Sounds From The Junkshop #63 - Bernard Butler

"So cherish the days when we'd search for caves and paddle our feet in the midday heat" - Bernard Butler - You Must Go On

I have to be honest, I ummed and ahhed a bit about doing an SFTJ on Bernard, not least because we kind of briefly covered his solo career when we did the Garbage Days Revisited on the band he made his name with, Suede, a few months ago. However, I think there's enough of a distance here for his two albums to merit a bit of a mention on their own.

I think it's safe to say that, when Bernard left Suede following the release of Dog Man Star, a bit of the mystique went with him. As I mentioned in the aforementioned Suede GDR entry, I wasn't a particularly big fan of Coming Up and thought that despite a few standout tracks, it was just a bit Suede-by-numbers for me. Head Music (the subject of said GDR entry) was a bit better before the group well and truly bombed out with the decidedly poor A New Morning album and split shortly afterwards.

A lot of people were waiting with baited breath to see what Butler did next and the answer was to team up with the silky voiced David McAlmont to form McAlmont & Butler. The lead off single Yes took me by surprise, a straight-up soul pop number with hardly any of Butler's trademark guitar work on it. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic tune with McAlmont's soaring vocals well and truly powering it along. Unfortunately, the album was a bit of a disappointment as it became clear after a few listens that apart from the single, it didn't really have a lot to make it stand out and by 1997, Bernard would have gone solo and signed up with Creation records.

I was a bit unsure of what to expect from Bernard's debut solo album - the memory of John Squire, the other big guitar hero of the '90s' ill-fated expedition into plodding dadrock with the Seahorses was fresh in my mind at this point - but with lead-off single Stay, he came up with a winner - a slow building slice of dreamy psychedelic Britpop which might have been a bit simplistic lyrically but carried itself well on its soaring tune (I mean hell, let's be honest, Oasis pretty much built their entire career on that formula). The omens looked good.

Unfortunately, the album People Move On was almost a total repeat of the McAlmont and Butler era in that the lead off single was by some way the strongest track on there. It had a few other reasonable numbers on it such as the hypnotic Autograph but for the most part it was solid and workmanlike but didn't really have a knockout tune - it's maybe quite telling that there was a definite similarity between second single Not Alone and his old group's first post-Bernard single Trash.

It's also maybe telling that although Stay only narrowly missed the Top 10, the subsequent chart positions for Bernard's singles would worsen somewhat with Not Alone being his second and final Top 40 hit. He would come back with a second album in Friends And Lovers in late 1999 but by this point Creation was on life support and would close soon afterwards. A shame as I actually prefer it to his debut - You Must Go On was a strong comeback single with its singalong chorus and other numbers such as the dark Cocoon and the sinister Has Your Mind Got Away harked back to the epic majesty of Dog Man Star but the game was pretty much up by this point and with Creation folding, Bernard's solo career would also come to an end.

As I mentioned in the Suede GDR column, Brett and co were also starting to list quite badly at this point and by 2003, the group would be no more. Even so, it was still a bit of a surprise when Brett and Bernard reconciled their differences to form the Tears given how acrimoniously they'd fallen out a decade or so previously. Unfortunately the comeback single Refugees was a bit of a disappointment - instead of recalling the glory of Suede's first two albums it sounded like a cross between Coming Up and the McAlmont and Butler album. The second single Lovers was a bit better but the album was a bit hit and miss and the band would break up soon afterwards. I don't know if old animosities reared their heads again but I seem to remember that both Brett and Bernard saying afterwards that they were still on good terms but things just hadn't been working musically. Either way, when Suede reformed in 2009, it was with the Mk 2 era line-up.

Bernard would move into production following the breakup of the Tears and would gain plenty of plaudits for his work on Duffy's Rockferry album. Bizarrely, I remember listening to this at the time as I was dating a girl who really liked it - it wasn't really my sort of thing musically but I did like the song Warwick Avenue which was a gorgeous soulful ballad whichever way you looked at it. Unfortunately, Duffy would step away from the spotlight for almost a decade soon afterwards following a horrible traumatic abuse ordeal - she resurfaced in 2020 and told her story on her website and it was absolutely heartbreaking to read. Her decision to abandon her music career was tragic but entirely understandable after that and hopefully she's now moving towards a better place.

Looking back at Bernard's various projects post-Suede, I reckon if you put together the best tracks from his two solo albums, the McAlmont & Butler album and the Tears album then you'd have a pretty good compilation of stuff but be warned, there's quite a bit of filler in all of them. If I was going to make a recommendation, I'd probably go for the Friends And Lovers album which isn't perfect but has enough good moments on it to make it worth a listen but the rest have a few good moments to pick and choose from as well. These days Bernard remains a highly acclaimed producer but I'll be interested to see if he decides to return to the studio in a musician's capacity any time soon.