3. SuedeSuede
The sound of my teenage years. I remember disliking ‘Stay Together’ when I first heard it on Top Of The Pops. Then I heard it a second time at a music shop in Manchester the following weekend and I rapidly reversed my opinion about the song and the band more generally. Dog Man Star has some beauties on it too, but this debut is so defiant and swanky. Swankier than Marc Bolan even. Just a joy to have something decent to listen to as a teenager that wasn’t anti-intellectual. It wasn’t enjoyable going to school with troglodyte beings who listened to Oasis and took pride in their very meagre imaginations. Unlike a lot of so-called Britpop, Suede’s early records were not an affront to the intelligence of listeners.
The best music in the UK in the 90s was definitely from down south and every time I got off the train at London Euston I would feel a shiver of excitement and fear, something that no northern city could really muster at the time for me.
The b-sides from the Bernard Butler era are rightly regarded by many as of sublime quality. I was in the Suede fan club for a while back in the 1990s but I just missed out on seeing them live with Butler, who must have been the best guitarist of his generation. He really could elicit sounds of deep, deep feeling. He was amazing back then, electrifying and charged full of emotion. Just watch that Love & Poison video. Three notes from Bernard Butler means more than tens of thousands of notes from almost every other guitarist. Combined with Brett’s melodies you had two really strong lines running through each song in tandem. It was a brilliant partnership.
