, there's a lot of stuff that comes with being, you know, they were big, they were big within the NME world. And also they were kind of new and really, really exciting. And nobody else had kind of quite caught up with them. I mean, they're just about to catch up with them, but nobody else had quite caught up with them. And they're sexy and they're quite druggie. And so in that situation, like if you are like that, and some of the band definitely were, you're enjoying it. Do you know what I mean? You're really enjoying it. And I just think that Bernard, although he had a lot of the correct elements for being a rock star.

• 5:32Speaker 06

  He got the looks, he's got the talent, he's got the absolute belief, which is just really, really important. But the flip side to him is I don't think he's that interested in the sex and he's not interested in the drugs. And so that just without even meaning to, I mean, it doesn't matter if like all the band are at the same interest level. Do you know what I mean? It doesn't matter. It's like, it's when part of the band is quite interested in partying and an element of the band is not, then that's just going to divide the band. It's just, that's just how it is. You can either all be in one, you need to all be in the same boat.

• 6:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 06

  Because otherwise, you know, you know what it's like. It's like, well, I mean, maybe you don't. But if you're hanging around with people. That are on a lot more drugs than you. It's quite boring.

• 6:20Yasi Salek?

  Well, I haven't been that person usually. I'm usually the other side of the boat, but um, but now I know now that I'm older and I try to like go around and people are like are real drunk or something. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm so happy for you. You're having so much fun, but respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about and I need to.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  I'm a bit bored now.

• 6:37Yasi Salek?

  I'm a bit bored. You've said the same thing 12 times. It's not funny. I think it's interesting because Matt was also not a crazy partier, but like we said before, Matt's just kind of the fulcrum, right? He's like, he's down to clown, but he doesn't need to do all the drugs. Like he's just like, he doesn't care what you do. He's just kind of like, all right, guys, like, and he'll, he'll get drunk and, and hang out and probably do a little here and there. I wasn't there, but.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  He'd actually do a bit of partying, I would say at that time, because everybody did.

• 7:03Yasi Salek?

  Everybody did, yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  They just did. It's just that some people, I actually think it's a, a kind of qualification for being a lead singer is the ability to take absolutely bucket loads of drugs and then carry on. It's like, that's part of your job.

• 7:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I have to agree. That's, that's rock and roll, honey. I also have like a really not Huberman health goop, Gwyneth Paltrow-esque theory that that kind of drug use preserves you in some way because, yes, because like, I'm sorry, look at Brett Anderson in today's year of our Lord 2025. Look at Evan Dando in the year of our Lord 2025. They have no business to still look that good. But it's like, I think it like preserves you in time. And I'm not saying that we should bottle that up and sell it next to Augustinus Bader at the Sephora, but just something to look into. Anyways, we digress. So Bernard, Bernard's not into things. And then

• 8:01Yasi Salek?

  the straw that sort of breaks the camel's back here for Bernard is the week before they're supposed to tour America, his dad is taken to hospital and diagnosed with cancer.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:13Yasi Salek?

  And again, like Bernard's what, like 21 at this point? Like he's very young. It's very devastating. Matt said, Charlie told us about this and we said, fine, we'll cancel the tour. And he said, no, Bernard wants to do it. Which in retrospect was a stupid, stupid thing to do, but we didn't know any better.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  No.

• 8:32Yasi Salek?

  They're like, okay, he wants to do it. And he's, then Matt was like, between his life back home and his family, to be suddenly flown into this tour and doing coke and there's girls everywhere. It's just a fairly lighthearted thing to do. And I don't think he could really handle other people doing that when he was so down. We should have never done it.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I completely, I mean, I agree, but nobody thinks of that at the time. They're like this, they just won the Mercury Prize as well, I think.

• 8:55Yasi Salek?

  Yes, wait, they're about to.

• 8:56Speaker 06

  That's quite a big deal in Britain.

• 8:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  And it was at the time and they just won it and they went up on stage to.

• 9:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, September 8th, they went, it's like right before, I think they go to America, come back, they win the Mercury Prize. Brett's Bernard's not even there because it's the hospital with his father.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  I think Bernard was there, maybe I'm wrong, but like somebody.

• 9:16Yasi Salek?

  He wasn't there, but Brett dedicated, they donated all the money to cancer research and they said, we've both been affected by cancer.

• 9:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like Simon was like, that's the first time I've heard about it.

• 9:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Which I thought was so crazy. I was like, babe, did what?

• 9:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, but that's bands, they don't talk.

• 9:36Yasi Salek?

  I know, American men don't talk with British men. They're not gonna sit around and be like, hey lad, how are you feeling about your dad's cancer? Should we talk about it? Should we hold the feeling stick? Like, that's not happening.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  No, it's definitely, that's why they're in bands.

• 9:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're like, this is how we express our emotions and feelings, not by talking to each other. Yeah. Also in America, they do Jay Leno, which is great. You guys should look it up. They do Metal Mickey.

• 10:07Yasi Salek?

  One of my favorite research tools is the YouTube comments because quite often people who were there will write little comments. And this guy wrote a comment under the Jay Leno performance. His handle is at Go Fish Global 7919. And he said, I saw these guys in Atlanta in the nineties and the thing I was most impressed by was meeting the lead singer on the dance floor while no music was playing. He was nothing like the stage persona he takes on in this video or in their official videos. This guy was. Extremely masculine without an ounce of femininity. I can't remember the performance, but I remember that because it was so unexpected. Look at that boots from the ground reportage. But I thought that was very interesting because like, again, back to the like,

• 10:50Yasi Salek?

  the role that Brett is playing through the songs and through the dancing and then this like, American guy meeting him and being like, oh no, he was extremely.

• 10:59Speaker 06

  He's really sexy. Like, he's proper sexy. Like, I know, I never really interviewed him at that time, but I know women journalists who have interviewed him, like, they just,

• 11:11Speaker 06

  you can see in their copy, they're like, oh my god.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  I cannot cope with this man.

• 11:18Yasi Salek?

  Okay, also in America, they learned that the cocaine in America is much stronger, apparently, than in the UK. And also, maybe they accidentally do meth or crack or both, unclear. It's just America, babe. That's what happens in America.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  All the drugs in America are so much stronger than here.

• 11:35Yasi Salek?

  There's a one story in almost every British band's first tour here where they're like, we thought it was cocaine and it was absolutely meth and they're like, fucking shitballs.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  They're completely mental because they're all really skinny as well, aren't they?

• 11:49Yasi Salek?

  They're up for four days. Who amongst us? So yeah, the vibes are bad. Bernard is also in love with his girlfriend, Elisa, and so he's also not, no drugs, no girls, emotionally distraught. He's just not one with the band.

• 12:05Speaker 06

  I also think there's a really tiny thing about Bernard as well, which is to do with his Irish Catholicism. And that is slightly to do, he just, you know, do you remember there was a bit where he wouldn't wear a cross? It's not, I don't think he disapproves of people, but there's something about him that's a bit more naturally conservative, not in a kind of like voting way by any means. But you know, like, maybe the idea of being faithful to your girlfriend, you know, like, it's less likely to incline towards the hedonism.

• 12:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's, he has like, maybe like a more solid backbone compass that has been ingrained in him from Catholicism.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, and from a good Irish family.

• 12:44Yasi Salek?

  And a good Irish family. And also, you know, we saw. He was quite insecure. So I think a lot of that plays into it too. You know, like he's still only like 21 years old. Anyways, everyone else is partying. They're doing their things. This is a tour that they did with the Cranberries. Who the story is, although I don't think Suede likes this story, that what sort of happens is Linger by the Cranberries blows up in America during that tour. And like Balance of Power, because it was a co-headline tour, sort of tips into Cranberryland. But Bernard is traveling with the Cranberries. He won't even travel with Suede. He's like, I'll be over here with Dolores and my fellow Irish brethren.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. And also, I mean, there was a couple of gigs, wasn't there, where I think, because the idea was that the Cranberries were supporting Suede. And then there's a couple of gigs where they have to flip.

• 13:31Yasi Salek?

  Well, listen, you can never tell what's gonna pop off in America.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  But it was a massive hit. That was a massive hit everywhere.

• 13:37Yasi Salek?

  Massive hit.

• 13:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so they end up canceling the last few days of the tour. They only do the New York show because all their Sony label people are gonna be there. But then it's an absolute unmitigated disaster. Simon said, I think this was when Bernard was so fucking wound up, he was going behind Matt's back, sticking the Vs up at him in front of the crowd.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  That's so British. Just fuck you. Flick the Vs.

• 14:07Yasi Salek?

  The Americans are probably like, what? Peace? Peace and love? What's happening over here? Because we don't have that over here. Like, what are you? But it's flipping the bird. It's very, it's very rude. Simon was like, it was really intense. You could see his hatred for the rest of us. And it looked like the audience had started fighting and Bernard stood at the front of the stage going brah. It was just insane. And we came offstage and I remember seeing all these people from Sony and they wouldn't speak to us.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  They couldn't even say, great.

• 14:35Yasi Salek?

  They were like, oh no. Bernard, for his part, gave an interview much later to Guitarist Magazine, because to your point, he would only do guitar-related interviews. And he said, the reason we came home early was more to do with the fact that I nearly went insane. My dad died, so I had to fly home. Then we started again a week later. Oh yeah, his dad, his dad died and they literally went back to America. I just couldn't cope. Playing the Drowners Night After night, I realize you have to play your singles, but it's very difficult to feel like you're not just going through the motions.

• 15:02Speaker 06

  It's so interesting. That's the bit that always messes everybody up, isn't it? You know, somebody, I read something the other day and they were talking about the Beatles and they were like, God, it's amazing. You know, they made so many great albums in such a short amount of time. And you know why? Cause they didn't go on massive tours. They just didn't play everything over and over until they wanted to kill it. I mean, obviously in the end they did want to kill each other, but like they didn't do that. And I think that that the nineties was really a point where that's what happened. You know, if you were any good, out you went on the road and you just played and played and played, you know, and Sway didn't even do it that much in America. And it's still gonna wreck you.

• 15:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, that not the other thing of like the real pressure and push to break America, right? Which some bands did and some bands didn't and like touring there, it's so different. In every way, like we said, the meth, but also like these long, long fucking drives. You're jet lagged, people don't know who you are. So the reaction, it's like you're Mr. King of the NME. And then you come here and everyone, you're in Kansas City and they're like, I don't know what this man is. What's your, you're wearing a blouse? Okay. I'm not interested in this.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  I think it was when I was writing about garbage and garbage, like obviously they're kind of American, three quarters American, you know? And like very well respected before they even started because of Butch Vig.

• 16:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  And even then, like they had a really brilliant album and like two, three years into their career, they're playing like, like kind of. You literally gigs where it's like they're playing it like a kind of festival at a farm. And there's like chickens running about. It's just mad.

• 16:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the real like seventh ring of hell, I feel like, which is my favorite though, is when you get on the, the county fair circuit.

• 16:45Speaker 06

  That must be it.

• 16:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's mostly bands that are like nineties bands now that are like. You know, like they like Smash Mouth will play the county fair circuit. People were like, hell yeah, I'm gonna go get a. Deep fried Snickers and a corn dog and watch Smash Mouth. We'll take you Miranda when you come here. I'll show you our culture. All right. So this is, this is the beautiful energy that they take with them into making the next album.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  It's all gonna go great.

• 17:13Yasi Salek?

  It's going, it's going wonderful. Brett is also on some other shit during this time of the Dogman star making situation. He just like really wants it to not be the same as the first album is what I was reading. Like they were just like, we don't want to recreate this thing. Like I want to go so different. So that's the headspace he's coming from. Before we get to the album though, we need to sort of talk about what's happening with Bernard. They put out one non-album single called Stay Together.

• 17:46Speaker 06

  It's not that good, I don't think.

• 17:47Yasi Salek?

  It's not that good. No, it charts quite high. It hits number three, but in the like canon of Suede, I think it got an artificial boost because Suede was sort of riding high then. But if you look back, you're like, it's not very good.

• 18:08Yasi Salek?

  Then the lads go into the studio to record Dogman Star. Friction starts. Bernard will not sign the management contract with Charlie. That's bad. He also secretly marries his girlfriend and does not invite any of the other band members. Then, yeah, which is like, that feels good. That's like, you're a band member and you're like, oh, you got married. Then he goes ahead and does an interview. Do you remember this with Vox? Where he's sort of, is not very nice about Brett.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  He's really quite horrible and it was quite a surprise, I think. I mean, the others didn't know he was doing it.

• 18:43Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 18:43Speaker 06

  And he was a bit like, he can't, he can, he's, he's really rude about his songwriting ability, isn't he? Didn't he say something like, you know, he can barely get past ABC?

• 18:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's, he basically says, I'm desperate to do things outside of Suede. The only thing that will keep Suede going is if I'm allowed to branch out because Brett's so fucking slow. It drives me insane. And then he was like, I wish I was in the kind of band where we could improvise over and over. But when you get someone like Brett on your hands, it's impossible. Because when he gets bored, he simply puts the microphone down and ends the song.

• 19:13Speaker 06

  It's almost like a different approach to, well, it's a lot, it's a different approach to life, but it's definitely a different approach to songwriting, meaning that Bernard's got so many ideas.

• 19:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Like so many ideas, he wants to kind of like put them down. He wants to work and he wants to do it all the time and he wants to do it during the daytime.

• 19:30Yasi Salek?

  Sure, in business hours, nine to five.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  And Brett is not in that state at all. Plus, I mean, you know, in Brett's favor, what I would say that Brett is really good at recognizing, he's really good at writing pop songs, man.

• 19:45Yasi Salek?

  Melodies, top ones.

• 19:46Speaker 06

  His melodies are amazing. His lyrics are really, really brilliant. So I think that, like, if you're a guitarist, you're like, I've done all these brilliant things and especially if you're Bernard, he's got so much stuff going on. And then Brett's a bit like, well, actually, the point of the song is me singing. And he's gonna be a bit like, what?

• 20:04Yasi Salek?

  To like, sort of not defend Bernard, but I kind of like totally feel like I'm probably imposing my own experience on this, but see, like, I can see what happens, because it's not overtly mean, what he's saying. It just reads to me like a person who's insecure. And when you're insecure and you think this other person is so secure, because that's usually how insecurity works, like, well, that person, like, untouchable, who cares what I say about them? They are the best. Because that's really probably how he viewed Brett, you know? He would never think I could hurt Brett. And he's sort of trying to exert like, but I'm important too. Like, I'm, you know?

• 20:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:37Yasi Salek?

  And actually Brett was quite hurt. Apparently Saul, from the label, read it to him over the phone in the studio. And Brett, he was like, and all Brett would say was, that's not very nice, is it? And I said, no, it's not so British. That's not very nice, is it?

• 20:53Speaker 06

  No, that's not so good.

• 20:55Yasi Salek?

  It's not so nice. Brett said, I remember being really hurt by that and angry, the way he passed off my contribution as simplistic. And he seemed not to recognize the worth of what we'd done together. And the biggest tragedy is that Bernard didn't realize how special it was. And I thought that was really sad.

• 21:10Speaker 06

  Hmm, I would agree.

• 21:13Yasi Salek?

  So the only bonus of this is the morning that he was, I guess, read this interview over the phone. He was recording the vocals for Asphalt World. And Brett said, so I was, I remember trying to channel all this hurt that I was feeling and iciness I was feeling into that vocal. Maybe that's why so many people like that song so much, because there's an edge to it.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Also, because it's a great song. That's a good.

• 21:33Yasi Salek?

  And it's a great song.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  We like that one.

• 21:42Yasi Salek?

  So Bernard apologized and Brett was like, you know what? All good fam. Let's just make this album amazing. Let's stop fucking around. Now, this is the best. I now have some excerpts from Simon's diary.

• 21:57Speaker 06

  Go Simon.

• 21:58Yasi Salek?

  It's so great. June 10th. Butler is apparently recording all his telephone conversations. That's not good. June 11th.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  A little bit paranoid.

• 22:09Yasi Salek?

  It's a little bit paranoid. June 11th. E times four. Coke times one. Acid times two. That's what happened on June 11th. June 14th.

• 22:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you've got to keep track of that stuff. June 14th. Photos on Regent's Park Houseboat. Bernard ignores everyone. The last day I ever saw Bernard Butler. June 16th. Ed Bueller is now Butler's number one enemy. Today Charlie went to the studio. Butler says Ed has to go. It's either Ed or him. Butler then storms out and goes home. He then phones Charlie. He's gotta go. Tell Brett to be on my side. Chaz goes to Brett and tells him both sides of the argument. Butler phones Brett and says to Charlie, what are you doing? Let me speak to Brett. Now I'll do a little dramatic reading of the conversation. He has to go Brett. Then Brett says, no, we need a producer. Bernard, come on, have faith in yourself for once. We can produce. Brett, no, we need Ed.

• 23:05Yasi Salek?

  Bernard, you're a fucking wanker.

• 23:08Yasi Salek?

  This is from Simon's diary, so I don't know if this is exactly word for word. And then Brett gives the phone back to Charlie and Bernard says to Charlie, you're all siding with Brett, all of you. You never listen to what I say. Well, listen to this. Swayed are finished. I know, it's so dramatic. And then Saul said, that was the end of it. He changed his phone number. Bernard Butler changed his phone number and would not answer the door when they would come.

• 23:34Speaker 06

  Pretty hardcore.

• 23:35Yasi Salek?

  But then he also, okay, this is an allegedly, heavy allegedly, I don't want to get sued by the estate of Bernard Butler. He's still alive, so maybe by himself personally. But two different people were like, yeah, he would call Ed Bueller and Ed Bueller would answer the phone. And then he would just hold knives together. Like menacingly hit the knives together. And I'm like, this is so creative.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, you just hear you hear knife scraping.

• 23:58Yasi Salek?

  So creative. I'm like, are you okay, babe? So anyways, Bernard leaves Suede on July 8th, 1994, according to Simon's diary. And then according to John Harris's The Last Party book, which is the really great, honestly, Britpop history book. The final words that Bernard uttered to Brett for nine, until nine years later were, you're a fucking cunt.

• 24:20Speaker 06

  Pretty hardcore. There's not much going back from there, is there?

• 24:25Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. I feel like you guys call each other cunt all the time in like a loving way. So who knows how how back or forth is, I can't really hear. Yeah, here it's real bad.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, but yeah, it's all in the tone, you see.

• 24:39Yasi Salek?

  Right. Yeah, I feel like that was not a, that was not a jokey, laughy, warm tone. That was a real, that was a knife scraping.

• 24:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I remember reading those extracts as well from Simon's diary. And there's an impression that he's Bernard is really winding Simon up as well. Like Simon's nearly like, I'm gonna leave, man. This is doing my head in.

• 24:58Yasi Salek?

  Well, they had a big fight before this where like, I don't remember the exact details, but I think Bernard was like, trying to get Simon to do exactly what he wanted. And Simon was like, no, I want to do it this way. And and Bernard was like really dismissive of him was like, just do your fucking job or something. And Simon like stormed out and he was like, absolutely not. I don't work for you. So it was, there was, the vibes were bad. So because of this, when he finally leaves, the feeling of the rest of the band immediately is relief. Like they're all kind of just like, oh, honestly, like it sucks, but thank God, because we've been walking on eggshells. And it's been like so uncomfortable. I love the enemy because this was their headline, while my guitarist swiftly leaves.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  It's kind of nearly there and not quite.

• 25:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're all kind of just nearly there. You're like, you don't have to make a pun out of it, but that's okay if you do. Also, this, this made me laugh so hard because it's so in the gossip and unable for us to prove this. But in that Love and Poison book, there's a little story about how a Suede fan named Natalie Fraser happened to meet Blur a month after Bernard had left Suede. And she, of course, goes and asks Damon directly about it. How, you know, how do you feel about Bernard leaving Suede? And she claimed that he had done a little dance, which if I remember rightly, was a Parklife-esque running on the spot, but rotating 360 degrees. So he's doing kind of like a, he really liked it.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  Running man around and round.

• 26:25Yasi Salek?

  The running man around and round. And that made me laugh so fucking hard. I was like,

• 26:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:30Yasi Salek?

  So we don't know if that's true or not, but if you imagine that it's true, it's quite funny.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  It's quite sweet.

• 26:38Yasi Salek?

  Okay, this is Suede's official statement. "Suede have not split up and have no intention of doing so. However, Suede and their guitarist Bernard Butler parted company earlier this month while completing work on the band Suckin' album, blah, blah, blah, blah." Bernard's statement, "I'm not insane and I'm happy."

• 26:57Yasi Salek?

  That one did not go through Savage and Best. I don't think that was, he went rogue on that one. And then, this is the craziest part of the story. Would you not agree that this is a truly insane twist? How could this happen? That they place an ad in the NME for new guitar. A of all, that's crazy. Like, you're Suede. But like, they're just like, well, it worked the first time. We'll just throw that right in.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  That's how they did it. There was no internet, yes.

• 27:25Yasi Salek?

  I know, no, I understand. But I feel at this point, you might have had a network of musicians. But no, they were like, they didn't say they were Suede. They just said that they were a name band. And they said one of their influences was Suede.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, they also said smashing pumpkins. I was like, what?

• 27:40Yasi Salek?

  Branda, because Smashing Pumpkins are a really good band. We need you to revisit Smashing Pumpkins, okay? I feel that you've been, you've been, something has been overshadowed for you.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  I'm right about Smashing Pumpkins.

• 27:53Yasi Salek?

  You might be right about Billy Corgan as a persona in this world, and I will be right next to you backing you up on that, but the songs are fucking genius. They're golden. They're great. Up, really up like six albums worth or something.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  No, no. But anyway, they put it in. Like, I remember reading it. Now, I've got some, where is it?

• 28:11Yasi Salek?

  Meanwhile, Brett was like, honestly, looking back, it's crazy. I'm not directly quoting him, I'm paraphrasing, but like, something to the effect of like, at the time, I just thought there were like a hundred Bernards out there. Like, it didn't even like really occur to me, like, like we just wouldn't find someone amazing. Like, I just, and then like they started to have people show up and they were like, hmm, interesting, there aren't, everyone is not a Bernard. My favorite was a guy who played clarinet, and he wrote them and said, I understand you recently lost your guitarist. I am not a guitarist. I play the clarinet, but I think I could probably replicate a lot of the lead lines on the clarinet.

• 28:50Yasi Salek?

  I want just 7% of that man's chutzpah and confidence.

• 28:55Speaker 06

  Oh my god, honestly. It is so much the mediocre guy aspect, isn't it? I'm here.

• 29:01Yasi Salek?

  I'm not recommending we use AI, but if someone did use AI to see what would happen if Suede went on with just a clarinet player instead of a lead guitar player, I'm interested. Then they had, this, this felt to me unethical, but they had a guy called Drew Richards audition, who was also a journalist and wrote a whole piece about his audition for Suede in the, I think Melody Maker?

• 29:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a bit naff, isn't it? I think it's really, you know.

• 29:29Yasi Salek?

  How dare you? How dare you, sir? Whatever. They're about to give up, and then they get a tape of the guy, he had not seen the Melody Maker ad, but he read about Bernard leaving Suede, and so he sent his tape to the fan club, and they put it on, they're like, hold on, this is really good, because then they call.

• 29:45Speaker 06

  And it sounds exactly, it's really weird, isn't it? Because it's like, he sounds exactly like Bernard, but then when they first got Bernard, you remember, he sounded exactly like the Smiths.

• 29:54Yasi Salek?

  Like Johnny Marr.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  He sounded like Johnny Marr. So like, it's just really funny, like, the, I mean, I get it, because you, I think, I think about this in a lot of creativity in life. The only way of doing it when you first start is to imitate someone you really love. You can't do it like, you know, like you can do as many creative writing courses as you want, you just have to try and copy someone you really like and you won't get it right. And in the not getting it right, that's your art. And then it's like, so it goes Johnny Marr, Bernard Berthelha, and then along comes Richard and goes, all right, I'll have a go, I can do this. It's amazing.

• 30:28Yasi Salek?

  And he did. He really, he nailed it. And then he started to develop his own style. But the greatest thing is that they called and his sister answered and they were like, yeah, we'd like to talk to, you know, Richard Oak about being our guitarist. And she goes, great. Do you know how old he is? And they were like, no. And they were like, he's 17 years old. You, this is his parents' house. He lives with his parents in Dorset. He's literally a child.

• 30:53Speaker 06

  And Dorset, like, that's different to like, it's even different to where like Brett and Matt would grow up. Because the idea of, if you're in where Brett and Matt grew up, there's a sense of London not being far away. Do you know what I mean? It's just outside of reach, but you could get a trainer. Dorset is miles, man, it's miles from everywhere. Like, there's nothing there.

• 31:13Yasi Salek?

  Dorset's where PJ Harvey is also from. It's like sheep's and stuff, sheep's and stone quarries.

• 31:18Speaker 06

  South and it's like, you know, it's lots of farmers. And I mean, there's lots of, but there's no big city to go to. I suppose the biggest one would be like Bristol, I think.

• 31:27Yasi Salek?

  So not only is he 17, he's like, not even like, an urbane, like, city dwelling, savvy 17 year old. He's from the country.

• 31:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just mad. It's so mad. When I read it now, I mean, I know it happened and I know what happened. But you think, oh, my God, that is nuts. It's just nuts.

• 31:48Yasi Salek?

  He is very interesting though, because like before, you know, copying Bernard to learn guitar, he kind of modeled himself after Keith Levine, which I thought was a very good and unusual guitar hero to have.

• 32:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

• 32:04Yasi Salek?

  He was on summer break. He was about to go back and do his A levels in classics, history and French. And he was about to go on holiday in France. But they were like, can you come audition? And he was like, holiday canceled. See you soon. And then they were like, do you want to join at the end of the audition? And he was like, yes, I just have to ask my parents.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Oh, and they're in France.

• 32:26Yasi Salek?

  And they're, they're in France.

• 32:32Speaker 01

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• 33:02Speaker 02

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• 33:14Speaker 03

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• 33:19Yasi Salek?

  So everything we're gonna hear now is Bernard, I think. It's still Dogman Star. So Richard doesn't, he just joined the band, but "We Are the Pigs" is the first single that comes out from Dogman Star. Fucking massive tune, I must say.

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Definitely, really definitely. It's great.

• 33:42Speaker 06

  I think there's a lot that's great about this album. I mean, it's a nuts album. And there's a lot that you can really pull apart and say, that doesn't work. It's absolutely ludicrous. What are you doing? Come on. But the sing, yeah, "We Are the Pigs" is one of the things that really works. It's great. It's really good. They're constantly identifying themselves and their fans. Do you know what I mean? They're saying, this is who we are. We're always an outsider. We're always this, we're all this. And like, actually, we're fabulous. We're in the gutter, but we're amazing. Look at us. You'll never beat us, kind of thing. And it's that.

• 34:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's very like hand in glove, hand in glove energy. It's like us against the world and you're in our gang, you know?

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Swagier, isn't it?

• 34:23Yasi Salek?

  Morrissey was kind of sad about it.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yes, exactly. They're like, fuck you all. We are here.

• 34:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Their V's up in the air. This is an Orwellian song. A lot of imagery of watching things burn.

• 34:40Speaker 06

  It's from Animal Farm, isn't it? "We Are the Pigs."

• 34:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, we are, and also it was the theme song of that band he was in when he was a kid with Simon and Simon called "The Pigs." He stole it. Oh, the name, anyways.

• 35:01Yasi Salek?

  This is the first thing Richard does with Suede is pretend to play guitar in the music video for We Are The Pigs.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  God, love it.

• 35:07Yasi Salek?

  You gotta start somewhere. And then Dog Man Star comes out October 10, 1994, produced by Ed Bueller to Bernard Butler's eternal chagrin. It has no relation to the 1964 film Dog Star Man, if you guys were thinking that that.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  No, it's a great name for an album, isn't it?

• 35:26Yasi Salek?

  Dog Man Star. So good.

• 35:27Speaker 06

  I think that's just great.

• 35:28Yasi Salek?

  And I did not, I did not have time to fact check this, but he says that those three words appear in almost every song.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  Dog, really?

• 35:37Yasi Salek?

  Unfortunately, there's no way to know, Miranda. There's no possible way to know, and we'll never know, because I'm not gonna do the legwork on that.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  The maths.

• 35:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, not doing the maths on that. So here's what I was kind of saying about Brett being on some other shit. Brett moved at this point into the basement of a Gothic mansion in Highgate that was owned by Mennonites.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  I know this. So what's really weird about where he was living, it's like quite easy to imagine if you're in London anyway, but weirdly, my boyfriend a few years later, who's now my husband, he lived on that road almost opposite where it was. So I can really pitch.

• 36:13Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, really pitch where it is.

• 36:15Yasi Salek?

  In Shepherd's, at Shepherd's Hill?

• 36:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, on Shepherd's Hill. So it's a really, it's not a weird area of London. It's a lovely area of London that's like, to get there, you go up a hill, like it's my, you know, big old hill. And it's like, it's quite countryfied. There's a train track that's kind of like all grown over. It's really gorgeous, but if you just go down that hill, you're in quite a rough area. And so it's like, kind of, it's like liberal and privileged, but there's pockets of stuff that isn't, that isn't nice. And I think the album quite often is talking about those bits, rather than him going mad in the basement of this fantastic house.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  Which he was doing.

• 36:53Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful house. Which he was. So Alan Fisher, his best friend, they're still living together, but Alan's really not there because he's with his girlfriend a lot. So it's just Brett alone, listening to the Mennonites sing their hymns, watching performance every day, which is absolutely bad for your mental health. Don't do that. Don't watch performance every day. This is not good.

• 37:14Speaker 06

  Such a bad thing. Oh, my God.

• 37:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're obsessed. And then Brett said, I was starting to go a little bit nuts. I was kind of having visions about songs. A lot of the songs were about visions. I was having visions of Armageddon and riots in the street and inventing insane things, living in this surreal world. I was quite into all these people that had visions and were slightly off their nuts. People like Lewis Carroll. I was into that whole idea of becoming the recording artist as lunatic.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  He was taking lots of drugs. He really was.

• 37:44Yasi Salek?

  He was doing the classic, like, you all heard of Aleister Crowley, babe? Yeah, I'm on that shit. William Blake, you know, that guy, Kenneth Anger, babe? Yeah, he's cool. And then he was doing a bunch of acid coke and ecstasy. And as he said, I scrambled my brain on those drugs and out came Dogman Star.

• 38:00Speaker 06

  I think the beginning of this album, introducing the band, I think it's absolutely brilliant.

• 38:07Yasi Salek?

  I do, too.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  And that's quite Lewis Carroll-y. Like, the lyrics are really Lewis Carroll. It's really nuts. It's like a proper statement of, okay, you thought we were this, but actually we're even wilder and we're even more menacing and we're even more scary and we're absolutely off our nuts. So fucking strap yourself in. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's absolutely brilliant. So if you're doing all that, like, I mean, I don't, you know, it's never, it's never that good an idea to really scramble your head on drugs. You know, it isn't that good. Long term, it's not so good. And like, and, you know, it doesn't do, you know, it's not great for inter-band relationships, but, you know, there's parts of this album, there's bits of this album that drives me absolutely nuts, that I just

• 38:51Speaker 06

  think it's terrible. And there's bits of this album that is absolutely brilliant. And the opening track is absolutely brilliant.

• 38:57Yasi Salek?

  It's absolutely brilliant. I agree with you. Like, they swung for the fences. This also could have gone south, but it didn't. And it really works. It's hypnotic. Like you said, it has that Lewis Carroll energy, especially in like lyrical phrases, like, stabbed a cerebellum with a curious quill, giving Lewis Carroll.

• 39:25Yasi Salek?

  This is Super 90s. The vibe of the song was Brett Anderson trying to replicate the sound of the Buddhist monks he'd heard chanting in a temple in Kyoto when they were on tour in Japan. And then put in the Mennonites and like, yeah, it's like, it really grabs you. Having a strong opener to an album, especially when you're trying to like reestablish yourself and kind of be like, "Oh, you thought we were this one thing? No, we're totally also this other thing." It really works.

• 39:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's so good. I really like, when I was listening to the album again, I was like, "Oh, my God, that track. I'd completely forgotten about it. I don't know why." I was thinking about the singles or the ones that I like, you know, more. And like, that opening track is, it's just great. It's like a, it's like huge, isn't it? It's like a wall of sound. It's just amazing.

• 40:17Yasi Salek?

  I mean, the whole energy of this album is kind of dark and kind of chaotic and insane. And it does have, I mean, like I said, Brett is going crazy. Alan said living with him was straight up like with nail and eye, which made me laugh. It was like LOL. Which you could, I'm like, of course, he's probably like prancing around in some crazy like trench coat and being, being on drugs and drinking wine. And I think Alan said he had to hide the wine bottle from him. But then also he had this insane girlfriend named Anik, who also had her own girlfriend.

• 40:49Yasi Salek?

  And she was, I mean, respect, men love, men love an insane woman. She was, you know, threw bricks through his window. She used to like, we'll get into some of the songs, but she used to like, go to the hospital and say like, "Oh, he hurt me." And she'd be like, "I didn't." He'd be like, "I didn't hurt her."

• 41:08Speaker 06

  She's just drama, isn't she? Proper drama.

• 41:11Yasi Salek?

  A lot of drama. I wanted to ask you about this. Like, now we're like, this is Britpop. In, in the sense of like, we've...

• 41:21Speaker 06

  It's been invented.

• 41:22Yasi Salek?

  It's been invented, right? But if you listen to this fucking album, you're like, what? This is not like what, you know, like, it's so crazy. And I'm wondering if that was like a slight reactionary thing of them being in the studio and being like, okay, Chaz and Dave, bumpa da bump bump, chimney sweeps, we're not doing that.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can think completely that. So I think that when they started, the idea of a kind of British, I don't know what you want to call it, but a British revival of a Brit pop thing. They were quite interested in that because they were the flag bearers for that when they made almost, literally they never had a flag themselves, but their flag was put behind them. And they were, what they were about was like, this is, we're writing about English life, about the little grubby bits. You know, it's not the wild expanses of America. This isn't rock. This is like, kind of, um,

• 42:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  odd pop. And then other bands came up and we can say, you know, basically, blah, definitely. But also ninety four Oasis were coming up and so, and Pulp were around and all that. And I think they just thought, we don't want anything to do with that. And Elastica as well, obviously.

• 42:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, they had already put out two singles.

• 42:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, they hadn't quite put out an album yet, but like they were, you know.

• 42:39Yasi Salek?

  They already got best new band and melody maker, like they're, they're making a splash.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they're like, the press was everywhere. You've got to remember that their press was also done by Savage and Best. So like, so there's like, within Savage and Best, there's a bit of kind of rivalry. Who's got, you know, there's Pulp and Suede and Elastica. Or they did all those different presses. So people would be like slightly, sniping about who's got the enemy cover, you know what I mean? But anyway, you know, I think they did take a very deliberate, like, left turn or whatever it is, but it's a turn away from what appears to be a kind of jagged, a slightly shiny, shiny's not quite the right turn, but, um, but not epic, not pretentious, not dark and sexual, not what they then do.

• 43:28Speaker 06

  You know, like the stuff that's coming out, I mean, Pulp can be dark and sexual, but they weren't quite doing that there. And Elastica are very jagged and spiky. Pretentiousness was really, really sneered upon because I think because of Oasis coming through.

• 43:45Yasi Salek?

  Oasis were like, hello, we speak in simple language.

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they were like, take the piss out of people for being art school and loaded was starting and all that kind of stuff. So it's like the idea of being kind of highfaluting and aiming for stuff and being, you know, aiming for too high was just, that was not good. That was not seen as good. I mean, it's in the end, I think that that, that, the idea that you shouldn't be pretentious and you shouldn't go for things and you shouldn't be arty is actually what killed Britpop. Because of course you should be all those things, like, that's great.

• 44:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and it's like, I mean, Oasis was not ever gonna be those things, because that's not who they are. Like, that would be so inauthentic, but it was okay for other bands to do it if that was in their wheelhouse. I mean, I thought Brett said very funny things about it. He said, you know, we, I don't think anyone can deny that we pretty much kicked off what became Britpop and we were proud of that for a little while. Then everybody started singing about having a lovely bunch of coconuts and running up the apples and pears. And it became a horrible, twisted musical carry on film. And we did our utmost to distance ourselves from it. Miranda, do you want to explain what a carry on film is to the people?

• 44:54Speaker 06

  Oh, my god, okay. I think you can explain the whole of the night, you see, the carry on films. Okay, so the carry on films, we were all brought up in the carry on films and these were like, they churned them out in the kind of, it must be the 50s or 60s, I suppose, really. But anyway, they're like kind of saucy seaside romps. I mean, they're not always by the seaside. They'll be like, carry on camping and carry on up the Kaiba and carry on matron, carry on doctor. And there's like a basically series of well-loved actors who play the same part over and over. And the kind of driving force of them is always, there's Sid James in there and he is very well-loved. He's got a crinkly face and he's got a laugh that goes,

• 45:35Speaker 06

  I can't even do his laugh. And he's always after the sexy birds. They're always after the sexy birds.

• 45:40Yasi Salek?

  Oh, like that, like that Blur video.

• 45:42Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 45:43Yasi Salek?

  Like, was it called Vacation House? No. Country House, Country House.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  Country House. Yeah, so that, that's a bit like that. That's like Benny Hill. The Benny Hill, when they run around like that, it's Benny Hill. Carry on is earlier than that and it's, and it's almost more innocent. But it's like absolutely everybody was brought up on Carry On.

• 46:02Speaker 07

  Good evening.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Oh, hi. Oh, what a lovely looking pair.

• 46:08Speaker 07

  Took the words right out of my mouth.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  You know how like in Britain, we think that tits are funny. But like in America, we think that tits, you think that tits are dangerous. We just think tits are funny.

• 46:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I've seen your Naked and Afraid television program. No, not Naked and Afraid, Naked Attraction.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. We just think it's funny. And that is actually part of Carry On. Like, that's the Carry On legacy. We just think, whoa.

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  You kind of get a sense of who he's talking about there. He also has another quote where you get a better sense. "We could not have been more uninterested in that whole boozy cartoon-like fake working class thing. As soon as we became aware of it, we went away and wrote Dog Man Star. You could not find a less Britpop record. It's tortured, epic, extremely sexual and personal. None of these things apply to Britpop."

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  And it's basically what we were saying, like, this is not. But I think because it's entering into a firmly post-Britpop trademark world, like, we have Some Might Say hitting number one from Oasis already, Parklife had been released. It doesn't do as well commercially, right? Because people have moved on. They're like, no, we want this now.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It died a death. It really, I mean, you know, actually, I'm sure it sold quite well, but in terms of reputation, people thought it was like, especially because Bernard had left and people thought it was overblown and just pretentious. And it was an absolutely anti-pretentious time. I mean, now, I think it's regarded very differently. It's kind of regarded as a flawed masterpiece, which I think is more fair enough, actually, because there's definitely moments on it that are absolutely brilliant. There's bits that I don't like at all, but it's funny, they use the word when they talk about it, when Brett and and Matt talk about it, they use the word dank. And it doesn't seem like dank to me. I don't think that's right somehow. It's more...

• 47:59Yasi Salek?

  I get that. It's kind of like, it's like wet, like a moldy beast.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe wet rather than dank. Properly wet.

• 48:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, like viscous. It's like a viscous album.

• 48:10Speaker 06

  And yeah, and like it's... It's, you know, there's a lot of menace in there and it's quite grandiose. You know, there's bits of it that are kind of theatrical. It's really, I think it's, there's parts of it that are absolutely brilliant, I have to say. But it was really not of its time, you know.

• 48:25Yasi Salek?

  And it was different enough from the first album, which was like we were talking about. Had these elements maybe in a more subdued way and was poppier. So like.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  It's, you know what it was. Like the first album was a bit more glam. It was a bit like glam rock. And this one is a bit more, this bit proggy. You know, there's points where you're just a bit like, okay mates, we've got a point. You know, you can move back to the tune now.

• 48:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, we didn't talk about this. That was one part of the big fights was Bernard was like, I need there to be an 11 minute guitar solo right here. And they were like, yeah, I just, I think that we don't need it in 11. Can we, like, he wanted, like, he was really trying to expand the horizons of these songs. They were very inspired by T-Rex and all this stuff. And I think actually they ended up clipping and re-editing a lot of the songs.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, they did.

• 49:11Yasi Salek?

  Even to get them this, to where they are now.

• 49:15Speaker 06

  It's really interesting because prog, prog generally, honestly, throughout the nineties was absolutely, it was like a bad word. And that was because punk had killed prog, like punk, like killed prog, stoned it.

• 49:28Yasi Salek?

  You weren't supposed to be good at your instrument and do musically challenging things.

• 49:34Speaker 06

  Absolutely not. It was everything that everybody was against, right? And that punk, you know, went to post-punk, went to indie, went to Britpop. Like, it was like fundamentally drawn, drawn through you. That you, you look at Elastica, you know, like everything was short and sharp. Like, don't repeat yourself, get off, right? And so to, to be indulgent and noodly and like Bernard supposedly, you know, wanted one song to be 25 minutes long, you know. That's absolutely, it's the antithesis. Nobody would do that. It's wrong. You know what I mean? It's like, um, you're just not allowed. This is not why pop music exists. Pop music's year zero is set 1977. And come on, you know, you can't do it. And so, yeah, it was definitely not where it was going.

• 50:19Yasi Salek?

  Before we get into the songs, I just wanted to read you guys two more quotes because I thought they were really interesting, just to keep contextualizing the world this album comes into and kind of what Suede is in the public consciousness post. Brett said, "The mutterings of disquiet continued and the public confidence in Suede began to wane, coinciding not coincidentally with the new wave of bands who waved flags and dropped their H's and painted a social tourist cartoon of British life, patronizing jingoistic and crass. The press's heads were turned and they followed like a child chasing a ball onto the road." So poetic. And then Noel Gallagher in Faster Than a Cannonball, which is really great, if you guys like any, just British stuff.

• 51:02Yasi Salek?

  It's by Dylan Jones, it's an oral history of just, I think, not just Britpop, but all the art in that time in the 90s. Noel Gallagher said, "Before we came along, the greatest hope for British music was Suede. They didn't write songs that mean anything to people living in council blocks in Glasgow. We were not into chin stroking. We were very naive. We were quite pure in a way. It was just all about rock and roll." And that's kind of to your point, right? Like, that was, it was considered highfalutin and bad and disconnected to try to make music like Suede was making, where Oasis was like, "We're making music for everybody, for the working man."

• 51:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the point of Oasis really is their universality, I think. You know, absolutely, everybody can relate to them. They're like folk songs that you knew before you knew them. But what's interesting about that is, of course, that Brett is just as poor, you know, he grew up just as poor as Noel and Liam. It's like, of course.

• 52:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and he's just took what he had and made a different thing out of it.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:06Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so we talked about introducing the band, great opener. We talked about We Are The Pigs, heroin babe, bye, this is a jam.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  You like it? Yeah, it's a good one.

• 52:15Yasi Salek?

  I love it. It's a good one.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:18Yasi Salek?

  Brett said, "I love this from the moment I heard Bernard's demo. The guitar part is so beautiful and dark and winding and immediately suggested to me a bleakly sexual lyric. The song is about loneliness and pornography. And I suppose it's the first song on the album that introduces the themes of isolation, continued, and two of us, still life, etc. I'm casting myself as an 18-year-old hormonal teenager trapped within his drab slum with the imprisoning power of the female form, unable to break away from this fantasy and form actual relationships."

• 52:55Yasi Salek?

  Obviously, he's also baiting a little bit with heroin. We're talking about a female hero, but you know, it's a little.

• 53:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's quite a lot of kind of obvious drug references throughout the whole of the record, isn't there?

• 53:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good one, though. Heroin is a good one.

• 53:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, even though he's not doing heroin yet, which we'll get into, there's a bit of a

• 53:15Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 53:15Yasi Salek?

  heroin gate situation that comes up pretty soon with some accusations. The opening line of heroin is from the Lord Byron poem, She Walks in Beauty. Yeah, Noel Gallagher not doing that. He's not quoting Lord Byron in any of his songs. And that's okay. There's something for everyone.

• 53:37Yasi Salek?

  The Wild Ones? Also gorgeous.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  I love The Wild Ones. That is like definitely one of my all time favorite songs by A Long Way. That is such, such a beautiful song. He sings it so beautifully. Like, I think he sings it absolutely good, you know, because he's got that kind of, normally you hear that kind of yowl in it, like slightly bowie. Yow, yow, you know, Mick Jagger, you know, slightly campy.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  And like in this one, he just doesn't do that.

• 54:23Speaker 06

  It's a straightforward song. It's like, if you stay, we will win. But you know that that person that you're singing to is leaving, they're leaving. And he's based it, apparently, I didn't know this, I was just reading up about it, and he based it on, Je ne regret rien, that one. No, no, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas. And like, I mean, that's one of the most heartbreaking songs that's ever existed. You know what I mean? And I love the wild ones. I can't, you know, I cannot tell you how much I love that song. And it's actually weird because within the album, it's quite a straightforward song, you know, because it's

• 54:59Yasi Salek?

  It feels more like album one, like it could really be at home on album one.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  It's like a beautiful love song, isn't it? And there's something about the vocals are a bit higher in the mix, maybe, or more straightforward behind it.

• 55:13Yasi Salek?

  It's like anthemic, right? It has this like

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:16Yasi Salek?

  real like lifting up feeling to it.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it really is. And apparently, I think they wanted, I think Bernard wanted a huge, long outro.

• 55:26Yasi Salek?

  Of course he did.

• 55:27Speaker 06

  And they changed that. There's still a bit of an outro, but I think he wanted like, I wouldn't have minded an epic outro, actually, because I love that song. Just keep it going is fine.

• 55:34Yasi Salek?

  Right, yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  But like, I think they edited that down a little bit.

• 55:48Yasi Salek?

  Brett agrees with me and you on how much this song is wonderful. He says it's still my favorite single moment in Suede's history. And when interviewers ask me what I'm most proud of, I always mention this song.

• 55:59Speaker 06

  This is correct, Brett. We are proud of you.

• 56:03Yasi Salek?

  Uh, this song was was inspired by Anik. So we need to tip our hat to Anik for being so chaotic and insane.

• 56:10Speaker 06

  But also, it could be about Bernard. It could be about Justin.

• 56:14Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 56:15Speaker 06

  This band is a series of fucking breakups over and over again, you know?

• 56:20Yasi Salek?

  It's a series of like doomed, but like poetically destined and faded connections, you know?

• 56:29Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 56:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's so, it's really great. Daddy's Speeding is not my favorite song, but I like that Brett was like, I want to write, I want to write a song about Hollywood and James Dean's death.

• 56:45Speaker 06

  Was it because he had a dream about he was driving with James Dean or something? It's like, okay, mum.

• 56:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  Go, go off, sis.

• 57:04Yasi Salek?

  The Power doesn't have Bernard on it. That's the last song they wrote for the album. And it's just Matt and Simon and Brett together. And he said, it's, there might be a lightness to that because Bernard wasn't there. They were happy.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  Did they get like a session guitarist or something? And they're like, yeah, it was really, this was really easy to make.

• 57:26Yasi Salek?

  I think maybe Brett just played the guitar. I don't think they had a fourth person involved in it. I think it was just them. He said, this song is a simple message of empowerment. It is quite a simple message of empowerment.

• 57:46Yasi Salek?

  It has some questionable lyrics about through endless Asia, through the fields of Cathay. And if you're far over Africa, it's just things we don't need to.

• 57:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, they need editing.

• 58:00Yasi Salek?

  We don't need to relitigate that. It's okay. New Generation, I didn't even write anything about this because I don't think that the song is that interesting. This Hollywood life is, again, it's interesting that he seems sort of preoccupied, which will come up again and again in future Suede albums, sort of preoccupied with the Hollywood glamour, which I guess makes sense in the glam-esque element and the drama and the theatrics. Like, of course, eventually you're going to turn towards like Hollywood and old Hollywood. And now that you're dealing with fame, like, it does make sense. But I found it interesting that that shows up a couple of times on this album.

• 58:34Speaker 06

  It's a very specific idea of Hollywood, isn't it? It's not like Quentin Tarantino. Do you know what I mean? It's not that, it's not contemporary Hollywood. It's old Hollywood. It's the old idea of who's glamorous.

• 58:44Yasi Salek?

  It's Veronica Lake.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's Lauren McCourt and it's like, and James Dean. It's all these, Marilyn Monroe, not Lauren, Lauren is not doomed as a person, but.

• 58:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. It's kind of the, like you said, the doomed, died, died young.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's those people, isn't it? You know, a bit of Montgomery Clift in there, I imagine.

• 59:13Yasi Salek?

  The two of us, speaking of songs that feel like they could definitely be about Brett and Bernard, oh.

• 59:18Speaker 06

  Hmm, yeah.

• 59:19Yasi Salek?

  This one gets me. It's so beautiful.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  Oh, do you like this one? I quite like this one. It's, for me, I wrote a few notes and literally I've written twice. It goes on a bit long. And then I thought, oh, it goes on too long.

• 59:32Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Miranda's like, I like this song. It's, I'm bored now. I like it, but I'm bored. Can we wrap it up?

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'm like on Brett's side, you know what I mean? Just to go, you know, Bernard likes to go on a bit long. But it is nice. It's the piano's nice and it's nice.

• 59:49Speaker 07

  I listened to the piano, they said that it could be the two of us.

• 59:59Yasi Salek?

  Brett said the whole thing with Bernard was we'd fall out and then get back together. One of my strongest memories of Bernard was him playing the piano to the two of us. And I think his father either had just died or was incredibly ill. I remember him playing it and it being really emotional. You could actually see him channeling his sadness into this song. And I just felt it was so beautiful and so powerful. It was everything that was good about Bernard. The way he could actually write such incredibly musically powerful things. That's the memory I like to remember of writing Dogman Star. It just being such a beautiful melody that I couldn't fail to write something really powerful to it.

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  Okay, so now I take you back as a good song.

• 1:00:33Yasi Salek?

  Now it's not too long, is it Miranda? Now you feel bad.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  No, no, no. Keep going. You've done very well.

• 1:00:42Yasi Salek?

  "Black and Blue" is the song that I was sort of alluding to earlier that's inspired by a Nick. Brett said, "It was like that Smith song, Friday Night in Outpatience", which is a lyric from Stop Me, if you've heard this one before. "I was detained, I was restrained." That one, I broke my spleen, broke my knee. Then it really laced into me. "Friday Night in Outpatience, who said I'd lied to her?"

• 1:01:09Yasi Salek?

  He said literally every time. I wouldn't hit her or anything like that, but I'd grab her or something and she'd be like, oh, you've hurt my hand. And she'd demand to be taken to hospital. And she'd go to the doctor and say, he'd hurt my hand. And the doctor would go, there's nothing wrong with you. Go back home and stop wasting her time.

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  And also the hospital, like geographically, it's just, so they're on this lovely bit in Highgate, right? Where she's up. And then the groty bit of London will be down the hill. So you go down, literally, you go down this road, you're under a bridge called Suicide Bridge, you can imagine. And then you get to the bottom, and that's where the hospital is.

• 1:01:43Yasi Salek?

  So just a short, just a brief, a brief walk?

• 1:01:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be a bit long walk, but you know, it's a bus ride. It's not too bad on a bus.

• 1:01:51Yasi Salek?

  So you'd have to take her on the bus to go to the hospital to say that she hurt her hand. And then the doctor would say, your hand is fine. You need to go home. That sounds fun. That's a good relationship. It reminds me of when I was in one of these kinds of relationships where I would lay down in the road all the time. Like, I don't know why this was my thing. That was my insane woman move. But I'd be like, I don't even, leave me alone. I'm going to lay in the road. And he'd be like, please don't leave. There's cars coming. And I was like, whatever, I'm laying in the road. Cool. Cool story, Ossie.

• 1:02:18Speaker 06

  How old were you, yes?

• 1:02:19Yasi Salek?

  Too old to be doing that.

• 1:02:22Speaker 06

  This was just two years ago.

• 1:02:24Yasi Salek?

  This was, yeah, this was 2021. Just kidding. We kind of talked about the asphalt world, but let's really dive in. We love this song, right? We're pro the asphalt world. This is one of the high points of Dogman's song.

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  It's the point of the album. It's like, it starts off so amazingly. And then for me, it does really, really well. And then there's some wild ones. Oh, my God, I just want to die. It's fantastic. And I can, okay, I might even take your argument about the two of us. But really, for me, it dips a bit. And then you get the asphalt world. And I'm like, oh, right now, I'm like, now I'm properly in. This is amazing. It's got an amazing tune. It's got really good lyrics. The lyrics are kind of funny and dark at the same time. Do you know what I mean? She's in the asphalt world. But there's another one where she's like in the ass felt world, like somebody feeding her a rock.

• 1:03:09Yasi Salek?

  I know. It's so good.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  It's really funny. It's pretty funny.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  It's very swayed, isn't it? Like, it's like a kind of quintessentially kind of swayed topic. It's about a girl and like, where did she go? What did she do? How does she feel when she's next to you? I mean, it's so swayed and the tune is amazing. And then it just, it goes, it goes all over the shop. I love that. It's really good. It's a really, really good song, I think.

• 1:03:44Yasi Salek?

  It really is quintessentially swayed. It's the centerpiece of Dogman Star. It's about being deviant in your relationships and proclivities. But the beauty of that, it's about, you know, sexual jealousy. We talked already about how Nick also had a girlfriend. So that could have been partial inspiration. I mean, obviously Justine could have been partial inspiration. I mean, that wasn't that long ago, but it's gorgeous. Do I think it would have been a better song if Bernard had been allowed to put his 20 minute guitar solo in the middle? I don't think so. I'm sorry to say it. I don't think it would have been a better song. I'm gonna have to side with Brett on this one. I think he was right. I don't think any song on earth would be better with a 20 minute guitar solo, but certainly not this one.

• 1:04:30Speaker 06

  No, it's, and also, you know what it's got on this really, I've literally written, I've written bassline. The bassline on it is really nice. You don't know, you know.

• 1:04:39Yasi Salek?

  Come through.

• 1:04:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he's a great, he's a great player, but like within swayed, you don't normally notice Matt, I don't think. But you notice the drums quite a lot. The drums are quite high and you notice Brett, obviously. And obviously when Bernard's, I just think Matt is quite underrated because of all the drama, the stuff that's going around him. And then in this, like, he's always really good, but in this song, I was just like, God, that is, that's a really kind of pretty and well played, nimble, gorgeous bassline, you know, that like makes the song, you know?

• 1:05:19Yasi Salek?

  You make a good point. They're not Elastica, so it's not like stark enough that where you're like, baseline.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:05:24Yasi Salek?

  Boom, the star of the show. Like, it's always sort of woven into this, like, big tapestry of sound.

• 1:05:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. The big sound. It's not like, say, Alex on Girls and Boys, is it? Which, like, that's the point of the song. You need the disco bass so that Graham can argue with it. Yeah, within, you know, this is a wall of sound record, isn't it? So you don't really notice it, but it's really good. He's really, really good.

• 1:05:48Yasi Salek?

  And then Still Life is the last song, which is sort of the Scott Walker-y feeling that you get.

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  It's got an orchestra on it, and that needs to go, don't you think? It's naff.

• 1:05:58Yasi Salek?

  This is not my favorite song. I feel this could have been lopped right off and we call it a day, but I was not part of the decision-making process, and I'm not a musician.

• 1:06:07Speaker 06

  But I genuinely think, I just think, because they hired the London Symphony of orchestras, and that, do you know what I mean? It costs loads of money.

• 1:06:14Yasi Salek?

  Wasn't there something else they had on here at first, like a children's?

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  Tap dancing.

• 1:06:18Yasi Salek?

  Orchestra, tap dancers, right? This is when you're like, oh, my God, Brett did acid and came into the studio and said, you guys, I know what we need on this song, and hear me out, it's tap dancers. And then everyone was like, okay. They weren't like, no, that's insane. They're like, yep, let's put an ad, we'll get some tap dancers. And then they recorded it, and they're like, oh, my God, that's funny. Actually, that doesn't work at all.

• 1:06:39Speaker 06

  It's so indulgent, like, it's so, having all that kind of orchestration at the end, it almost sounds like Disney towards the end. It's just like, what are you doing?

• 1:06:48Yasi Salek?

  It only works when Radiohead does it, I'm sorry to say. It's when, when there's indulgent, over-the-top, crazy musical ideas, it only works when Radiohead does them.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  Because Radiohead are kind of scratchy music, aren't they? They're like, and I kind of think with Sway, there's so much beauty in there anyway, that if you add an orchestra, it makes it a bit too nice.

• 1:07:08Yasi Salek?

  Saccharin, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:19Yasi Salek?

  Rolling Stone described this, I don't know if it was at the time or later, I think it was later, as one of the most pretentious albums ever released by a major label.

• 1:07:28Speaker 06

  Isn't that good? I love it.

• 1:07:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  They should have it made into a little badge.

• 1:07:32Yasi Salek?

  That's a stamp it on the CD for anyone that still buys CDs in 2025. Brett said in NME, "Well, I just don't think the songs are pretentious. That's not even an insult to me. It's just fucking inaccurate. Like, people say I tend to write all these obscure things, and I just don't think I do. Most of the lyrics are very, very simple." All that criticism is down to the fact that people are so limited in the way they think about things. He basically said, he was like, "Oh, you don't get it? It's because you're a loser."

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  I think he's right.

• 1:07:58Yasi Salek?

  And your life is, I think he's kind of right, too.

• 1:08:00Speaker 06

  I think he's really right, because his lyrics are not hard, man. Come on. They're not, they're just really not easy to understand. You're just saying you don't like the fact that the songs have got lots and lots of guitars on them. They go on too long for you. That's what you're saying.

• 1:08:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. It got pretty great reviews, though, in the British press. Like, I think NME gave it a nine.

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  All right, okay. I don't remember this, because in my head, it just, it landed with a bit of a, like that, but like,

• 1:08:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  I could really easily have got that wrong.

• 1:08:30Yasi Salek?

  You know, I thought that, too, but then I looked back and I was like, okay, critically, it was actually, they were quite into it. Again, John Harris did the NME review, and he gave it a nine, and he said, "This is an album surrounded by the white heart of something close to genius."

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:08:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay, that's positive. Well, there's one, one other piece I want to read. John Harris is such a good writer. "And sure, in times when sincerity and echolaten drama are so out of kilter with a culture whose abiding motto is irony or death, anyone who does this and makes great art out of it will be ridiculed."

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's right.

• 1:09:01Yasi Salek?

  So he's kind of like, team suede. And then at the end, it's, "You're a fool, Bernard Butler. You really are."

• 1:09:06Speaker 06

  Oh, I know that.

• 1:09:08Yasi Salek?

  He loved it. Melody Maker, they said Dogman Star makes no concessions to those who haven't already pitched their tent in Camp Suede. If you loathe them before, you'll loathe this. Dogman Star, while fine, is certainly a bit much, but then the whole point about Brett is that he's a bit much. It is conceited, but there's more courage in this sort of conceit than in mumbling modesty. My only worry is that Suede already sound like this. Epic, elegiac, over, full of themselves is their life after Dogman Star.

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  Who wrote that? Do we know?

• 1:09:38Yasi Salek?

  David Stubbs.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  Okay, so yeah, he's good as well. These are good, you know, like there's people that are within that that are good. Those people are good. They know what they're doing.

• 1:09:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think New York Times gave it a good review, but it was also by a British person, Simon Reynolds.

• 1:09:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, also very good.

• 1:09:54Yasi Salek?

  Stuart McConie.

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  He must have loved it.

• 1:09:57Yasi Salek?

  He loved it. He said, this is a great album. Let's end with two big reasons why the power and still life are nothing like the Suede that was promised by the first couple of singles, but they are the best things here. I don't know if I agree with that. In fact, the best things they've done to date, but still in general, he loved it. Hugh Magazine gave it a really popular, a really positive review. LA Times hated it and gave it two stars, but again, they were not breaking America anyways.

• 1:10:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're not going to do that.

• 1:10:23Yasi Salek?

  Once the London Suede happened, it's over for them in America. No one's buying anything by the London Suede.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  And it's funny, isn't it? Because like those, all those people that you've mentioned, like, I mean, Stuart's picked the wrong songs out for me, but like Stuart and John and, you know, these are people who I don't, my taste does not completely cross with theirs, but I trust their judgment. Do you know what I mean? They're good. They're really good writers and they're like, they're saying, okay, this is a great album and I agree with them. This is, this album is really interesting and great, but it's something, there's something about, and I do think it's partly to do with Bernard leaving and just the, the world just looking somewhere slightly different, just going, okay, we like you. You're still doing your thing? That's great. You're still doing it? You're still in your blouses? You're still wearing black? You're still skinny and droopy? Fantastic. Carry on. We're just looking over here now. You know, there's a bit of that feeling.

• 1:11:13Yasi Salek?

  We have park life now, so we don't need you.

• 1:11:16Speaker 06

  It's just, it's like there's a. It's found like an old person now, but I was young then and like, you know, when you're in that point in in your in your life, when things are happening quite fast and you're involved in music and music's churning quite fast. You know, I remember when it's way but came, but I really remember when girls and boys arrived, like I remember listening to it and thinking, okay, it's changed, like it's everything's changed. And you know, there was a real sense of like, okay, it's like a, it's like a summer record, it's about summer. It's really upbeat, it's kind of disco for indie kids, it's fun, it's interesting, it's funny.

• 1:11:47Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  You know, Blur, they just are more accessible than Suede, they're less dark.

• 1:11:53Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. And and Blur set out to do something different, you know, I don't think. Suede didn't set out to be accessible by any stretch of the imagination. They didn't set out to even have pop hits. They didn't really care about that. They just weren't those guys.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  No, I worked for Smash Hits and they would be harder to, you know, Suede are harder to deal with. In Smash Hits, they're just harder to deal with. There's a darkness. There's a grown up sexual and druggie energy around Suede that is hard to present, whereas Blur, you really can't present them as cute, for cute guys.

• 1:12:25Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I remember, I remember reading with Blur, like their whole front row was like fourteen year old girls.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what, that's what literally sent Graham mad.

• 1:12:34Yasi Salek?

  No, he was like, I don't like this. I feel very gross about it and good, you know, good for him. That's the correct answer to that. And Alex was like, this is cool. And he was like, no, it's not cool. It's bad. It's bad. It's weird.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  I can't hear my guitar anymore, there was shouting.

• 1:12:47Yasi Salek?

  They're screaming. It is really interesting though, because I mean, I don't want to get too ahead, but like, then we get to the next album. And the the next two albums and you're kind of like, oh, man, if either of these had come out, especially the fourth album, which is head music.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Yasi Salek?

  Some of those singles would have thrived in prime Britpop time, don't you agree?

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Yasi Salek?

  But they just didn't, they didn't do that till later. They kind of went that direction.

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, like Doug Mazzon was like, is it grown up? It's not really grown up, but it's just darker than the times, isn't it? And and coming up, which is the third album, coming up was just a whole load of bangers, one after the other. It's like, yeah, we've got a single, here's another single, have another single, here we go. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:13:31Yasi Salek?

  Five.

• 1:13:31Speaker 06

  And that's five, I think, yeah.

• 1:13:32Yasi Salek?

  It's just like.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  And also I think they're trying to, you know, we are getting ahead of ourselves, but they're trying to do, they're trying to show that they're still a band with two new people and they're reestablishing themselves, aren't they?

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

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• 1:14:33Yasi Salek?

  So they start writing the next album directly after this with Richard and they're writing more and more songs that rely on keyboards. I love this story. Suede is a hilarious band because they're like, hmm, we have all this keyboard parts. We should maybe get a keyboard player, guys. I don't know. And then randomly Simon's cousin Neil John Coeding comes around because he's graduated from Hull University and he's like, I need to borrow a suit for a job interview. And all the whole band is there and he's like, A, looks cool as hell. He's gorgeous. He picks up a guitar in the corner, starts playing it, then starts playing the piano. And Alan Fisher was like, hey, can you play anything else? And he's like, yeah, this thing, this thing, this thing. And Brett was like, Simon, we've been having meeting after meeting to say we need a new

• 1:15:17Yasi Salek?

  member and you don't mention your cousin plays like seven instruments. And Simon was like-

• 1:15:22Speaker 06

  And looks like that.

• 1:15:23Yasi Salek?

  And looks like that he's gor- And Simon was like, in the documentary, he goes, I literally didn't know he could play any instruments. He was just my cousin Neil from Hull. I had no idea.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  And also Hull is so, it's so unglamorous, honestly, Hull. It's like, like it's north, it's north, it's from, you know, I cannot tell you how unglamorous Hull is.

• 1:15:44Yasi Salek?

  Somehow Neil came out of there looking glam as hell, gorgeous and playing seven instruments. I just, again, the Forrest Gump-ness of this band, like God really wanted them to succeed. God was like, oh, Bernard's left. Don't worry, I brought you another Bernard. Here it is. His name's Richard Oakes. He's 17. Oh, you need a keyboard player? He's a, here's a gorgeous man who plays seven instruments who's Simon's cousin. And Brett, Brett said it was super exciting. He was like, it felt like we had a new band because we had a new guitar player and another new member in Neil and him and Neil got along really well. And he said, it felt like a little gang. It was really exciting. That was the spirit of coming up.

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. Didn't Richard feel a bit left out though?

• 1:16:23Yasi Salek?

  That's what kind of happened. So yes, you great point. Brett and Richard's like creative relationship kind of shifted then because he was sort of like hanging around with Neil a bunch.

• 1:16:35Speaker 06

  Brett just makes me laugh. He's like, I mean, he is, he's absolutely fantastic. I really love him. I think he's great. But God, he is really swayed by looks. Just like,

• 1:16:44Yasi Salek?

  he's like, oh my God, Richard, you're a good looking, but this, totally. But it bites him in the ass time and time again, because we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. That was nine ninety four, when Dogman Star comes out. So ninety five, it's not the best time for Suede. They're writing their music, but they're feeling, which I'm sorry, I keep reiterating this, they're feeling the cold shadow of the back turned on them for Britpop. Brett said, by the summer of nineteen ninety five, Suede was beginning to be seen as a spent force, at best, an anachronistic punchline or a cautionary tale, and at worst, an irrelevance. Somewhere probably in the offices of Loaded, or in a conference room in Millbank Tower, what goes on in Millbank Tower?

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  I think that's, that's the Labour Party. I think they mean Millbank Tower, I think. It's like you're talking about Alistair Campbell. You know what I mean? Like, a new Labour. I think it's that.

• 1:17:37Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. Because they were planning on, oh, yeah, they were tapping Britpop to help them get the votes. He said, a party was going on and we were definitely not invited. So.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he's completely right about that. Like, you know, Loaded did what Loaded did. And there's a lot to be, you know, you could do a new time program about Loaded, and it has been done. But the thing about Loaded and Oasis is in they kind of ushered in a very, very straightforwardly heterosexually gendered life. Do you know what I mean? And, you know, this, and Suede are not like that. They're like ambiguous sexual, like they're very sexy, but they're not a straightforward, straight lad sex.

• 1:18:22Yasi Salek?

  No, and Brett wasn't feeling good. He said, "I became prickly and irascible at the version of myself that was being projected by the press, that of a bitter, increasingly marginal figure who was never able to forgive the zeitgeist for drifting away from him." And that is the vibe we're bringing into 1996 when we're making the next album. Another vibe we're bringing into 96 is being fat. I'm sorry to say it, Brett got a little fat. He is not looking good. Okay, I'm sorry, it's just the truth. January of 1996, Brett is not looking good. He's gotten a little puffy and bloated. He looks a little, he looks, he looks bad. He's baggy eyes, he's a bit puffy.

• 1:19:06Speaker 06

  Well, he just looks a bit like boozy.

• 1:19:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's just a little worse for wear.

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  Which is unusual for him.

• 1:19:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  And a bit, and a bit kind of sweaty.

• 1:19:14Yasi Salek?

  He's on the cover of NME, the first one of January, and John Harris writes about him, "Brett isn't looking too great, to be honest. The gray bags under his eyes are hanging like large sacks of vegetables." He kind of alludes to the fact that there's whispers about Brett's drug use. It's a little bit of a gossipy piece. This is maybe sparked by something I did not mention yet, but that had happened just in December of 94 in ID, I think it was 94, I can't remember if it was 94 or 95, when Damon Albarn gave a little interview to ID, and he said, "I think Suede are digging their own grave at the moment, and there's a bit too much reverb in their lives, the wrong drugs. I think Blur seemed to be out on their own as far as not encouraging people to fuck up their lives with drugs.

• 1:19:59Yasi Salek?

  The reality of drugs is that they affect everyone in very different ways. There are a lot of people, myself included, who get really ill if they take Class A drugs. And heroin seems to be so bloody fashionable at the moment. I think heroin is shit, and I know for a fact that Brett is doing heroin, and he is a fucking idiot. From Damon to Brett, you're a twat for doing that. Get a life." Okay, you guys, I'm so sorry to be the reality check here and to be the narrator. But the truth in reality, actually Damon was doing drugs and not Brett was not doing the bad drugs. And I'm not saying that as Yasi Salek. This is what Justine Freshman said. She said Damon accused Brett of doing it when he was doing it and Brett wasn't. That was the ironic thing.

• 1:20:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. Also, have you listened to the lyrics of Beatle album?

• 1:20:43Yasi Salek?

  Come on, I'm saying, I'm like, so, but it was very strange for like, it's like such a weird move to be like, it was like such a diversion tactic to be like, drugs, disgusting. I would never do that like that guy. When it was like, really like, who could have done this, driving the hot dog car into the

• 1:20:59Speaker 06

  He did it before the Damon as well. There's a, there was a cover on the Q magazine. I remember it said, there's a blizzard, blizzard of cocaine in London and I hate it. And you're like,

• 1:21:09Yasi Salek?

  And I hate it. And you're like, you hate what about it? That they're not giving you enough of it? That you need more of it? That you're not directly skiing on top of it? Yeah, it was very, it's a very funny. So Brett did not like that. In that same enemy article where John Harris says he looks bad and he's probably on drugs, he's asked about the ID thing and Brett says, I'd say it was down to someone who's got a fucking big mouth and not much to say with it.

• 1:21:38Yasi Salek?

  And then he asks him straight up, are you a heroin user? And Brett goes, no, I'm not. People like are trying to kick us to bits, aren't they? That's the way it is. I know I'm a whipping boy for a gang of people who drink down the good mixer because I don't go there and I've got no interest in any of that. We don't fit in and because of that we get criticism.

• 1:21:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that's partly true as well. I mean, apart from the bit where he said he didn't take heroin.

• 1:22:02Yasi Salek?

  No, but he didn't. He doesn't start taking heroin until 1997. So in this article, he was telling the truth. He says it himself. He's like, I didn't start taking heroin until summer of 1997.

• 1:22:13Speaker 06

  It's so funny, isn't it? Yeah. And also like, there's a thing that happened. I don't know. That is, it, it happens in a more kind of drug adjacent that become druggie scenes. And, you know, I've seen, you know, like you See it in every kind of indie scene and probably, you know, in most kind of small scenes. There's a point where everyone's enjoying themselves on a certain kind of drug and then heroin comes in. Every time, like every time, somebody will bring heroin in and it will wreck certain people's lives. That's just how it goes.

• 1:22:43Yasi Salek?

  I don't want to sound like a namby pamby goody two shoes. And I have no fear of drugs as people have known dad put your earmuffs on. But I'm like, you guys, heroin, we've all, we've all seen the same films. We've all watched the same, it there's never, no one's ever like, thank God I did that. That was great. That's the best decision I ever made in my life. Never turns out that way. But yeah, people, generation after generation was, are like, yes, I'll do that. I'm like,

• 1:23:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Yasi Salek?

  Should you not just watch Trainspotting? And I think everyone in the, when they're 10 years old should have to sit down and watch Trainspotting and requiem for a dream and then come tell me, do you want to do heroin?

• 1:23:20Speaker 06

  It's also, and also that generation of musicians, because they're the same age as me, we used to have those adverts on the telly about heroin. About like, there was, I mean, unfortunately, there was also, there was also print adverts. So the people who were on heroin looked quite sexy.

• 1:23:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the adverts were like, do you want to do this? It's cool. He does it, it's cool.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  But yeah, yeah. I mean, it's always a point when it arrives and somebody, well, more than one person, a few people will get addicted. It's a fucking absolute nightmare. It's terrible.

• 1:23:50Yasi Salek?

  I love, I, it's also very funny because it's a real contrast, right? We're like Damon Albarn is just directly saying Brett's name and saying stuff. And to your point, which I think is super funny, Brett Anderson will never with a gun to his mouth, say Damon Albarn's name or Blur's name. And in NME in July of 95, he says, there were no industry whispers about him being on drugs. He said, what happened was some toss pot from another band

• 1:24:16Yasi Salek?

  got it into his head that he knew anything about my life and decided to comment on it. But it's true. I did look like a right fat ass.

• 1:24:25Yasi Salek?

  Can we get that cover deleted?

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  That's so brilliant. Well, what's really funny is I just looked for it and it's like not there. I think he's got it deleted from the internet.

• 1:24:35Yasi Salek?

  Savage, savage and best went to town on that one. But he did say something really interesting. I think it was another year later. These are all just to do with this. And he was like, I don't give a flying fuck about whether people use drugs or not, but I do give a fuck about people trying to assassinate my character. I don't give a fuck if anyone thinks I've got my head down a toilet with a needle up my ass, as long as I make good records.

• 1:24:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 1:24:57Yasi Salek?

  He doesn't care. Okay. They put out their first single of the next album, July of nineteen ninety six, post heroin, get over here. It's called Trash. I'm dying to get your take on this song because I wasn't there. I want to, I want to understand what. It sounds like this was a smash hit, this song.

• 1:25:14Speaker 06

  What I remember is that it was, and it was, it's funny because you don't think of Suede as a positive band, positive. They do eventually make a song called Positivity, which is not very good.

• 1:25:24Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely garbage. It should be deleted off the internet with that fat cover of.

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

  Oh, it's just terrible. But at this point, they're like a, like a part, positive version of Suede. So they're really like, it's like they've come back and they've got the kind of, the glam bit of the first album and the, and they haven't got the nuttiness of the second album, but maybe the, the kind of attitude of the second album. And they're just like, okay, we're here. We're really good at this. Do you want us to watch, do you want to watch us be really good at being swayed? We are great. And they've got like Neil, it's up the front. So like Richard, who's like a great guitarist, but not, um, he's not going to sell himself. I don't know. In the same way as Bernard didn't really, but he's not going to sell himself on his looks or anything. Neil's at the front on the keyboards, not really doing anything, just looking divine.

• 1:26:15Yasi Salek?

  My fair, that's literally what they were like. They were like, what does this man do? He just stands there the whole set and goes blink.

• 1:26:23Yasi Salek?

  Like every like two songs, he goes blink blink. And I'm like, why can't I have that role in a band? I could be cool in a band and go plink, plink every two songs. Hire me.

• 1:26:32Speaker 06

  He's like a supermodel. He's just like unbelievable.

• 1:26:35Yasi Salek?

  You guys need to look at some pictures. It's like, who looks like that? It's absolutely insane.

• 1:26:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, he looks amazing. And Brett is really amazing. And they just arrived. It's like a kind of. I don't know what it's like. It's like the colors have turned up or something or they've got sharper like or the lights on, you know, maybe they were always in the dark before. It's like the light is on them and they're like, okay, you are really good at this and you're going to show us you're really good at it. And they're completely great.

• 1:27:00Yasi Salek?

  I I couldn't agree more. I I feel like the first album is like they're still a little tentative, even though obviously they're very confident, but they're, you know, it's their first go. They don't, they've been trying for a while. It's great. It's amazing. Then you get to the second album where they're like really in the darkness of like the vibes are fucking atrocious. He's in a basement, Aleister Crowley, the fucking hymns, like it's a lot going on here. Insane girlfriend going to the hospital every five minutes. It's not good. And then Bernard finally leaves. You got these, Richard, who seems like a lovely little lad, like you said, from the country is just happy to be here. And Neil, who's just gorgeous and fun and wants to party. And then the whole mood is lighter.

• 1:27:40Yasi Salek?

  The whole mood is just vibier and and they trash, I guess, was like their, he called it their anthemic rallying call.

• 1:27:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the same thing. It's like you're, this is our tribe, you know, whoever they are, are they the pigs? Are they, you know, they're, they're like, there's always a swayed kind of, a tribe is the right word, I think.

• 1:28:03Yasi Salek?

  The swayed gang.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, gang. I was gonna say crew, but crew isn't right for swayed. It's like their tribe and they're calling on their tribe and they're saying, here we are, it's us again. You know, you were trash, we're from the gutter, but we're so glamorous, you can't believe us. Look, look at us. We're amazing.

• 1:28:18Yasi Salek?

  Joyous affirmation of being trash. We love it. We love it.

• 1:28:31Yasi Salek?

  It did really well. It, you know, enemy was like sweater back, babe. Everyone's happy. It would, it would have hit number one if fucking my king Robbie Williams hadn't decided to release his first solo single, his cover of George Michael's Freedom, and also my queens, the Spice Girls happened to put out wannabe that same week and no one's gonna, no one's Is gonna beat them to the number one spot. Sorry, that was an international phenomenon.

• 1:28:59Speaker 06

  I remember seeing that. I remember seeing it because we didn't have, you know, music telly was like really, you know, because that music telly and I was in a hotel because I was somewhere and I remember seeing, so every time you went to a hotel, you switched on MTV because it was so exciting because you've got MTV, this is really brilliant. And I saw wannabe and I thought, oh my God, that's just that you knew as soon as you saw it.

• 1:29:18Yasi Salek?

  Did you hate it? Were you kind of like?

• 1:29:20Speaker 06

  No, I liked it. I was like, what is that? It's gonna be massive.

• 1:29:29Yasi Salek?

  You guys just noted in your notes of chronology, the Spice Girls did come this week and put the first nail into the coffin of Britpop and no one knew that yet, but the first nail was wannabe for sure. Um, also arguably Robbie Williams as well in the same vein, coming back like we're, we're, yeah. But Sway comes in, everyone loves trash. It hits number three. We're doing great. There's a great interview around this time where Brett manages, I'm so sorry, it's, I don't mean to bring Damon Albarn into this all the time, but Brett did and he did. And I'm just a reporter. I'm just a journalist. I'm just here to tell you the news from 35 years ago. So

• 1:30:09Yasi Salek?

  they interview him. That's, that's my beat. My beat is important news of 35 years ago of, uh, musicians that no one talks about anymore.

• 1:30:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You're like, I love it. So Vox asks, would you like to be playing football stadiums? And Brett says, I wouldn't like to be playing football stadiums if what I was playing to the assembled masses was a load of my old man's a dustman crap.

• 1:30:41Speaker 06

  But it's like, because when you think of my old man's a dustman, there's a kind of dance that goes with that. And it's like, you've got your elbows out like this and you go, my old man's a dustman, he wears dustman's hat.

• 1:30:55Speaker 06

  And that is a kind of cockney knees up.

• 1:30:59Yasi Salek?

  I'm literally just thinking, I just pictured Newsies or something. I'm picturing a chimney sweep. I just like going down with it. I can't, I'm crying. Pretending that you come from the fucking East End when you're a member of the landed gentry. I find that obscene.

• 1:31:17Yasi Salek?

  And the guy from Vox goes, you're talking about Damon Albarn, of course.

• 1:31:23Yasi Salek?

  And Brett goes, I find it incredibly false. People throw the word false at us and we've never been false about anything we've done. I've never tried to come across as anything. I'm not. I find this whole inverted snobbery thing about music incredibly condescending to the working class. I thought that was so fucking good. Like, no one else really said that, that like Noel Gallagher to imply that working class people can only understand the most oversimplified

• 1:31:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Yasi Salek?

  thematics in a song is patronizing. It's saying that they're stupid.

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  I'm sorry. Also, look, you know, his, his favorite band, The Beatles, what are you talking about? Like, they stretched themselves so far. They did more than any other band. Like, in fucking under 10 years, what are you talking about, please?

• 1:32:13Yasi Salek?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  It's rubbish. But also, if you think about it, it's, it's interesting to me because the idea is that, you know, Blur is a complicated class band. They're mixed class. So like, you know, Alex is very straightforward, middle class. Damon is art school class, you know, which I suppose is middle, it is middle class, but it means that you end up with not very much money and you live in kind of working class areas. And Dave is working class and Graham is an army kid. So it's like, it's, it's, it's a real mix. They're a funny mix, but they, you know, they went to university and all that kind of stuff. But Pulp, working class, you know, like, but working class, Suede, working class, and Oasis, working

• 1:32:56Speaker 06

  class. Like, like, it's just that because Oasis offer an idea of what a lot of people think working class is, Oasis fits into that slot a lot easier for people, for, for certain people to understand. So they go, oh, this is what working class culture is like. They like football. Like, you know, that's what you kind of think.

• 1:33:13Yasi Salek?

  It's overly simplistic to, to say that you have, it's fine. It's great to represent the class that you're from or the background that you're from and do it faithfully and directly. That's one way to do it. And that's totally fine. You also don't have to. It's art, you know?

• 1:33:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Yasi Salek?

  Like, I understand the criticism of the Blur thing at the time, but also like, when you think about it as an art project, right? Like, you're like, it's an art project. Like, it would, the idea was to celebrate and look towards an aspect of British life that was maybe feeling overlooked or that, you know, and that's art. That's fine.

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:33:49Yasi Salek?

  I mean, did he have to, did he have to do the oi mista yumi mava accent in person and in interviews? Okay, you know what? Maybe he was doing a whole thing. Maybe it was a performance art project. I don't know.

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  Like, when he talks, he always just sounds like Damon, but when he sings, it was more, maybe. Do you know what I mean? It was more that, really. But I do agree that it's essentially, especially Blur, they changed every album. That was the kind of thing, wasn't it? They had an idea for every album and each album they

• 1:34:16Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  felt, they felt, they had this idea and they constructed the idea and they pushed the idea to its conclusion. And then they did something else the next album.

• 1:34:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:34:27Speaker 06

  Whereas I think, I think Suede had an idea and they just rev it up over and over and there's like, that's fine. I've got, I've got no problem with that. That's their thing. But they, they, they are never, other than Suede, Suede expanding in different directions, but they are always, they're doing the same groove over and over and they would, they would admit that, I think.

• 1:34:47Yasi Salek?

  Completely. And, and they're sort of fiercely autobiographical, even though it's veiled through a lot of metaphor and like,

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Yasi Salek?

  you know, but Brett is kind of constantly talking about himself, even if it is through the prism of other narrators. You know, like, it's always coming from kind of a really authentic place of his, like, feelings and interests. Other bands did different versions of that or didn't do that. Like, who knows what the fuck Noel Gallagher was talking about? Nobody. Nobody knows.

• 1:35:18Speaker 06

  You know what it's like? It's like Suede are like expressive art and Blur are like conceptual art. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:35:28Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, exactly. And Oasis is a secret third thing.

• 1:35:34Yasi Salek?

  Well, as Noel Gallagher famously said, I don't make art, I make music. And I thought that was like a really, uh, self-aware thing for him to say, you know? Speaking of, so in this interview, Brett continues, "I come from the background that these people are talking about." So he like, kind of is like, "I am..." And then they ask him directly, "Are you more comfortable with Oasis?" And he goes, "Yeah, they're just a bunch of blokes having a good time out of it. There's nothing wrong with what they do." "How do you rate Noel as a songwriter? I think some of the songs are good." I wonder which ones Brett Anderson liked. He's lying. Okay, so now Coming Up comes out, September 2nd, 1996.

• 1:36:13Yasi Salek?

  Once again, I don't remember where I saw this, and maybe I have it in my notes, but everything's a bit of a haze now. Brett basically said, "Every Suede album is like a pendulum swing. We go to one thing, and then the next album has to be totally different. So we go, we use the last album as a place to get away from, and that's how we get to the next album. And so this is what Coming Up is from. It's a departure from Dogman Star. That's the main impetus for it. Brett moves out of the fucking basement with the Mennonites and breaks up with a Nick.

• 1:36:51Yasi Salek?

  Starts going out with a nice girl named Sam Cunningham, moves into a flat that has windows and is not under the ground. He says, "When making records, it often feels that Suede here is caught in a cycle of opposition against itself. Sometimes it feels that there is a pendulum that swings between creative poles defining the nature of the next album by inverting the qualities of the last. We wanted the record to be everything that Dogman Star wasn't: punchy, direct, and bristling with hooks. Something that reflected the language of the street, not some distant, aloof, esoteric fantasy netherworld." He was like, "I'm done. Friendship ended with Aleister Crowley. My new best friend is direct lyrics from the street." What do you think of this record?

• 1:37:30Speaker 06

  Oh, I like this record. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, it's a really great record. I think the first three Suede albums are great. Like, I can pick things apart, you know, it's easy to pick things apart, especially in Dogman Star. But they're really, like, I would completely recommend them to everybody. It's a great album. That's like, he's, and he describes it, you know, he's so clever, Brett, man. He knows what he's doing. He completely describes it correctly. It's bang, it's just, it's full of bangers. You know, there's like, every track's a winner, you know, it's like a, it's like a party version of Suede. That sounds so wrong. There is no party version of Suede.

• 1:38:06Yasi Salek?

  Or it's always a party version of Suede. He doesn't say it, but like, let's be honest, let's be real. We pointed out from the beginning that Brett Anderson is an ambitious and competitive person. I'm just saying after Dog Band Star was, while critically beloved, kind of like turned away from by the zeitgeist. I'm just gonna say my man Brett Anderson was like, oh, really, bitch? You want fucking hits?

• 1:38:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:38:35Yasi Salek?

  You want smashes? You want charting hits? I'll give you five or whatever. And then this is where this album came from.

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  And the cover, the cover's Nick Knight, isn't it? It is Nick Knight, I think.

• 1:38:47Yasi Salek?

  It's not Nick Knight. It is the guy from Factory Records. Peter Saville.

• 1:38:55Speaker 06

  That Peter Saville's just the best, man.

• 1:38:57Yasi Salek?

  It's Peter Saville. He's in the documentary. They go to his house. They talk about how they came up with this image. It's, they did pull something out of a photo book and then they said, can you make it like this? Yeah.

• 1:39:10Speaker 06

  Peter Saville is amazing. He's like, he is, he's like swayed before swayed. He's so loose.

• 1:39:17Speaker 06

  He's loose, but man.

• 1:39:18Yasi Salek?

  That's what they say. That's what they say in the documentary. They're like, we would just go to his house and he would just like roll downstairs in a robe with his like hair all messy with some beautiful woman there being like, love, can you make me a coffee?

• 1:39:31Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:39:32Speaker 06

  He's amazing. I love him.

• 1:39:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's a great, it's a great cover. It's very like indie sleaze before indie sleaze almost. I'm sorry to use that word, but I'm just trying to use it. I don't even, I don't know what the real word for that time of music was that we all lived through and never called it indie sleaze. But you know what I'm talking about. It kind of has that like neon energy that would become very big in the early 2000s.

• 1:39:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's neon. It's like, it's neon, but it's still got that swayed.

• 1:40:02Yasi Salek?

  It's still like dirty and sexy. Yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 06

  That's the sleaze.

• 1:40:07Yasi Salek?

  It's it's someone, you know, lounging on a mattress on the floor with like another sort of figure.

• 1:40:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, and there's no, there's no cover on the mattress.

• 1:40:18Yasi Salek?

  No, which is, you know, we're doing drugs um on the mattress on the floor. But yeah, I mean, this album did, didn't this album have five top 10 singles? I would not making that up.

• 1:40:29Speaker 06

  I think it did. It's in my head. It's just absolutely full of like hits.

• 1:40:34Yasi Salek?

  It would hit number one. This this album was a fucking massive success. It sold more than the two albums before it combined.

• 1:40:42Speaker 06

  Wow, that's so mad, isn't it?

• 1:40:44Yasi Salek?

  I know, because, listen, it's a good album, but for me, I'm like, this doesn't really hold a candle to swag.

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  No, it's funny, because if you look at the, yeah, five singles.

• 1:40:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Lazy, Beautiful Ones, Trash, Film Star.

• 1:40:58Speaker 06

  Saturday Night.

• 1:41:00Yasi Salek?

  And.

• 1:41:00Speaker 06

  And maybe, yes, I don't know. Yeah, lazy, I don't like.

• 1:41:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 06

  Beautiful Ones.

• 1:41:05Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful Ones is a banger. I'm sorry. I love it. It's you can't deny Beautiful Ones. It was originally called Beautiful Scum. That's how he wrote it, but then he was like, hmm, let's make it a little bit more appealing. Okay, but here's something I wanted to ask you about this. I normally don't trust my own ear because I I'm not a musician and famously don't know much about the making of actual music. But while I was listening to this, and particularly Beautiful Ones, because it's a song I actually really like, I was like, there's something missing from it that I want from a swag song. And I don't know how to describe it. It's like a warmth that like isn't there. And then I read this thing that Brett said, and I was like, oh, this is what it is. So he says the only thing that he regrets on this album is that they used Verispeed vocals.

• 1:41:50Yasi Salek?

  He said, in the days before the digital wonders of Logic and Pro Tools, when everything was recorded on a two inch tape, the only way you could change the speed of a track was to slow the tape down or speed it up. And of course, that results in a subtle change in pitch. Basically, when they got to the mixing stage, the label was like, these songs need to be faster so that they can be like hit.

• 1:42:07Speaker 06

  So they just literally pitch it up a bit?

• 1:42:09Yasi Salek?

  They just pitched up. And I was like, damn, that's what it is. Like, it changes his voice. And I'm missing, and he said, he said it better than me. He said, there's a soul and grace in the songs that it betrays. And I was like, oh, I would have loved to hear them not that way, because I wonder if they're like more more swady almost.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also that means you have to see them live, isn't it? That's how you're gonna find a Suede noise. Because I think that, you know, it's interesting because we're talking, I mean, quite correctly, talking about their music. We talk about their albums, but I just wanna say how fucking good they are live. They are really, really, really good.

• 1:42:48Yasi Salek?

  I haven't gone to see them.

• 1:42:49Speaker 06

  They are so good, honestly, and they were good from the start.

• 1:42:51Yasi Salek?

  They barely played America.

• 1:42:53Speaker 06

  Nah.

• 1:42:54Yasi Salek?

  I didn't get to see them.

• 1:42:55Speaker 06

  They're really great. Like, he is amazing. They are hardcore. They're really, really good. Like, even when, you know, there's a point when, you know, so we, with Suede, you know, they, they exist for a point and then they go away and then they come back, right?

• 1:43:10Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:43:11Speaker 06

  And there was a point when they were at the not-quite-coming-back bit where I s- um, saw Brett. And he was at a little festival called Paul Elliott. It's a really small festival, it's not really a music festival. And he was there with his lovely wife and his kids. And Danny from Supergrass had formed a band, and Danny's a friend of theirs. And Danny paid in the band, and then Brett came on for the final song. And, oh my god, he came on and he wiped the flo- I cannot tell you. It was a tiny thing, nobody expected it. He wiped the floor, it was like a god had arrived. He was so good. And he just stepped on and he just sang. And it was just amazing. And then he just left. It was just, he's fantastic.

• 1:43:55Yasi Salek?

  But even just like, watching, obviously, the performances on video, which I've done a lot, but even watching interviews, even now, or like, whatever, in the last five or six years. You ca- I'm like blown away by how charismatic and like charming and glamorous and well spoken he is. Like, there's a, and this is no disrespect to Bernard, who is obviously a genius, but there's one, there's an interview between the two of them, maybe like ten-ish years ago? And they're talking about Dogman Star, and it's like Bernard is just so much less eloquent than him. He's just a little, it's just not, that's not his thing, right? He probably communicates way better through the guitar. But then Brett talks and you're like, this is nothing but respect for my president. You can be in charge of my life, you, whatever you want, actually Brett Anderson,

• 1:44:39Yasi Salek?

  you take it, take it away because you know what you're talking about.

• 1:44:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:43Yasi Salek?

  And, and is gorgeous and all the stuff. Yeah, I need, I need to see that.

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, thank God he is like who he is, like, thank God he, he did make it. Like, the world would have missed such a perfect pop star. He's so good at his job.

• 1:44:58Yasi Salek?

  I can watch that video of him smacking his ass with the fucking microphone at the Brit Awards just over and over again and just like can't stop. It's so good. Anyways, the veris speeding aside, these are obviously tunes. Okay, these are jams. It also probably sounds better, which Ed Buehler said for himself, which respect to him, because he himself didn't mix it. Someone else mixed it. Yeah, apparently it was not a very good mixer. We talked about trash. Film star, we're back to, this is a preoccupation again with fame and Hollywood, but not like it was on the last one, right? This is like more contemporary.

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it's, it's another glam stomp. I think it is a stompy one.

• 1:45:41Yasi Salek?

  Totally. They really get in their T-Rex back on this album.

• 1:45:44Speaker 06

  They really are. They've got their platform shoes on.

• 1:45:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Yasi Salek?

  Lazy, we said, is okay, but it was a single. It was inspired by Hangovers of the early days and Brett wrote it a long time ago. By the Sea is another earlier Brett song and those two kind of came from his own bag of old songs. She is okay. I didn't write any notes about it. We already talked about Beautiful Ones tune. Absolute tune.

• 1:46:20Yasi Salek?

  Star Crazy was written by Neil.

• 1:46:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is, these ones are quite interesting because you, I was looking at who wrote what. And so you suddenly see, oh, of course it's Anderson Codeling or Anderson Oakes or like, yeah. Oh, oh.

• 1:46:36Yasi Salek?

  No, he has new collaborators.

• 1:46:37Speaker 06

  For them.

• 1:46:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  I'm so happy. They're writing songs.

• 1:46:42Yasi Salek?

  It's a good, it's a good album. I like it. It doesn't, for me, it's not that sweetie for me, which maybe I, it's all retrospective. I wasn't living through it. So I don't know. How did, do you remember how it landed for you or for your community at this time?

• 1:47:01Speaker 06

  So what it felt like to me was it was a series of singles, right? So it's done, it does really well. I'm a singles girl, so that's fine. But I think you're, as I've got older, I'm more album-y, I think. But at the time, I really was like, you know, I did like albums. I was like, really about the singles. And I think now, I mean, maybe it was, it is to do with the fact that you said that they, that it's all pitched a little bit. It hasn't got the, they're all really good songs, but it hasn't got the atmosphere of Dogman Star or a Suede. And I don't know why that is, but it just hasn't. It hasn't got a kind of sense of a world, you know?

• 1:47:39Yasi Salek?

  I kind of agree. Yeah, I have to agree. Again, it's good.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  And like, it's really good. Don't get me wrong, but it's not a, you don't feel like you're entering into the portal. And once you're through the portal, you're in a Suede world and you can't get out.

• 1:47:50Yasi Salek?

  Totally. It's such a good way to put it. Like even Dogman Star with all its obvious flaws, like I'd rather live there.

• 1:47:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, because with Dogman Star, I mean, you, it's a bit like you're in a big rambly house in Highgate, isn't it? Like, and on a fucking, on what, on a mattress.

• 1:48:03Yasi Salek?

  I'm like, I'm like totally, I've never in my life been to Highgate or inside of a rambly house in Highgate. But I'm nodding along like, yeah, that's totally what it's like.

• 1:48:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, you would, you would fit in great.

• 1:48:15Yasi Salek?

  Thank, thank you. This album is nominated for another Mercury Prize, the 1997 one.

• 1:48:23Speaker 06

  Who wins that one?

• 1:48:24Yasi Salek?

  Okay, who should have won, if you ask me personally, is OK Computer by Radiohead? Cause that's.

• 1:48:30Speaker 06

  They've never won anything. They've never won a Brit.

• 1:48:32Yasi Salek?

  I feel like the British people secretly hate them.

• 1:48:35Speaker 06

  That's so weird. So weird.

• 1:48:36Yasi Salek?

  I got into a little chat with this with someone. They were like, when they came around, we thought they were corny enough and just public school boys. And then I was like.

• 1:48:43Speaker 06

  But they're Radiohead.

• 1:48:45Yasi Salek?

  They're literally incredible. Like, are you, anyways, yeah, they, Ronnie size and represent one.

• 1:48:52Yasi Salek?

  For new forms.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  It's okay, but it's the wrong one.

• 1:48:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a good one. Okay, okay, computes. Are you kidding? How we put fucking okay computer on and be like, these men were so ahead of their time. Also, famously, my favorite, I've said it so many times, I've probably already said it three times on this podcast. Everyone's like, get over this piece of information. I just love that Brett and Justine were so mean to Tom York for his stupid haircut that he went and made fun of Justine Fishman in Karma Police and her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill.

• 1:49:21Speaker 06

  So much.

• 1:49:22Yasi Salek?

  But if you do look up the pictures from the enemy awards, his hair looks insane. I think he had extensions. It's like a blonde, like eighties type.

• 1:49:29Speaker 06

  Somebody said it's like a haystack between two Hitlers.

• 1:49:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. It's so good.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

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• 1:50:12Yasi Salek?

  So, Swede are riding high again. It's selling. They've got hits. They're making money. It's 1997 now and Justine reaches back out to Brett and they reconnect because she had a nightmare about him where he died and she wasn't invited to the funeral. And she said, I woke up in tears and I just thought, oh my God, I haven't seen him in like four years and he lives around the corner. And I just called him up. Took me all day to get ahold of his number because we didn't really have any mates in common anymore. I went to Sam and we just had a real laugh straight away. It was all water under the bridge. All that shit that had gone on. And I met Sam, his girlfriend. I thought she was amazing. She was wicked. Really gone on with her and the three of us started hanging out.

• 1:50:53Speaker 06

  It's nice. They're all, it's interesting. They're all West London. So a lot of Britpop is kind of North London, really Camden and around there.

• 1:51:02Yasi Salek?

  That's where the good mixer is.

• 1:51:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. And Justine, you know, when she lives with Brett, she lives with him in Kensington, right? Which is West London. And when they split up, he kind of, although he does go to Highgate, he kind of comes back. West London is his place. And what's weird is when Damon and Justine split up, Damon is West London. So he and Jamie Hewlett share a flat in West London through which like half of London's young women just pass through.

• 1:51:32Yasi Salek?

  Pass through, sure, good for them.

• 1:51:33Speaker 06

  And that's kind of post Justine, obviously. But they are the West London contingent, like he's still West London, like, I mean, he lives in like Devon now, Damon, but he, his studio is still West London. It's quite interesting to me.

• 1:51:48Yasi Salek?

  I think Brett lives in the country now.

• 1:51:50Speaker 06

  He lives in the country, but he has a flat in West London.

• 1:51:52Yasi Salek?

  Wow. So I should have a flat in West London is what you're saying. That's where I need to live.

• 1:51:56Speaker 06

  Money.

• 1:51:58Yasi Salek?

  I'm working on it, Miranda. Okay, I'm working on it. It's not happening quickly and podcasting is not as lucrative as you might think. So they reconnect, which is great. And she's, you know, we talked about this in the Blur episode and we'll surely talk about in the last episode. Vibes are bad in Justine land. This great success of Elastica is pretty hard. She can talk to Brett about that. Damon's not around. He is touring a lot. They're sort of estranged. Also, again, this is absolutely a proven or fact driven thing. I'm just reporting some gossip. There's some drugs going on.

• 1:52:38Yasi Salek?

  Is all I'm saying. There's some implication via some associates of Suede and also maybe Simon Gilbert that perhaps Justine brought back with her not just friendship, but also a bit of heroin into the mix. I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm just telling you what I read in the books. Brett said, Justine had ambled back into my life. The years of estrangement and distance had muted the jagged raw edges of my feelings towards her. And I was able to welcome her back more as a long lost friend than an errant lover. And we began to know each other all over again, but in a different, more decorous way. I think our mutual success had shifted the dynamic between us and forced us to communicate as different people cast in different roles. The former tensions and memories and betrayals somehow seeming to happen to somebody else.

• 1:53:22Yasi Salek?

  She was in the lonely throes of a dying relationship and I felt I had personally evolved beyond the need to be sour or recriminating. And so we wandered around the sun kissed streets of Notting Hill together in the pulsing summer of nineteen ninety seven. I'm like babe, one year ago, you called Damon a toss pot in the press. I don't know how far you evolved past the bitter reclamation.

• 1:53:42Speaker 06

  Bollocks.

• 1:53:44Speaker 06

  Just happy, cause he's now wandering around with Justine in West London. Well, like they're splitting up. He's like, yeah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

• 1:53:51Yasi Salek?

  He's like, I got over it, cause I won.

• 1:53:53Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:53:54Yasi Salek?

  Anyway, so they're all hanging out. Whoever is doing what? Everyone's doing drugs. Again, I don't wanna speak for people. Brett has been very open about this. Brett is doing heroin. Brett is doing crack. Brett is on his real drug shit. This is when he finally is like, oh, it's dark. Things are dark. Matt said, it's difficult to tell when things become a problem. There's always been a load of drugs around Suede, not just the band, but all the people we're involved with. So it's hard to tell if a line had been crossed. Brett's a strong personality and I never really saw him as a person who would have a problem with drugs. I'm not moralistic about drugs. I wouldn't say this one's bad. This one's okay. More than anything, there started to be a whole load of people he was associating with who I just couldn't stand.

• 1:54:38Yasi Salek?

  They had nothing to do with the band, nothing to do with anything but drugs.

• 1:54:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:43Yasi Salek?

  This is a classic tale as old as time, right? Like you do enough bad drugs, you start to only have bad drug friends.

• 1:54:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's any drug. It's like alcohol, the same. It's like.

• 1:54:54Yasi Salek?

  It's on it. It is kinda the same.

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  Just get into a kind of addictive state of mind, then you just need to be around the same, the people who wanna do the same thing as you.

• 1:55:02Yasi Salek?

  Even just partying, right? Like, I don't know if you had this. Like, I remember so distinctly when I stopped partying to the clip and speed that I was accustomed to. And really like kinda cut it out for, I didn't get sober or anything, I'm not sober, but for a long time. And I was like, oh my God, I don't have any friends. Or like, I did, but like, it was like, all, I was like, I don't wanna hang out with those people. And then you kind of reconnect with maybe like real friends. Or you see, you thin out the herd and you kind of were like, oh wow, a lot of these people were just party friends. Those aren't real friends.

• 1:55:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And also like everyone's still, I mean, in the nineties, everyone was still quite young. So, but it's, you know, once the hardcore drugs come in. And hardcore drugs, I would say is basically heroin. And crack, you know, sure, like, I mean, obviously, some people have addictive personalities and it will happen earlier. But when those ones come in, even I, you know, e- even if you're not a naturally addictive personality, you will get addicted. They're, yeah, they're quite hardcore.

• 1:56:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, no one has like a strong enough backbone or whatever Matt was saying about Brett, like the heroin doesn't care. Crack doesn't care. Famously, the two drugs that are like, I'll get you bitch.

• 1:56:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:12Yasi Salek?

  So, yeah, the vibes are very bad. The people are bad and gross. Another issue is that Neil and Brett are very now interested in dance music and hip hop.

• 1:56:26Yasi Salek?

  And I know it's always, you're always like, oh no, don't do that. Let's not do that. But I get it. It's fucking nineteen ninety seven. You guys, cut them a break, okay?

• 1:56:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's also, I like dance music and hip hop, but if I was in Sweden, I would like keep that as a separate issue.

• 1:56:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you can like it, but there's no need for you to do that.

• 1:56:44Speaker 06

  There's other people that are doing that better.

• 1:56:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, poor Rich, Rich, Richard's over here being like, no, but don't we not do guitar rock music? I'm here to do guitar rock music. Brett was like, one night me and Justine did some E and she played me Tricky's Black Steel. I simply couldn't stop playing it. I love the dark groove and the voice, but most of all, I love the words. This might have been partly why they end up finally parting ways with their producer, Ed Buehler. And they tap Steve Osborne, who famously was partners with Paul Oakenfold. They did Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches, the Happy Mondays album. So, you know, previously we talked about Brett loving Happy Mondays very early on. And also now he's, you know, re-interested in dance music and Steve Osborne had produced this very seminal Mondays thing.

• 1:57:31Yasi Salek?

  And he was attached with Paul Oakenfold. So they tap him. And then another very extremely nineties thing happened, to my understanding, which is Brett says, while we were touring coming up in Asia, I started to read a lot of eastern philosophy and began to prac- I'm sorry, it's not funny. Began to practice meditation. There were no religious implications, only philosophical ones. The concept of ultimate. Enlightenment, Satori was very seductive. I'm just saying, who amongst us didn't buy some Tibetan prayer flags and some Nong Champa at the head shop in 1997? Who amongst us wasn't like Buddhism seems cool? Nam Myung Ho Renge Kyul, you know what I mean? Like.

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  You know, those little tiny symbols that you do with your fingers?

• 1:58:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes, totally. It's giving that, it's giving Nong Champa, it's giving head shop, it's giving didgeridoo, world music. This is all very 90's stuff and I totally get it. It's, it was, it was a phenomenon in the 90's. It could have gone much worse, but it's not that far outside of the lineage of like the Beatles being like, hey, have you met our guru? You know what I mean? Like, this is a, this is a tale as old as time. It's just like a different version of, I'm not gonna say colonialism, but you know what I'm saying? There's, there's something weird there and it's fine. We were all, we were all subjected to it.

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  Oh dude.

• 1:58:53Yasi Salek?

  So this is the, this is, this is the beautiful soup from which we start making the next album, head music, which doesn't, takes a while to make, doesn't come out till 1989.

• 1:59:02Speaker 06

  Boy, that's a, yeah, death.

• 1:59:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  99, oh man, it's all over.

• 1:59:08Yasi Salek?

  Well, we didn't talk about it, but Britpop officially dies, R.I.P. in 1997 when Noel Gallagher goes to 10 Downing in his stupid blazer and his dumb haircut. It's over for everybody, but Britpop is over, it's dead.

• 1:59:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:59:22Yasi Salek?

  And 99 is a strange year for sure.

• 1:59:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Yasi Salek?

  This album was a bit cursed, okay? Brett is a fucking junkie. Let's, yeah, let's call, let's call it what it is. Neil is very ill with a mysterious disease that turns out to be chronic fatigue syndrome and literally can't get out of bed to come to the studio. The vibes are horrible. Brett said, "I was getting fucked up, Neil was getting ill and Richard was losing the plot and feeling sidelined and drinking too much. The only people that were still together were Matt and Simon." This album is essentially made by Matt and Steve Osborne at the studio. Whereas Matt is like reading the newspaper, doing the crossword, while poor fucking Steve Osborne is trying to like piece together little bits of what they've recorded and looping

• 2:00:09Yasi Salek?

  them to make these songs.

• 2:00:12Speaker 06

  Don't you think it's interesting? Because it's also, I mean, this isn't really a factor. But if you think about thirteen.

• 2:00:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:21Speaker 06

  So that was made with William Orbit and that was done in a similar way. So like I, I personally really love thirteen, but like it's done in a way where they blur, make the record and they wander off and then he'll loop. It's, it's not done in a blur way.

• 2:00:35Yasi Salek?

  You know who doesn't love that record? William Orbit.

• 2:00:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Speaker 06

  But it's also the ability of dance music people to take stuff and turn and make it into a record, but they're do, it's like they're the musicians. Do you know what I mean?

• 2:00:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Like the band members are actually just the instruments that they're using to make the, yeah. I know I'm, I'm not selling it, but it turns out kinda good. Against all odds. It's like, it shouldn't, it should be horrible. It should be wall to wall terrible and it's actually somehow not. It was very interesting. Matt said that Steve Osborne said he'd seen it all with the Happy Mondays and he said to Matt, I don't mind him doing the brown. It was the crack that killed the Mondays.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, they've literally got a song called Crack and then you need Jack on it. Like, come on.

• 2:01:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:21Speaker 06

  That's enough.

• 2:01:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So Brett said something very funny. My biggest regret about head music is that my snowballing love affair with smack and crack restricted it from becoming a great album. The album, which started out with so much promise mutated into an unfocused shadow of itself as I spent more and more time sat in front of a crack pipe and less time with my eight track. This lack of respect for my work is something that will never happen again. Okay. I'm so sorry. Spoiler alert. It does happen again. And the next album is actually way worse. And it's, and you can't even blame drugs because you're sober, but it did happen. I'm sorry. It's true. This album is somehow better than the next one where you were sober. You just, I don't know what happened, but we don't have to, you know, he would agree.

• 2:02:00Speaker 06

  It's funny when you look at all the tracks though, because I just looked at the tracks and who wrote the tracks on this album and it's all just Brett. There's no, there's no Richard, not a track written by Richard.

• 2:02:12Yasi Salek?

  No, Richard was like, Richard was like, you wanna make dance music bitch? I don't know how to do that. I'm over here. I love, I have, I don't know what you, why did you hire me?

• 2:02:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. He's like, sing at home, I'll just read a book, shall I? And there's like a few that have done with Neil, but it's like, it's Brett's album and then Steve Osborne trying to make it into an album.

• 2:02:30Yasi Salek?

  You guys, electricity. This song fucking blows. I'm sorry. It's just, it's a, it's a bad song.

• 2:02:37Speaker 06

  It's rubbish. There's a lot of this album I really, really don't like.

• 2:02:41Yasi Salek?

  Me too, me too, me too. But there's a lot. Okay, in fairness, there's stuff I like. Sub warfare is also bad. Can't get enough egregiously bad. Like, like new heights of bad. I just, can I just read you the, the verse one and verse two? I feel real now, walking like a woman and talking like a stone age man. I feel real now, talking like Buddha. That's right, prayer flags, babe. Ching ching with the little. And doing it again, I get kicks, I rip it up, kick it up, take it like a teenage tough. I feel real now, talking like sugar and shaking that stuff.

• 2:03:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you thought that was bad, babe? Second verse, worse than the first. I feel schizo, ever so psycho, kicking at an old tin. Babe, what are you even talking? What are these words?

• 2:03:41Speaker 06

  You know what? There's a weirdly weird sense of it is that he's outdoors, right? We want sweet indoors.

• 2:03:49Yasi Salek?

  I want you in the, but like not with the crack pay and not listening to Tricky. You should never have listened to Tricky.

• 2:03:55Speaker 06

  No, because no one can do Tricky except Tricky. Are you mad?

• 2:03:59Yasi Salek?

  Then he was like, I love the lyrics of the Tricky Public Enemy song, so I went ahead and wrote this. I feel schizo, ever so psycho, kicking an old tin. What? He knows. Brett said in his second memoir, I think my biggest criticism for our work during this period would have to rest on my lyric writing. My unforgivable lack of focus to drift into selfishness had blunted my previously sharp powers of observation.

• 2:04:22Speaker 06

  He's very self-aware now.

• 2:04:25Yasi Salek?

  Everything Will Flow is a, is a really good song. I like it. I quite like it.

• 2:04:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's pretty much the only one I like. Maybe one more.

• 2:04:40Yasi Salek?

  You don't like "Down"? I love "Down".

• 2:04:42Speaker 06

  It's okay.

• 2:04:43Yasi Salek?

  The next one after that.

• 2:04:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's okay.

• 2:04:45Yasi Salek?

  It's so beautiful. I guess it's a little corny.

• 2:04:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, "Everything Will Flow" is good. I do really like that song. It's funny, because if you read the titles of these songs, they're a bit like if you and me sat down to write a piss-take of "Sway", do you know what I mean? Savoir faire?

• 2:05:05Yasi Salek?

  She's in fashion.

• 2:05:08Speaker 06

  She's in fashion. "Cracking the Union Jack" is the one.

• 2:05:13Speaker 06

  It's like, come on, man. This is just, it's like a joke version of "Sway".

• 2:05:18Yasi Salek?

  Respectfully, like, you shouldn't call a song "Can't Get Enough" when "Just Can't Get Enough" exists. That's number one. And you should not call a song "Everything Will Flow" when that Teenage Fanclub song that had already come, and it's so much better than this song. I'm so sorry, but it's, now people are just gonna be like, but I like the other "Everything Flows", or whatever the Teenage Fanclub song is exactly called. This is a bummer. The song "Head Music"? Titular? Absolutely no, thank you. Absolutely, please keep it. I do not want this. I do not want to hear Brett Anderson saying, "Give me head, give me head, give me head music" instead. I don't want that.

• 2:05:54Speaker 06

  No, no one does. We know you're sexy, and you're killing your sexiness. It's no good.

• 2:06:08Speaker 06

  Is it around this time when he bleaches his hair? Is it this album that he bleaches his hair? I think it is.

• 2:06:15Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. That's, that makes sense, but maybe.

• 2:06:18Speaker 06

  I think it is. He bleaches his hair because he's gone a bit dance.

• 2:06:24Yasi Salek?

  Unfortunately, when you Google Brett Anderson blonde hair, poor Tom York, all that comes up is that photo of the haystack between the two Hitler.

• 2:06:36Speaker 06

  He's losing his way, isn't he? He's losing his way here.

• 2:06:40Yasi Salek?

  I've been crackled do that, babe. Not that I know from personal experience, but I've just heard crack the hell of a drunk is what they say. Okay, I love he's gone. I love it.

• 2:06:50Speaker 06

  Okay, that, yeah, that one.

• 2:06:51Yasi Salek?

  I actually really love it.

• 2:06:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, that's good.

• 2:06:54Yasi Salek?

  I think it's shockingly beautiful.

• 2:07:04Yasi Salek?

  And Indian Strings is not bad either. That's, that's a bit of a guitar-y number. Elephant Man, babe. Neil wrote that one. Steve Osborne hated it so much. He was like, I won't produce this. I'm sorry. Take it somewhere else. I literally, this is trash. And Brett was like, no, it's good. We should do it. And they took it to another studio and did it and put on the album. And it's like, don't you think that if Steve Osborne is like, I won't do that, you should like take heed and be like, is wrong with it?

• 2:07:30Speaker 06

  Although, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's then also in this, it's still in assertiveness within Brett. So no, actually I do have taste and I can do this. It's just, he's so gone at this point, isn't it? It's such a weird thing because I think if you're functioning enough to be able to get up in the morning and go to, well, probably he's probably not getting up in the morning, but you know, to occasionally pass by the recording studio, then you think you're functioning. But of course you're just not. It's literally Steve Osborne trying to make an album and Matt doing the crossword and trying to encourage people. And Richard's just retired, doesn't he? I mean, it's like, man.

• 2:08:05Yasi Salek?

  It's in the, in the documentary, there's a great part where they're like, yeah, Brett would just like show up so fucked up on the keyboard and be like, you guys, isn't this amazing?

• 2:08:16Yasi Salek?

  With like play these sounds and Richard was like, um, I don't know what that is. And he'd be like, it's amazing. And it was just like, it was just madness. It was just crazy. And poor Matt and poor Steve Osborne, who's probably like, just like William Warburton after that Blur album, who was like, I will never work with those people again. That's was one of the worst experiences of my life. Yeah, I'm so done. This still hits number one on the UK album charts. And I, I, I think they're just riding high, right, from the last album.

• 2:08:49Speaker 06

  It's not even that. It's like, it's really funny because I think obviously when you're in your life, you don't really think about it now. Now, I can say, all the good stuff ended in nineteen ninety seven. Do you know what I mean? Like, but when you're living your life.

• 2:09:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you don't see it that way.

• 2:09:06Speaker 06

  It's not like that. You're just living your life and it's still, you still have a sense that British indie music is important. Still, it's like, it's still, there's still a sense that there was some kind of small revolution that had been ushered in by a lot of younger people. And that they had won in some way because New Labour had got in and people, people knew everybody was and the telly got better and the music got better and the fashion got better and everything got better. And the bars got better and the drugs got better and everything got good. And there's still a kind of sense of that still going on, but actually now, you know, now I'm out of it. I can look at it and go. Oh, actually by kind of nineteen ninety nine, a lot of people were going to kind of places like the Met Bar, which is really naff.

• 2:09:51Speaker 06

  And it's really, really coki and really druggie and it's not as free and as fun as it was, but you don't know that at the time. You're still going out and having a nice time, you know? You don't know any of this thing. And there's still an idea that British indie music is really great. It's still a thing.

• 2:10:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:07Speaker 06

  You know?

• 2:10:08Yasi Salek?

  But it wasn't.

• 2:10:10Speaker 06

  No, it kind of changed. Really, it really had changed, you know, like.

• 2:10:13Yasi Salek?

  Well, thirteen came out in nineteen ninety nine. That's a great album.

• 2:10:16Speaker 06

  I love that album, man. I just love that album so much. And like, you know, there's still other things like, you know, I can see why Brett might get seduced by dance music because, you know. You could never make the prodigy, but like, you know, the prodigy were brilliant and they were like in every festival you ever went to, prodigy were there and they were absolutely amazing.

• 2:10:35Yasi Salek?

  And hit number one in America. Also Fatboy Slim had come out.

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  Exactly. And the Chemical Brothers were always amazing. So like, you know, there was a lot going on that was. That was exciting and interesting. I mean, it's almost like too much, too many distractions. You know, when Suede started, everything was rubbish. So like they started and there's no distractions. And now it's like, oh, that's good. And that's good. And this is good. You know, you're a bit all over the shop.

• 2:10:57Yasi Salek?

  I don't totally doubt they could have done a good version of this. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think they could have done, I mean, blurted, you know, like.

• 2:11:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Yasi Salek?

  But he was too fucked up. You have to come, you have to come to work to make the good version. You can't just be like, be like, bleep, bloop, bloop, bloop.

• 2:11:14Yasi Salek?

  Isn't this brilliant? And everyone's like, no, babe. First of all, it's four in the morning. I'm tired. I don't know what you're talking about. We need to go. Well, nineteen ninety nine. It's also, everything's changed. Spice Girls have come out. Backstreet Boys have come out. I mean, in a boy's own Westlife, we have like all sorts of Britney Spears.

• 2:11:36Speaker 06

  Actually, she stopped Blur from getting to number one.

• 2:11:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's baby one more time. So also Backstreet Boys Millennium.

• 2:11:44Speaker 06

  And when did Eminem come along?

• 2:11:46Yasi Salek?

  Also this year.

• 2:11:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Yasi Salek?

  Slim Shady LP. Yeah. So everything has really changed. Also, in America, things are kind of turning towards, um, new metal.

• 2:11:56Speaker 06

  Wow. That's not, that's not my genre.

• 2:11:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, in the mainstream, it's Limp Bizkit. And then in indie, it's like Wilco, right? Like, it's going in this sort of other direction. It's just, it's a different world. And also, She's in Fashion is somehow a huge song. Like, it's a huge radio hit for them and they're, I guess, very known for it. I, I didn't.

• 2:12:16Speaker 06

  It's not one of the best ones. Yeah, I agree.

• 2:12:19Yasi Salek?

  I wanted people to be like, this is bad. But the reviews are like, largely the sentiment is, this is weird. It shouldn't work and yet we like it.

• 2:12:28Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 2:12:29Yasi Salek?

  Which, yeah, like, NME gave it seven out of ten. Ted Kessler wrote it.

• 2:12:33Speaker 06

  Ted knows your stuff.

• 2:12:34Yasi Salek?

  It's, okay, tell me if I'm wrong, since you were part of this. To me, it seems like the critics really reward. People for trying to do something, even if it doesn't work, kind of how even on Dogman Star, that's kind of what they were saying, like, we're just so glad they did this, even if it wasn't ultimately perfectly successful. And it almost sounds like that's what they're saying in these various reviews of head music.

• 2:13:00Speaker 06

  Suede is still very loved, like, they're great to interview. You know, when, if you're a music reviewer, personally, I think it's important to take every piece of art on its own terms. So don't like, you know,

• 2:13:12Yasi Salek?

  It's impossible, but yeah.

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  And they don't say, but don't say like of an Oasis album, don't say, come on, you know, where's the, where is the pretentious lyrics? And why is there not a dance remix? Do you know what I mean? It's like, that's, take, take it as it is. So with Suede, if you're, if they're aware, look, this is Suede trying something new, then they're going to take it as it is and think, is it, is it good or not? Like, I don't, I don't like it, but it's because I want Suede to do what I want Suede to do. But they like,

• 2:13:40Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:41Speaker 06

  Ted Kessel's got good taste. He definitely knows what he's writing about. And Brett is still really liked. And it's not, I suppose it's not, especially compared with what is to come. It's not a pig of an album.

• 2:13:55Yasi Salek?

  I think there's, I think there's like three to four good songs on here. Like,

• 2:13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Yasi Salek?

  I really think Everything Will Flow is a great song. I think Down is beautiful. It might be a little rote, but it's beautiful. I think Indian Strings is lovely and He's Gone I really love. So it's like, you still have four high points.

• 2:14:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I bet also, you know, I didn't see them around that time, but if they were playing them and they played them in the, in a Suede way, you know, like it just, it's difficult, isn't it? Because I can't, I just associate Suede with always being so good live. That if they, I mean, I might not have seen them when they weren't good, you know, if, if Brett was in as much of a mess as he is, he really might not have been very good live. But I've literally never seen a bad Suede gig. So I don't know. Do you know what I mean? Like, maybe they're still carrying it off on stage as well. And they are really liked still.

• 2:14:43Yasi Salek?

  I read a lot of the live reviews this time and they were not negative.

• 2:14:46Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 2:14:47Yasi Salek?

  I didn't write them down, but there was no like, oh my God, what a shambling mess. Like, it sounds like they still. Always kind of brought it.

• 2:14:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So he's still got it together enough to perform.

• 2:14:58Yasi Salek?

  Q Magazine gave it four stars. They said, like T-Rex and Roxy Music before them, Swayed, it would appear, are becoming the living embodiment of that most profitable of rock maxims. Don't mess with a winning formula. But then it's like against all odds, it's a gamble that pays off. So there'd be like, don't change, but also it worked.

• 2:15:18Speaker 06

  Who wrote that one?

• 2:15:19Yasi Salek?

  That one is Tom Doyle.

• 2:15:21Speaker 06

  Okay, so Tom also great. I worked with Tom on Smash It. See, I mean, you know, all these people know what they're talking about.

• 2:15:26Yasi Salek?

  Entertainment Weekly gave it a C minus. We are, Swayed did not break in America and certainly not with Head Music.

• 2:15:31Speaker 06

  No. It's a funny stage, isn't it? Oh, my God. Nineteen ninety-nine is such a weird stage.

• 2:15:37Yasi Salek?

  Famously for me, the two thousands are just the ugliest and worst time. That's how I feel. I feel we got into some real bad territory with fashion, with music. Not a hundred percent, but a lot of it. I'm like, let's not look back there. Let's pretend it never happened. And this, the seeds were sown in nineteen ninety-nine. Brett gets clean after Head Music, yeah. Nude Records kind of stops existing, but Sony signs Swayed, because that was the parent company anyways, for the fifth album. Between the release of Head Music and A New Morning, we're well past the Imperial phase now, you guys, so we're gonna sort of go through this and wrap it, wrap it up.

• 2:16:22Yasi Salek?

  They do one song called Simon. It was the title theme for a film called Far From China. This is a pretty good song.

• 2:16:37Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. This has completely passed me by. Like, Simon, Far From China, what?

• 2:16:43Yasi Salek?

  Brett calls it the last good song they'll write for a while, and he is right. At some point, Neil comes to Brett and says, I have to leave the band. I can't get out of bed and this is too hard. This is a huge blow to Brett. We talked about it already, but the theme of Brett's life being people leaving.

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  Also interesting, it's definitely, it's a real thing. Like what Neil has is a real thing, right? That is a real physical ailment. It happens. But it's not the same at all. But I remember my family get migraines and my son had a series of migraines. He literally had migraines every day, right? Every day. It was terrible, right? He had terrible migraines, terrible migraines, terrible migraines. It was awful. And not at the weekends. And they were real and they were happening. And then lockdown happened and he never had them again. And why did he have them? Because he hated school.

• 2:17:32Yasi Salek?

  Hated school? No, totally. This is a great, this is a great comparison.

• 2:17:37Speaker 06

  It's the same thing with Neil. Like Neil obviously loves the band. He's brilliant at the band. He knows what he's doing. He's absolutely amazing. But Brett has a terrible drug habit. It's not, it's not doing what it wants to do. And it manifests itself in this terrible illness. And it's a real thing that's really happened, but it's from the, like you not being able to exist in a way that you need to exist in your world.

• 2:17:58Yasi Salek?

  Babe, the body does be keeping the score.

• 2:18:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, always, always, always.

• 2:18:05Yasi Salek?

  And.

• 2:18:06Speaker 06

  Especially that skinny body.

• 2:18:08Yasi Salek?

  That skinny little beautiful man could not handle it. Also, he would say, he'd be like, I would, I would come home from tour and I should rest. But no, I would be sick and I would go out again and do a bunch of drugs and just keep going out and not eat. And it's like, no one was going to be healthy on that. And so he makes the right decision to take care of himself. And Brett said in two thousand and two, he couldn't help it. I know, but I did feel aggrieved. I felt let down, but more at the universe than at Neil. And in his book, he said, with both Bernard and Neil's departure, what I felt beyond the gnawing feeling of abandonment was the sad loss of a friend. What Neil probably saw as I let him out of my house and gruffly said goodbye was a downcast, vaguely embittered man trying to bluff his way through the situation with a veneer of practicality.

• 2:18:50Yasi Salek?

  In reality, my world was reeling and I knew that at some level the band had been dealt a blow from which it might never recover.

• 2:18:56Speaker 06

  But also, can we just say?

• 2:19:01Speaker 06

  It's not entirely Brett's fault, but it's a bit of Brett's fault.

• 2:19:05Yasi Salek?

  It's a bit of Brett's.

• 2:19:07Speaker 06

  And he knows that. He's not, this man is not an idiot. He is a very, very clever person. Who knows that it's like, it's, you know, Bern, maybe Bernard had to leave, but like, you know, this, there's definitely regret in Brett. If you talk to him about Bernard, that maybe he could, there's something could have happened to keep him there. You know, what is it? We don't know what it is. Is it Brett's personality? But you need somebody like Brett in a band. Like, no bands exist unless you've got somebody who is making them exist, who's dragging them along. He's saying, this is the band and this is what we do and we are really brilliant. And it's not always, it's not always the lead singer, but it's very often the lead singer.

• 2:19:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I, I sometimes it's not, sometimes it's like a, it's a bassist or something, or it's the drummer. In Metallica, it's Lars Ulrich, you know?

• 2:19:50Speaker 06

  Exactly. In Oasis, it's no, like, you know, you need someone that, but someone absolutely believes in, and that person is Brett. And that means that he drags people along and they might not want to be dragged in that way. The, whatever way he's got in his head, in his, at that time, you know, it's very tough to keep up with.

• 2:20:10Yasi Salek?

  And, you know, we said it, but like, this is probably creating some sort of neuroses around abandonment issues. Well, they replaced Neil with Alex Lee, who is a guy from a band called Strange Love, which I've never heard of.

• 2:20:22Speaker 06

  Have you not? They were just like around.

• 2:20:25Yasi Salek?

  They certainly weren't around in America.

• 2:20:28Yasi Salek?

  I'll tell you that much. And then they're like, let's make our next album. And they set about on the long and daunting and ultimately not very fruitful process and result of making A New Morning. Which doesn't come out till 2002 because they go through seven different recording studios, four producers, two years, and it costs one million pounds. They made an entire album with a guy called Tony Hoffer, which the one was fully scrapped. Then they tried John Leckie, famously of Stone Roses production fame, who was great, but he had other commitments and couldn't finish it. So then they ended up with Steven Street, who had most famously worked with The Smiths, but had also worked with Blur and all these, yeah, all these other people.

• 2:21:11Speaker 06

  A real sign that they're not with Nude anymore. Because Nude, like, you know, they had Saw there and like Saw's so important to that band. And also Nude, although Nude did go bust, like the way that indie labels were run at the time, they they they kind of plugged into the major labels to get them their electricity, which was money, but it was a finite amount of money. Whereas like Sony is Sony, Sony has a lot of money. And so there's nobody there with any taste or nobody there with any taste that fits with Suede. There's nobody there saying, this is you, this is your band, write a single here, do this, or I really believe in this, this is great.

• 2:21:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:21:45Speaker 06

  No guide and it's just a lot of money. It's a disaster.

• 2:21:48Yasi Salek?

  And and they have a lot of goodwill because they've had two number one albums in a row. So Sony is gonna be like, sure, here's a million pounds. And what did they get for that?

• 2:22:00Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 2:22:02Yasi Salek?

  Garbage, yeah, babe. Absolute garbage trash. I'm so sorry. And I I wouldn't actually, I'm usually not this negative about albums, except that Brett Anderson himself absolutely disowns this album, which is never existed, says they should never have made it. And if he says it, I can say it.

• 2:22:18Speaker 06

  And he's right.

• 2:22:19Yasi Salek?

  With head music, I respect the attempt to do something different. I think it's really cool. I think the ideas were good. I think there are, like I said, four good songs. I think the execution was faulty and everyone could say chalk that up to maybe people were un-present because they were smoking crack. But here, I'm like, what happened here, honey? Like, what?

• 2:22:41Speaker 06

  And also it comes out really late, doesn't it? Like, it comes out in the two thousands, right?

• 2:22:45Yasi Salek?

  Years, two thousand two, which by this time, Britpop is so cold and dead in the grave. No one's even really checking for Suede, I'm assuming. I don't know, you tell me. In America, no one had ever checked for Suede because we didn't really get into that world, but in the UK in two thousand two, were people like, what's Suede up to?

• 2:23:04Speaker 06

  Absolutely not. I mean, when when did the Strokes come along? Two thousand and one? That's what it feels like to me.

• 2:23:10Yasi Salek?

  I think so. Yeah, I think so.

• 2:23:12Speaker 06

  Because that that to me, when they came along, I was like, okay, like, it's done.

• 2:23:16Yasi Salek?

  That's where like last night and yeah, it was like. The tide turned fully back to America. Like it was like now, now we're doing this, like the yeah, yeah, yeahs, the Strokes, LCD, all this stuff.

• 2:23:30Speaker 06

  And like when they came to town, the Strokes, what I remember about it, so it was like a crew that would be around like Primrose Hill, you know, all the stuff that people used to like, you know, they used to hang out with Oasis and hang out with you. They would be with all the good new bands and they were absolutely with the Strokes. Like everyone just went like that. Who are these five absolutely, well, maybe not one, but absolutely gorgeous men who have turned up, look absolutely brilliant, play amazingly. I mean, they just, that was it. It was done. It really was done.

• 2:24:07Yasi Salek?

  I mean, rock music is completely undertaking a different thing. Like the Strokes are kind of occupying that cool space that Britpop did. The Flaming Lips are also sort of doing, and Wilco, they're in their prime. I mean, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comes out in 2002, which is a very American indie music, but like Interpol, Turn On The Bright Lights is 2002. Yeah, in America anyways for that. And then in mainstream rock, I mean, Red Hot Chili Peppers put out By The Way, which I know it's a very un-British thing, but By The Way was a massive album.

• 2:24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:39Yasi Salek?

  And Nickelback.

• 2:24:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, these just don't really matter.

• 2:24:43Yasi Salek?

  And this is how you remind me of what... Well, you guys, you guys had Coldplay.

• 2:24:50Speaker 06

  We had Coldplay. I don't mind a bit of Coldplay.

• 2:24:53Yasi Salek?

  But I like, listen, a little yellow, babe. I'll put it on. Okay, I love it.

• 2:24:56Speaker 06

  But we, I would say that The Strokes was really important and actually weirdly Eminem was really important, you know?

• 2:25:02Yasi Salek?

  And what about the Streets? I was gonna say, the Streets is sort of bringing in this new, cool, right? Like Dizzy Rascal comes a bit, a bit...

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  He's like another generation.

• 2:25:13Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So it's like what the young people are in. I mean, and Swayed's not young anymore, right? They're firmly in their 30s now. Okay, positivity? Absolutely not, babe. Absolutely.

• 2:25:25Speaker 06

  It's terrible.

• 2:25:26Yasi Salek?

  I don't even have anything. There's not even a worth it for me to say anything here because this album is just start to finish bad.

• 2:25:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It's amazing that it's the same band. I can't believe it's the same band.

• 2:25:37Yasi Salek?

  It's not even bad in the way that head music's bad points are bad, which at least they're bad in a way that like inspires you to be like angry or upset or something where I'm like, ugh, head music? Give me like, these are just so banal. Like, it's like background wallpaper music. It's just, who cares?

• 2:25:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. It doesn't work. The production doesn't work. The songs are rubbish. There's a song called positivity. This is Suede. Come on.

• 2:26:08Yasi Salek?

  He wrote the lyrics Alone, Somewhere in the Country, The Morning is for You, The Air. You know what's giving? And thank God we have it. It's giving freshly sober person.

• 2:26:18Speaker 06

  It is. It's giving sobriety. We love, I love sobriety.

• 2:26:21Yasi Salek?

  We love it. We love it, babe. Your side of the street is clean. You, you are, you have accepted into your heart that you're powerless.

• 2:26:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:29Yasi Salek?

  But it did not make a good piece of art.

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  No, it doesn't. We're very happy that your life has been saved and I'm very happy that you still exist. Sobriety has saved so many people of that era. I'm really happy about it. But yeah, it's not the songs.

• 2:26:43Yasi Salek?

  You're not gonna like this, but a great sobriety album is Californication by The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

• 2:26:49Speaker 06

  That's funny.

• 2:26:49Yasi Salek?

  That's right. It's a great, it's a great sobriety album. All right. Well, we don't have to talk too much more about this album. And then shocked, shockingly to no one, one year later, Suede is like, we're done now. We're not gonna do this. October 28th, 2003. The way we know the exact day is that they went on Graham Norton to play Beautiful Ones. And they were interviewed by Jeremy Allen right before that. And then he saw them again six weeks later at their last show in London. And Matt Osman came up to him after and was like, yeah, you know, um, right after we did your interview. A minute later, Brett Anderson whispered into my ear, let's not do this anymore. So.

• 2:27:33Speaker 06

  Quite cool though.

• 2:27:35Yasi Salek?

  So cool. It's so cool to know the jig is up, babe. We should not do, it doesn't feel good. We didn't make a good album. We know that, like, there's no need to beat a dead horse.

• 2:27:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it's not, you know, it's not like when Bernard left. Nobody's called anyone a cunt.

• 2:27:54Yasi Salek?

  No, no, no. They don't break up, right? They just sort of are like.

• 2:27:58Speaker 06

  No, it's just like, let's not do it. We don't want to do it anymore. We're not enjoying this.

• 2:28:03Yasi Salek?

  We're not enjoying this. This is something I wanted to ask you about because I couldn't totally get to the bottom of it through my research. At some point, very soon after this, though, Brett and Bernard reconnect, right? And they make a band together.

• 2:28:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're called The Tears, right?

• 2:28:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. So you know what's funny about that? I mean, that, you know, that's great. I was, I was a little bit thinking about it because there's definitely part, there's a big regret still part. Uh, I think even now he would talk about it, that Brett was, he's, he's still very sad that Bernard left. That there's, there's a feeling a bit like that they could have done something, that Suede have done something else. And it's not like he doesn't respect the Suede that exists now, but it's a bit like a dream that died. And what's funny is when they get back together again, because everything has moved on, like people are quite happy for them, but it doesn't really, you know, people quite like it. I think almost like if they'd done it, if they'd made that kind of concept and that idea, 10 years later,

• 2:29:02Speaker 06

  people would have been like, oh my God, this is the best. We need to go to Wembley to see it, you know, but.

• 2:29:07Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:29:07Speaker 06

  It was a bit too close to the end of Suede. So people would be like, oh, that's nice. They made friends.

• 2:29:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was not even a year later. And it was a different band, you know? Like you're saying, like if it was 10 years later and Bernard returned and they're like, it's the 20 year anniversary. Dogman star and we're reunited to play Coachella. Ah, but that wasn't, they were not craving opportunists like that. They were just going with their hearts and souls.

• 2:29:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's nice that they.

• 2:29:32Yasi Salek?

  It's so great.

• 2:29:33Speaker 06

  You know, there isn't the bad blood anymore, you know, does it mean, the one thing that we can say for Brett is that the breakups that which are so important within and that make this band, which is Justine and Bernard and all that, like he's now friends with them. Like, he still doesn't ever, ever mention Damon Albarn's name.

• 2:29:53Yasi Salek?

  It's good to have one mortal enemy, I think. Yeah, it's, I think it's, it's healthy to keep you going in life. I don't have one. I used to have one and it was a lady at the gym who would always take the stair climber I wanted and she would never get off and she would like just sit there and chew gum. She had this packet of like chicklet gums that she, and I, she didn't know she was my mortal enemy. I don't think I ever spoke to her, but I really hated her.

• 2:30:14Speaker 06

  Your gym nemesis.

• 2:30:15Yasi Salek?

  She was my gym nemesis, exactly. I need to fight a new enemy.

• 2:30:19Speaker 06

  You can get one, come on.

• 2:30:20Yasi Salek?

  They get back together, I don't know how, I mean, you know, sobriety, I don't know if Brett worked the program, it's none of my business, but sobriety usually involves some making of amends and some taking accountability. So maybe that has something to do with it.

• 2:30:32Speaker 06

  I would say he is not 12 steps over. My instinct would be.

• 2:30:38Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't, it's not giving. He's not giving that that's his thing. I loved that though, in the official statement around the end of Suede, Brett said something that kind of echoed what he had said in an interview around the first album, I guess. When he said, there has been speculation about record sales and chart positions, but the bottom line is I need to do whatever it takes to get my demon back. And remember he says that like the main inspiration was his demon? It's very hard to, to get your demon back when you're sober, but it's not impossible because your demon has nothing to do with drug and alcohol use. Your demon has something psychological that will always, you always have a shadow. So where people have shadows, everyone has a shadow. The shadow might just make you do drugs.

• 2:31:21Yasi Salek?

  To not contend with it, but it doesn't go away.

• 2:31:24Speaker 06

  That is true.

• 2:31:25Yasi Salek?

  Well, they get back together, surprise, surprise, two thousand ten. They play their first show in seven years at the Royal Albert Hall.

• 2:31:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:31:33Yasi Salek?

  Two thousand ten Teenage Cancer Trust, were you there?

• 2:31:35Speaker 06

  No, I was not, but they, so the Teenage Cancer Trust is quite interesting because it's every year now and they bring, you know, it's all for charity, but it's become a kind of institution and people get together and they do unusual combinations of things and people agree for it's quite a big deal. And it's a Royal Albert Hall and Royal Albert Hall is a really great venue. It's, it's like, it's round, everyone's on top of it, on top of you, the music, the sound is really great. There's a kind of prestige to it. It's not like a grubby indie vibe, you know? It's like, you know, people go there to, to, to hear classical music and stuff like that, you know, so it's got a kind of weight.

• 2:32:15Yasi Salek?

  I mean, they obviously had firmly had a place in the canon of British music that had a deep respect.

• 2:32:25Speaker 06

  Definitely, people, there's certain people that still really love them. And it's interesting, like, so like when I worked for Select, so I worked when my friend Andrew Harrison was the editor, right? Now, Andrew is, his natural favorite kind of music would be dance music, right? Like Orbital, right? He loves Orbital and like, you know, he, he really likes dance music. He loves a prodigy. He, he does like indie music, don't get me wrong. He loves, but he worshiped Suede. I cannot tell you, he just worshiped Suede. He doesn't look like a Suede person. He looks like an ordinary bloke who supports Liverpool and likes dance music, right? You know, he's not glamorous. He's not like dark in that way. He's literally never taken a drug in his life.

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  He worshiped Suede. He thinks Suede is absolutely amazing. He thinks they're brilliant. And he was so, like out of anyone I know, he was so excited that they came back. He was like, this is just amazing. I can't believe it. They are loved.

• 2:33:21Yasi Salek?

  They're really loved. And I will say, I listened to the, they've made several albums since their reunion, um, starting around, I think twenty thirteen was. Blood Sports. Blood Sports is pretty good.

• 2:33:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:33:34Yasi Salek?

  You know, I mean, it's it's not it's not Suede one, you know, of course, and it's never going to be, but it's still, it's not embarrassing.

• 2:33:40Speaker 06

  No, not at all. It's like, that's what I think is really good about them is they're like, it's like, you know, Suede has written two books that are kind of memoir. They're great. And also they're kind of interesting because they're not like, he, he, like, if you describe it, it sounds all wrong. He writes, he writes in a really flowery way. He's like, he doesn't really write speech. He just, it's all description. He never uses one adjective when he can use three, you know, like, it's incredibly kind of flowery language. They're brilliant. They're really, really good. They're really good pieces of work. And that's what I feel like about Suede have come back. And they know what they're good at, and they still make really interesting and good pieces of work, you know?

• 2:34:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we're not gonna go detailed into the other albums because I think the Suede story is what we've talked about. Yeah. And then the other albums, I think you should visit them. They're great. I just wanted to say, like, I feel that Suede, at least in America, is definitely underrepresented in that canon of nineties British music. But like, to your point, the people that love them, who would like lay down in traffic for them do exist here. And I kind of feel like going through the story, are they mostly talking about the first two albums? I would have to say yes.

• 2:34:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think they, you know, it's funny, it's funny to me, yes, because I think you like are almost like a born, you should like Suede. You know what I mean? Like, you should.

• 2:35:04Yasi Salek?

  I love Suede.

• 2:35:05Speaker 06

  You should definitely like them. They're like your kind of thing. And it's a lot to do with the commitment to the idea of what they are. And their glamour and their sexiness, but also what we were talking about with those first two albums, the atmosphere that they bring. The whole world that they bring, that you can go into, that you step into when you're in in their, in their world, you're in it. And I kind of feel like, yeah, they might not have, you know, things don't always work immediately, do they? But like, you know, if if you ever get a chance to go and see them, you should just go and see them play because they're really good. Like Brett Anderson is absolutely brilliant. They're great. You know, and they've got banger after banger.

• 2:35:43Yasi Salek?

  And I'm sorry, like, any band should be so lucky to make those two albums and have that be their legacy. And again, then, it's a best-case scenario. You made two iconic, critically adored, returnable, perfect albums. And then you made two that made you a lot of money that no one really cares about anymore, no offense, respectfully. And, perfect. That's a perfect... Oasis only made two albums that anyone cares about. Let's be fucking honest.

• 2:36:08Speaker 06

  Absolutely. They should have stopped. We know.

• 2:36:11Yasi Salek?

  They should. No one is talking about standing on the shoulder of giants, okay? And that's fine. I did. I had to talk about it on this podcast. But that being said, Sway, thank you for your gorgeous legacy. Thank you for your, for your work. Thank you for the country bob that has inspired me to go cut my hair into a country bob tomorrow. And when I say tomorrow, by the time this comes out, I'll have it. Miranda Sawyer, thank you so much for spending 12 to 15 of your precious hours of your life talking about a thing you lived through already 30 years ago. This was very fun for me personally.

• 2:36:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's super fun. I really, really enjoyed it. It's great. It's such fun.

• 2:36:51Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, Miranda. Okay, come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain.

• 2:37:03Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was once again, the amazing Miranda Sawyer. Her wonderful book, Uncommon People, is available to buy now wherever you buy fine books. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delbacke and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos De La Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to producer emeritus, Producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Venessy, Michael Hardman, Casey Simonsen, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Meyerson, Jessica Hopper, and the spirulina

• 2:37:48Yasi Salek?

  man at my farmer's market. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:38:05Yasi Salek?

  Not, not now. Not today, gardener. My enemy, the gardener.