We Are The Stars Of The Firing Line
Suede were never my band, not like Blur, or Super Furry Animals, or many other Britpop bands who had their fifteen minutes of fame on Top of the Pops, miming along to their one-hit while audiences bounced inanely. They were a band I inherited, a band beloved of my best friends at the time, and one that seemed to pull me into their orbit as if I had no say in the matter.
That’s not to say that I didn’t like them; I did, and still do, although there’s an element of diminishing returns throughout their catalog from second album Dog Man Star onwards; guitarist and co-songwriter Bernard Butler quit the band just before that one came out, going off to make one spectacular album with David McAlmont before disappearing into his navel (and I say that as one of the few people in the world who owns a copy of Friends & Lovers and will admit to liking it), and Suede were never the same since. Sure, they embraced pop with a tighter hug on their next – and, maybe, most successful (David! Andy! Confirm?) – album Coming Up, and Head Music, the album after that easily earned the title of “unjustly ignored” before they gave up the ghost and turned shit, but still. There was one shining moment where Suede really mattered.
I remember the way that Dog Man Star was always being played in Andy’s apartment, just after it had come out, and the way in which it sounded different and right and epic and saying something about our lives, even if I could never quite figure out what. Because I was spending so much time at Andy’s, the album came to soundtrack my year almost as much as it did his, although his year was bigger and more expansive and exciting and important – Such things can be said of the year where you meet your wife and everything in your life suddenly turns around, I think – while things fell to an admittedly comfortable shit for me (I was young, and secretly enjoyed all the drama and faux-misery, in a way that I never really realized until later), there was still something fitting about the grandiose pretention of the whole thing. Even today, the hum and cymbal clash that starts the album, “Introducing The Band” with its “dyingi’mdying” background vocal and Brett Anderson’s nasal sneer telling us about the century falling to violent hands, does something to me, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stick up and takes me back to 1993.
They fell into self-parody, eventually, of course; the lyrics become wrapped around themselves in faux poetry, and glam rock stylings falling into each other and becoming stale. But there was a point in my life where this music was gloriously appropriate, over-the-top, sexy and everything we thought the world had in store for us.
