Garbage Days Revisited #9: Suede - "Head Music" (1999)

 

"And these are the thoughts that you keep inside, you smile from your window and stand all alone. And pour all the love that you keep inside into a song..." - Suede, He’s Gone

It was probably inevitable that we'd come to cover Suede on this blog at some point. In a way, the story here has a lot of parallels with the Manic Street Preachers GDR entry from a month or two ago but let's pick it up some time around 1993 or so.

I think the first time I heard Suede properly was when Animal Nitrate blasted into the Top 10 and I really can't state enough as a 14-year-old just how much of a shock to the system that song was for me. With Brett Anderson's screeched vocals and Bernard Butler's truly ferocious guitar riff cutting like a razor, it sounded thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I remember seeing them play the Brit awards a few weeks later - it's easy to forget now but early Suede were genuinely disturbing. While Butler, bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert could've probably passed as off-duty members of the Senseless Things or the Wonder Stuff, seeing Anderson tottering around the stage in a see through lace blouse like a brilliantly grotesque cross between a giraffe and Patsy from Ab Fab was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Needless to say my Dad who was watching it with me, nearly spat out his dinner in sheer horror.

I think I did listen to the first Suede album at the time after borrowing a mate's copy but have to admit I didn't really "get" most of it. As I’ve mentioned on here before my favourite bands back then were the Senseless Things and Carter USM and while they seemed to be directing their rage at the increasingly desperate state of the country, Suede just seemed to be kind of going round in circles being angry at nothing to these ears. That said, I did like the frenetic Moving which was kind of Animal Nitrate's closest soundalike on the album and some of the more restrained numbers like the haunting She's Not Dead and the slow building anger of Pantomime Horse were genuinely breathtaking. I think I actually liked the latter so much that I wrote its opening lines of "I was born as a pantomime horse, ugly as the sun when he falls to the floor, I was cut from the wreckage one day, this is what I get for being that way" on the inside of my school work folder along with the various Things, Carter and Stuffies lyrics that adorned it already. Of course, back then as a young and (relatively) innocent music fan, I had no idea about the homosexual connotations - I just thought it was a song about feeling like a misfit and being unhappy with yourself which I very much was back then.

Of course, the first Suede album has grown on me a lot in the intervening years - the only thing that stops it being perfect in this writer’s humble opinion is that I'd trade out Animal Lover (the weakest track on here and the only one that could really be described as Suede by numbers) for the excellent B-side To The Birds which would've made a far better penultimate track in my opinion and put fellow B-side My Insatiable One on there in place of Sleeping Pills (a decent song but having that and the similarly slow Breakdown next to each other means that part of the album drags a bit to these ears). But like I say, minor quibbles. However, back when it came out in 1993, my thoughts were that Suede were good but not great - I think the sheer amount of hype they were getting at the time might have put me off a bit as well and meant the album quickly fell behind Construction For The Modern Idiot, Post Historic Monsters and Kingmaker's Sleepwalking in my "regularly played album" stakes as the year went on.

It was the following single, Stay Together, which was the one that properly reeled me in looking back and started my fandom of the band properly which has more or less continued to this day. Clocking in at eight and a half minutes, it really did sound like absolutely nothing else I'd heard at that point with strings, horns, some truly mindbending guitar work from Bernard, Brett absolutely owning the vocals and despite its length, packing sufficient twists and turns to ensure there was no chance of you losing interest. However, despite reaching the Top 3, it would end up alienating quite a few of their fans who were put off by how long it was. Like I say though, I thought it was brilliant and it would set up what was to come perfectly.

The album in question was, of course, Dog Man Star, still my favourite Suede album all these years later but also one that almost tore the band apart with Bernard's attempts to make every song an epic and Brett's desire to keep things reined in and concentrate on the tunes, leading to a total breakdown in the band's relationships with each other. As soon as the album was finished, Butler was unceremoniously shown the door and the group seemed to be in a tailspin. Despite this, it still sounds amazing today from the epic Scott Walker style balladry of The Wild Ones through the savage We Are The Pigs, the stark ballads Still Life and The 2 Of Us to the epic nine minute Asphalt World. Unfortunately despite brilliant reviews pretty much across the board, sales were disappointing and it was the only one of the group's first four albums not to top the charts with the singles from it faring disappointingly (I'm still amazed that The Wild Ones, an absolutely sublime song, didn't go at least Top 10)

Stung, the band would regroup. Teenage guitarist Richard Oakes would be brought in to replace Butler and bring along his cousin, keyboardist Neil Codling (or "god in babe form" as all the girls who liked the band I knew at the time seemed to refer to him) to make the band a five-piece with the new line-up putting out the much poppier Coming Up album. In a total reverse of the previous album, it would be a big seller but while I liked it at the time, whisper it quietly, listening to it again recently it hasn't aged well to these ears. The piercing high end production really is painful on the ears in places and songs like Trash and Beautiful Ones feel like the band have ditched the booming authority of the previous album for by-numbers slogans that almost feel like self-parody in places. And there really is no excuse at all for the drippy ballad Saturday Night which remains probably their worst single to date. It still has its moments - Filmstar packs a bit of the punch of old, Lazy has a great opening riff from Oakes even if the song itself is a bit unremarkable and the more considered likes of the string-soaked She, the stark By The Sea and the epic Chemistry Between Us hold up reasonably well. But listening to it now, it definitely sounds like a disappointment after the sheer majesty of Dog Man Star.

Which is what (finally!) brings us on to the album we're here to talk about today - 1999's Head Music, the second of the band's brace of late '90s "Suede go pop" albums and the one I feel deserves a re-evaluation. While Coming Up seems to have largely escaped unscathed from the "too poppy" criticism, Head Music received a much cooler reception when it came out (although this still didn't stop it topping the charts) with a lot of reviews saying it felt like the band were trying too hard to be all things to all men. To me though, this is what makes it a better album than Coming Up - it keeps the pop melodies of that album (Can't Get Enough especially is a great slice of robo-glam-pop) but adds some more measured numbers to keep things enjoyably mixed.

Okay, there is one duffer on here which is Savoir Faire which has to be one of the worst songs Suede ever recorded (sorry guys) but that solitary red light aside, Head Music is a damn good album in my opinion. She's In Fashion may have lyrics which sound like they were scribbled down on the back of a beer mat in the pub but the dreamy strings and Motown style chorus drag what could have been a slice of almost self-parody up into a surprisingly good pop song while the yearning Everything Will Flow, the stark Down and the twin epics of Indian Strings and He's Gone bring back memories of the first two albums mixed in with Coming Up's pop sensibilities and are fine stuff. A special mention has to go to Codling's Elephant Man as well which is a top slice of Fall-style craziness and adds a bit of bite where it's needed. Even the seemingly throwaway two minute acoustic-led Crack In The Union Jack which closes things works well in the context of the album.

Unfortunately while it did well commercially and spawned four Top 20 singles, Head Music turned out to be the beginning of the end for Suede's original run. Brett had been struggling with a heroin addiction during the making of the album and would check himself into rehab as soon as the band were done touring it while Neil Codling had contracted ME which forced him out of the band due to ill health to be replaced by Alex Lee, formerly of SFTJ alumni and frequent Suede support band Strangelove. The resultant album A New Morning was a real disappointment - Anderson may have now been clean but, as harsh as this may sound, it felt as if the darkness that had been such a crucial part of Suede's sound had now gone completely to be replaced by sheer dullness. Admittedly it's been close to twenty years since I last listened to that album but I know a fair few other Suede fans who have revisited in recent years to see if they were too harsh on it and the general consensus is that time unfortunately hasn't improved it. Not only was it a critical flop but it failed commercially as well, only just denting the Top 30 while both of its singles stiffed in the lower reaches of the Top 40. With Nude, their label, going to the wall, soon Suede were no more.

This isn't quite the end of the story though - Anderson and Butler* would shock a nation by reuniting in The Tears which lasted for a solitary surprisingly good album before the Coming Up era band reunited full time after a one-off reunion show surpassed all expectations and saw the band adding more gigs and eventually getting back together full time.

* Just to fill in the gaps here, Bernard had put out a couple of solo albums on Creation in the interim which suffered from the reverse problem Coming Up did - plenty of ambition and scope but not so many memorable tunes. Stay and You Must Go On were both good though and both albums are worth a listen for the curious. He also put out two albums with David McAlmont which yielded the classic soul-pop song Yes but sadly not a lot else. These days he’s a highly acclaimed producer.

It would have been very easy for Suede to quietly retire to the ‘90s nostalgia circuit at this point and do a ten date greatest hits tour every couple of years or so to keep the pension pots topped up but credit to them, they've been more than active in the decade or so since reforming, putting out no less than three albums, 2013's Bloodsports, 2016's Night Thoughts and most recently 2018's The Blue Hour. Even more surprising, these albums were anything but pale retreads of past glories, confidently carrying the band's sound into the 21st century and packing some damn good tunes and plenty of variety to boot (just like Dog Man Star did back in the day, one might say). A new album is due either late this year or early next depending on which rumours you believe and rest assured it's something I'm very much looking forward to hearing.

Ironic that a band who were pretty much terrifying when I first saw them have now become respected elder statesmen of alternative music and, I'd argue, national treasures all these years later. It's extremely rare that you'll have a band come back twenty odd years after their commercial peak with material that's a worthy match for their most famous stuff but Suede very much are that band and deserve to be respected as such. And, as I said earlier, to me Head Music is the great hidden gem of their catalogue. If you wrote this one off as "too poppy" or "Suede by numbers" at the time then I really advise you to give it a revisit urgently and savour its delights for yourself.