I always feel bad calling Billy Joel one of my "guilty pleasures"...he's one of the most commercially and critically successful songwriters and musicians of the past fifty years and has written countless hit songs. Perhaps I shouldn't call him a "guilty pleasure" and instead say that he's one of my favorite musicians who most people who know me would be surprised I'm such a big fan of given when compared to everything else I listen to. But really, it should make perfect sense: he's a fantastic piano player, songwriter, singer, and can write hooks with the best of them (and as anyway who knows me know, I am and always have been a sucker for a well crafted song with an infectious hook). Over the course of his active career, Billy Joel released album after album full of great songs and became one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the 1970s and 1980s before retiring from popular music in the mid 1990s.
William Martin Joel was born in 1949 in Oyster Bay, Long Island to a German immigrant concert pianist and an English immigrant mother. He had a troubled childhood, with his parents divorcing in the mid 1950s and his father moving to Vienna, Austria. Reluctantly forced into classical piano lessons at a young age, Joel was captivated, as so many millions of others were, by the Beatles when he saw them on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 and decided to drop out of high school in order to pursue a career in music full time. After playing on several demos and sessions with a few small-time groups, he joined a local band called The Hassles who released two albums. Following that, in 1970 he formed a short-lived heavy metal duo called Atilla with former Hassles drummer Jon Small. The duo released one unsuccessful album and split up when Joel's affair with Small's wife Elizabeth was revealed. She broke it off with both of them and, distraught, Joel attempted suicide by drinking furniture polish (in his own words, "it looked tastier than bleach"). Surviving the attempt to take his own life, Elizabeth reconciled with Joel and they eventually married.
Signing a terribly lopsided contract with a label called Family Productions, he released his debut album Cold Spring Harbor in 1971. The album sold poorly, much of it due to the mastering being too fast and the songs and vocals being too high-pitched, something which wasn't corrected until many years later. Realizing he'd been ripped off, Joel managed to sign with Columbia Records, who bought out his contract with Family. His second album, Piano Man, was his commercial breakthrough, led by the title track as well as underground radio stations in the northeast (especially in Philadelphia) playing the album's closing track, "Captain Jack." Relocating to Los Angeles, his follow-up album, Streetlife Serenade, is an underrated and overlooked one in his discography. Without any immediate hit singles apart from "The Entertainer," it's a bit darker and more melancholy, with tracks such as the title song, "Los Angelenos," "The Great Suburban Showdown," "Roberta," and the instrumental piano workout "Root Beer Rag" as definite highlights. Homesick for New York City, Joel moved back for good and his next album, Turnstiles, reflected his happiness at being home. Songs like "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," "New York State of Mind," and "Miami 2017 (I've Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" reflect this, and are among the highlights of the album, as well as the classic "Prelude/Angry Young Man." By this point, Joel had a steady band behind him that would last for the next fifteen years and solidify his sound both in the studio and live on stage.
1977 saw the release of The Stranger, Joel's commercial and critical breakthrough album and the work that is still considered his magnum opus. The Stranger was packed with classic songs...almost the entire album has been in regular rotation on the radio since its release, with such songs as the title track, "Movin' Out," "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant," "Only the Good Die Young," "Just the Way You Are," "She's Always a Woman," and "Vienna" as classics. This album would also mark the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with producer Phil Ramone, who would produce all of Joel's albums up to and including 1986's The Bridge. The following albums 52nd Street ("My Life," "Big Shot," "Zanzibar"), Glass Houses ("You May Be Right," "Sometimes a Fantasy"), The Nylon Curtain ("Allentown," "Pressure," "Goodnight Saigon," "Laura") and his homage to 1950s and 1960s pop, An Innocent Man ("Uptown Girl," "The Longest Time," "Tell Her About It") continued a ridiculously strong run of albums and songs. It wasn't just the singles that were great...numerous album cuts were as good, or in some cases better than, the radio hits. There was a bit of a drop-off from here: 1986's The Bridge was very good but not great, but still had some excellent songs ("A Matter of Trust," "This is the Time") as did Joel's final two albums. 1989's Storm Front contained the hits "We Didn't Start the Fire" and "I Go to Extremes" while his final album, 1993's River of Dreams, had the title track and "Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel)" as highlights. At this point, Joel decided to retire from writing and recording popular music, a surprising decision for someone of his talents. Since then, he's focused on writing classical piano pieces and has continued touring, both with his own band and in tandem with Elton John, playing his hits and entertaining millions of fans around the world. He's definitely on my bucket list of musicians I want to see, and seeing as how he's played Fenway Park in Boston the last two summers, I'm hoping that I have a really good chance of making it happen.
Billy Joel today, in 2015
As for my own fandom, I grew up listening to my parents' copies of The Stranger and 52nd Street on vinyl. My dad isn't a fan, but my mum is, so between those records and hearing all of his songs on the radio when I'd be listening with her, I became a fan at a very young age. Additionally, my best friend from elementary through high school was a huge fan. We sang many of Billy Joel's songs in the high school chorus and acapella groups I was in (including "The Longest Time," on which I performed the solo). From the beginning, I've been captivated by his fantastic songwriting...he writes melodies with the best of them and is also quite talented at writing songs that tell stories. His phenomenal piano playing has always been a highlight for me, as well as his singing voice. In fact, he's one of my favorite musicians to listen to and sing along with. The range of music he's produced goes from story songs like "Allentown," "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant," "Miami 2017 (I've seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)," and "Captain Jack" to ballads like "Honesty," "She's Got a Way," and "And So it Goes." There are belting rockers like "You May Be Right," "Big Shot," "Movin' Out," and "Los Angelenos," pure pop singles like "Uptown Girl" and "My Life," and numerous great album cuts like "Laura" (the best Lennon/McCartney song of the 1980s that they never wrote), "Vienna," "Roberta," "Zanzibar," and countless others. For many years during my youth, I used to hide the fact that I was such a big fan because he wasn't considered too "cool" by my peers. He also doesn't fit the mold of most of the musicians I listen to and I'd find many of my friends and family members to be quite surprised when I mentioned how much I liked him. However, as I've gotten older, I don't feel the need to be so coy about my fandom. So many of Billy Joel's songs have meant a lot to me throughout the various stages of my life and continue to do so to this day. Whether it's been during tough times or happy times, reflective, depressing times or exciting times, I've always found that his songs have a way of speaking to me as a listener and conveying their message and emotion both through their music and their lyrics. He may not fit in easily alongside the majority of what I listen to, but I'm proud and glad to be a fan of Billy Joel's music...it's meant, and continues to mean, so much to me and brought me such enjoyment that I can't ever imagine not having it in my life.
For those of us 30 and older, buying music in our youth meant waiting until the newest releases from our favorite artists were available on CD (or in earlier years, vinyl or cassette) before heading to the local brick-and-mortar store in order to purchase a copy. If you wanted something before it came out, you just had to wait, and if you wanted something your local stores didn't have, you either tried to mail-order it from a catalog or you called stores in the surrounding area to see if any of them had a copy. While this may seem like archaic to anyone under 30, that's just the way it was. The record companies controlled access (in terms of both release dates and pricing) to the music and the consumer had little choice but to pay what was asked, and when. Things began to change in the late 1990s, though, and as we all now know, in 2015 the way in which music is distributed and consumed is so drastically different to what went before that it's almost unrecognizable. The story of how this all happened is what How Music Got Free aims to tell.
***special thanks to Joe at The Bodley Head for sending me a copy of the book to review!***
(please note that I reviewed the British version of the book, which has a different cover and subtitle to the American edition...they are, however, identical in every other way)
According to his about the author blurb at the end of the book, author Stephen Witt is approximately the same age as me (he was born a year earlier) and was even born in my home state of New Hampshire. In his introduction, the experiences he had going to college, finally having internet access, and discovering the new technology of the mp3 eerily mirrors my own experiences. I started college in the same year as him which is where I had my first access to the internet, my first high speed ethernet connection (not until sophomore year in 1998...freshman year the university still had dial-up!), and had never heard of an mp3 before then. I arrived on campus with hundreds of CDs in boxes and a huge sound system, although I eventually started using Napster a little bit when it first appeared. I never stopped buying CDs, however (I still haven't) and I never downloaded pirated music. However, Witt did and found himself sitting with multiple hard drives storing hundreds of gigabytes of music by 2011 or so. That got him thinking, where did it all come from? Who was responsible? And did it really cost the music industry millions of dollars and almost kill it off? As he began to dig deeper he realized it started to converge on one man in particular, and the idea to write an investigative book was born. The result is How Music Got Free, and whether you read the British edition (subtitled "What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?") or the American edition (subtitled "The end of an industry, the turn of the century, and the patient zero of piracy") you'll find yourself wondering the same thing.
The book follows the paths of the three individuals most responsible for the hell that broke loose in the late 1990s: Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German researcher who led the team responsible for creating the mp3 technology; Doug Morris, a legendary record executive who made a fortune shepherding hit after hit onto the charts, artistic quality be damned (and who helped make rap the dominant genre it's been since 2000, for better or worse); and Bennie Lydell "Dell" Glover, the quiet man who worked at the largest CD pressing plant in the USA and who was personally and almost single-handedly responsible for leaking almost 3,000 albums onto the internet weeks or, in some cases, months ahead of their release dates. The chapters take turns advancing the narrative of each one of these men, with successive chapters returning to their subject in order to detail what happened next. As the book progresses the story becomes more gripping and fascinating and at several points seems to be the product of a highly creative individual, until you step back and realize this all really happened. While I won't attempt to tell the entire story in this review, and while I urge you to read the book to get the full story, I'll give a general overview as it's no less fascinating.
Starting with Brandenburg, he was a psychoacoustic researcher at a German university who was obsessed with trying to compress audio files to as little as 1/12th their original size without sacrificing sound quality. He and his team finally achieved this after many years of hard work and research by eliminating many areas of the sound spectrum that are either imperceptible or unnoticed by the majority of listeners. However, committee politics with the European MPEG consortium led to the resulting mp3 technology being purposely crippled by superfluous additional software filtering being unnecessarily mandated by the committee, who preferred to adopt the inferior mp2. Eventually, however, the mp3 won out and made Brandenburg and his team very wealthy. As staunch defenders of copyright laws, however, little did they know that they'd opened Pandora's Box. Running alongside this was the late-career arc of Doug Morris, who had been active in the record industry since the 1960s and spent many years working for the legendary Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records before heading to Warner Bros. Records. Eventually he ended up at Universal Music Group and at one point was personally controlling a third of the entire global music market. Morris had a keen eye and ear for which songs would make huge hits, caring little for artistic quality and more for capturing the public's interest long enough to sell millions of records and make a lot of money. He specialized in making national (and oftentimes, international) hits out of regional acts and scoured the country to bring rock, pop, and rap acts out from their local communities and onto the national stage. Running alongside this boom in disposable music was the CD, where ridiculous numbers of the shiny plastic discs were being sold ever year. The greed of the music industry was on full display during these boom years of 1990-2000, as described in the book: as the industry managed to get the cost of production down to around a dollar a disc, they never thought once of passing the savings on to the consumer, who were still paying the same $15 for a new CD in 2000 that they were in 1993. Eventually, this would come back to bite the industry in a big way. However, one man (among many, it must be noted) stood to do more damage to the industry's bottom line than anything else...
Dell Glover was an unassuming guy living in western North Carolina; he went to church, hung out with his friends and family, worked hard, and enjoyed life. In addition, he was en electronics whiz and spent many hours tinkering with computers and electronic gadgets, fixing them for friends and making a little money on the side doing so. Dell was a music fan, enjoying country, rock, pop, and rap, so getting a job that had some relation to the music industry was fortuitous indeed. He first got a part-time job at the massive Kings Mountain CD pressing plant in the mid-1990s and put in many long hours and overtime shifts in order to get full-time work and benefits there. Around the same period, he and his coworker/friend James Dockery became immersed in the nascent internet and the various IRC (internet relay chat) channels devoted to music. This eventually led them to become part of RNS (Rabid Neurosis), which would go on to become the most infamous online music pirating collective in the history of the internet. Dell began to realize that several new albums were being smuggled out of the plant weeks in advance...he would hear them at parties thrown by his coworkers and wonder how they got out, especially given the ever tightening security measures the plant was taking. Eventually rising to a supervisory position, Dell figured out a way to smuggle freshly pressed albums out (I won't spoil it for you...read the book!) and began his years of leaking album after album through his colleagues in RNS. Eventually, too many albums were being leaked far in advance of their release dates, catching the attention of the FBI. After many years of investigative work (and a few missteps by Glover and his cohorts in RNS), Dell was arrested and the key members of the RNS crew were nabbed. The entire story is gripping and I had to keep reminding myself over and over that this actually happened and was not just exciting fiction.
At its core, How Music Got Free is a multi-stranded tale of how an unwitting scientist, a clever music-loving techie (among millions like him), and an industry so short-sighted and greedy that they almost deserved what happened to them, all eventually intersected. It's the story of unbridled greed, hubris, and getting caught with their (technological) pants down on the part of the music industry. It's the story of well-meaning, important research and its unintended consequences on the part of Brandenburg's group. And it's the story of an entire generation of music fans and consumers shifting the way they viewed and acquired music. It's this last part that is the crux of How Music Got Free and which will make the reader think long and hard about their own attitudes and habits when it comes to music, both during and after reading it. Reading this book brought back a lot of memories of those times in the late 1990s/early 2000s when I was in college and and graduate school. At the time, I was hearing about all of this as it was going on. Yes, I used Napster a little bit, as well as some of the other peer-to-peer networks like eMule, Soulseek, and BitTorrent. Back then when it was all new, I didn't know that what I was doing was wrong as I was of the mindset that if I liked what I listened to enough, I was going to buy the CD anyway. To this day, I still buy CDs even though I've supplemented my listening with online (legal) streaming like Spotify and YouTube. While I do think the music industry got what was coming to them given their attitude toward the artistic value of much of the music they were pumping out, as well as their indifference to the economic burden their inflated prices placed on consumers, I do believe that artists and producers deserve to get paid for their hard work. The question of ownership and whether online file-sharing is right or wrong is the main thesis of the book and is something that is still hotly debated today. The path that led to where we are now is littered with tortured thinking, legal rulings and technicalities (such as the ruling that mp3s infringed on musical copyrights, but mp3s players were perfectly legal to make), and plain old bad decisions that would come back to haunt the various players in this saga years later.
Stephen Witt does a fantastic job weaving all of the various components of the story together into a cohesive tale of how we got to where we are today: moribund physical music sales, an industry near death that has to think of new gimmicks in order to stay relevant, and technology run rampant to the point that music is both as accessible as ever to consumers and burgeoning musicians, yet the industry is almost impenetrable to new artists unless. Throughout the entire book, Witt brings it all together, creating an intriguing, true-life detective story; making it even better is the fact that he actually met and interviewed (nearly) all of the main people he writes about: Doug Morris, Karlheinz Brandenburg and many members of his research group, and of course Dell Glover. The firsthand accounts and memories from these major (albeit behind-the-scenes) players makes for gripping reading and elevates the book above mere investigative writing. If I have one quibble with the book, it's that I felt it was a little bit rushed toward the end when it came to the discussion of the lawsuits and consequences suffered (or in some cases, unbelievably, not suffered) by the music pirates, as well as the aftermath and impact on all involved once the dust settled. This is more down to my personal thirst for more information than any shortcomings in Witt's writing and it very well may be the case that since the lawsuits in question were relatively recent (2007-11) the information is either not yet available or not accessible to the general public (yet). In any event, How Music Got Free is an excellent book that only describes how we got to where we are in terms of how music is valued as both an art form and product. This book will force the reader to examine their own attitudes toward both long after the book is finished as you realize all of this change took place over less than a decade. That, perhaps, is the most stunning takeaway of all from How Music Got Free, but there are many more thought-provoking kernels of truth in the book that make it a fascinating must-read for any music fan and/or technophile.
The classic Suede line-up circa 1993, left to right: Simon Gilbert (drums), Bernard Butler (guitars, piano), Brett Anderson (vocals), Mat Osman (bass guitar)
Welcome to this next entry in my series of profiles on some of my favorite bands. Today's article is about Suede, a band that burst forth from the grimy underbelly of London in the early 1990s and became, for a short time, one of the finest British bands of the decade. Propelled by the exquisite songwriting team of Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, along with Butler's equally impressive guitar playing and the great rhythm section of Mat Osman (bass guitar) and Simon Gilbert (drums), Suede explored a seedier, more haunting, and realistic urban vein of British rock than many of their peers in the 1990s BritPop scene. However, tensions within the band brought on by a variety of reasons led to the original line-up's implosion by the end of 1994. Regrouping with a new guitarist who also happened to be a 17 year old Suede superfan (Richard Oakes) and Simon Gilbert's cousin on keyboards (Neil Codling), Suede remade themselves and released a two more successful albums before quietly losing steam in the early 2000s and calling it a day. After solo albums and various side projects (including a surprise reunion between Anderson and Butler that led to the excellent, albeit short-lived band The Tears), Suede reformed in the late 2000s (with the Oakes/Codling configuration) and, with a great new album released two years ago, are again an active band producing great music. How they got to this point, as well as the excellent music they made along the way, will be the subject of the following profile now that you've read my potted Suede history, so read on and be enlightened...
The genesis of Suede was at University College London in 1989 when Brett Anderson met Justine Frischmann and, along with Brett's childhood friend Mat Osman, decided to form a band. After placing a now-famous ad for a guitarist in NME that read "Young guitar player needed by London based band. Smiths, Commotions, Bowie, Pet Shop Boys. No Musos. Some things are more important than ability. Call Brett," they received a response from a young guitarist named Bernard Butler. He was only 19 but even at the stage was an incredibly talented musician who was obsessed with Johnny Marr's work with the Smiths. Initially playing small club gigs with a drum machine, they eventually recorded a short demo with none other than former Smiths drummer Mike Joyce occupying the drum stool. Joyce declined to stay full time, not wanting to burden the young band (who were influenced by his former band) by staying on as a member (which is quite a gracious thing to do, actually!). Eventually they brought Simon Gilbert into the fold and, apart from Frischmann on rhythm guitar, the now classic Suede lineup of Brett Anderson (vocals), Bernard Butler (guitar, piano), Mat Osman (bass guitar), and Simon Gilbert (drums) was complete. This is where the great music (and later, the drama) really started...
By 1991, Brett and Justine had split as a couple but she was still in the band. Making matters worse, she then embarked upon what would eventually be a high-profile and extended relationship with Damon Albarn from Blur. Her tardiness or absences at Suede engagements, often because she was hanging around with Blur on video shoots, hurt and angered Brett enough that eventually she was sacked; according to all involved, it galvanized the band and crystallized their sound into what they would become famous for. (Justine would eventually go on to fame fronting Elastica). While their brand of dark, sweeping, and despairingly romantic music was out of step with the Madchester/baggy and shoegazing sounds then in vogue in the early 1990s UK, they continued to gig while the Anderson/Butler songwriting partnership began to bear real fruit. They began to attract the notice of the UK music press and even ended up on the front cover of Melody Maker with the headline "Suede: The Best New Band in Britain." Eventually signing with indie label Nude Records in 1992, they released a trio of singles that were stunning in quality and sound for such a young band: "The Drowners," "Metal Mickey," and "Animal Nitrate." Furthermore in what would become a Suede tradition these songs had B-sides that were as good as (or sometimes, better than) their A-sides. Suede's B-sides would continue to be of such high quality that many of them outshone album tracks and would eventually lead to a double-album release later in the 1990s.
Their self-titled debut album was released in 1993 and quickly went to #1 in the UK charts. It was full of incredible songs in addition to the first three singles, such as "So Young," "She's Not Dead," and "Pantomime Horse." The palpable sense of despair, longing, and doomed romanticism permeated every one of the album's songs and was so unique amidst what contemporaries like Blur, Pulp, and Oasis were doing. Even given the success of the album in the UK, as well as its respectable performance in the US (where it remains to this day Suede's biggest selling album), things were not well within the band. Bernard Butler was unhappy with producer Ed Buller while he and Brett, whose songwriting partnership had been so productive and successful, were moving in totally opposite directions. While Brett and the rest of the band were enjoying their fame and increasing their indulgences in drugs and alcohol, Butler was moving into writing and arranging more complex music. A grueling tour of the USA in support of their first album with the Cranberries as their opening band turned out to be the beginning of the end for Suede Mk. I as the two bands eventually swapped positions on the bill since the Cranberries were more popular with American audiences than Suede (there's no accounting for taste, I suppose). While the debauchery of the road was described years later as "wicked" by Mat Osman, Butler was dealing with the death of his father back in England and his recent engagement; he had no interest in partying with the rest of Suede and even took to riding on the Cranberries' tour bus between shows. Worst of all, they were sued by an obscure American smooth-jazz singer who had trademarked the name "Suede" in the USA; from then on the band have been legally forced to use the name "The London Suede" in the USA which not only sounds terrible but, as Brett said years later, is NOT the true name of the band. A standalone UK #3 single, "Stay Together" was released between the first two albums and while much loved by Suede fans, the song and its video have been disowned by the band (unfairly so, in my view). During their UK tour of early 1994 Bernard Butler played what would turn out to be his final show with Suede as work on their second album proved to be the final nail in the coffin for his tenure in the band. Brett Anderson had recently moved into an old, isolated Victorian mansion in Highgate and escalated his intake of hallucinogens in pursuit of artistic enlightenment and inspiration. He was also going through trying personal times in his romantic relationship while Butler took some swipes at him in the press. The major factors leading to his split from the band were Butler's presentation of longer and more elaborate songs and more critically, his dislike of Ed Buller's production: he felt it was lacking and that he could do a better job, while Brett, Mat, and Simon sided with the producer. Bernard gave them an ultimatum: Buller or me, and shockingly they called his bluff. The album, which would be released as Dog Man Star pate in 1994, was still some distance from completion and required overdubs from Butler which took place alone in a different studio, while Brett had to finish writing lyrics and replaced all of his guide vocals with proper tracks. One song, "The Power," didn't even have final guitar parts by Butler and was completed by a session guitarist who used Bernard's demo for reference. The end result was an album that, while a critical darling now considered Suede's masterpiece (an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with) which sold respectably and reached #3 in the UK album charts, was completely overshadowed in a year that was dominated by Blur's Parklife and Oasis' Definitely Maybe. It's a shame because from beginning to end it's a stunning record, from the striking album cover to the gloomy, romantic, and despairing music contained within. Such exquisite songs like "We Are the Pigs," "The Wild Ones," "Daddy's Speeding," "New Generation," and "The Asphalt World" stand up alongside anything anyone else in 1990s rock was producing. The album as a whole presents a look at England and relationships that is seedier, darker, more violent, and rougher than what was going on around them in the dayglo BritPop scene, making it out of step enough from the rest of the BritPop/Cool Britannia movement that it was never mainstream despite being as good artistically as anything else.
So there Suede found themselves at the end of 1994 with an album that deserved far better than its commercial fate and without their guitarist who also happened to co-write all of their songs. The latter issue was quickly resolved by bringing in Richard Oakes to fill the vacant spot. Oakes was a 17 year old Suede fan who had sent in a demo tape of himself playing Butler's parts note-for-note, much in the same way Butler had made tapes of himself doing the same to Johnny Marr's guitar parts from the Smiths a decade earlier. He even looked the part, with long black hair and a red Gibson ES-355 just like Butler played. Indeed, Bernard was less than impressed, criticizing his old band in the press as having replaced him with a "copy." The band toured Dog Man Star in 1995 but as it was an album recorded by an incarnation of the band that no longer existed, their hearts weren't really in it. Regrouping for their next album, Anderson decided the band would make a pop album where every track could be a single, similar to his and Osman's beloved 80s pop records. Bringing in Simon Gilbert's cousin Neil Codling on keyboards, the resulting album, Coming Up, was released in 1996 and was a bold and bracing statement from Suede Mk. II. Eschewing the dark, 70s glam sartorial style of the original lineup, the new version of the band favored of an all-jet black look (hair, leather jackets, t-shirts, jeans, and Dr. Martens) as they underwent a visual as well as a musical makeover. The resulting album showed that musically the band were as good as ever with Oakes a more than capable replacement for Butler while Codling's keyboards added a new texture to their sound. The album itself was a big success with Brett's prediction proven to be half correct; a whopping FIVE of the album's ten tracks were released as singles, all reaching the top 10. However, the following album would prove to be more problematic...
Suede Mk. II (1995-present), Left to Right: Gilbert, Richard Oakes, Osman, Anderson, Neil Codling
In between 1996's Coming Up and its follow up, 1999's Head Music, Suede released a double album compilation of their B-sides called Sci-Fi Lullabies. What this album did was show the rest of the world what Suede fans had known for years: that the band's B-sides were of a quality equal to or surpassing many other band's album cuts. Standouts like "My Insatiable One," "He's Dead," "To the Birds," "Together," and "Young Men" were just some of the riches to be found on this compilation. Focusing on new music, however, all was not well in the Suede camp during the making of Head Music. Brett had sunk even further into his drug habit, now becoming addicted to crack cocaine. In order to cope with the increasingly chaotic sessions, Richard Oakes began to drink heavily while Neil Codling began suffering from the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Coupled with a more electronic and experimental sound, it all added up to a recipe for disaster and while the resulting music wasn't terrible, it was inconsistent and contained the single worst song Suede ever recorded (the Neil Codling-penned "Elephant Man"). The album did, however, contain some absolute stunners like "Electricity," "She's In Fashion," "He's Gone," and "Everything Will Flow." It went to #1 in the UK album charts but there was a sinking feeling that Suede were a spent force as Brett's lyrics veered into self-referential self-parody and the experimental approach to the music didn't come off as well as hoped. Codling's CFS caused him to leave the band shortly thereafter, further upsetting Brett as he struggled to and finally succeeded in conquering his drug addictions. Feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, the band recruited former Strangelove member Alex Lee as Codling's replacement and recorded 2002's A New Morning. Vilified by the band and fans alike, the album proved to be Suede's nadir and while there are some decent songs ("Lost in TV," "Beautiful Loser," and "Astrogirl") overall it was an unsatisfying confection: Suede as toothless, middle of the road pop band. After playing some gigs where they performed each of their albums in full on successive nights and releasing a single compilation with two new tracks, the band quietly split up in 2003. Brett would go on to reunite with Bernard to form the band The Tears, who recorded and released an excellent album entitled Here Come the Tears. They played several gigs around the UK and Europe and even supposedly recorded a follow-up album that sadly remains unreleased as they quietly disbanded a short time after. In the immediate aftermath of his leaving Suede, Bernard had recorded two excellent albums with soul singer David McAlmont as well as two uneven but solid solo albums. Following the demise of the Tears, Brett released some low key solo albums that were quite good but sadly got little exposure. However, after years of rumors and clamoring from fans, Suede got back together (with Codling back in the fold) for a one-off show in 2010 for the Teenage Cancer Trust. They continued to play some festival shows and handfuls of gigs around the UK and Europe before the reunion finally became official. Their most recent album to date, 2013's Bloodsports, brought the band's sound up to date while still retaining all of their trademark touches...the result was a fantastic work that is among their best and stands up to any of their excellent 1990s work. The same goes for the B-sides associated with the album's singles. Suede are rumored to be working on a new album that will hopefully be released within the next year, showing that they are back for good as a creative force to be reckoned with; the music world and die-hard Suede fans are all the better for it.
Personally, Suede were a band I discovered relatively late in my musical development; it wasn't until I was around 20 or 21 years old when I finally bit the bullet and sought out some of their music to listen to. I'd been a Blur fan for several years by this time and had certainly heard of Suede but I'd never taken the time to listen to their stuff until I hit my early 20s. I can say without exaggeration that I was absolutely blown away from the very first listen. Beyond the great music and the mood and emotion they conveyed, the guitarist in me fell in love with Bernard Butler's playing and I added another huge influence to my pantheon of guitar heroes. His sound, his guitar tone, his songwriting, and his approach to playing all loomed very large in my own playing and he's a major influence on me to this day. Like another mutual hero of ours, Johnny Marr, Butler mastered and expounded upon the approach of playing chordal lead lines and rhythm parts at the same time. He even influenced some of the gear I now use: his red Gibson ES-355 (with a Bigsby vibrato arm) played through a Vox amp is a key component of his sound. While I've long been a lover of Vox amps, I hadn't ever used semi-hollow bodied electric guitars but after getting into Suede, in 2005 I bought an Epiphone ES-335 (a great guitar made by the Gibson company but for a quarter of the price!) and I installed a Bigsby vibrato on it. Since then, it's been my go-to guitar for the majority of my playing, a really versatile workhorse that not only affected my playing by my songwriting as well. I've also worked very hard at incorporating Bernard's technique into my own playing...while I'm not nearly as good as he is, I'm getting there! Musically they've given me a wealth of material to enjoy and are one of the bands where absolutely every track they release is essential to have. I've got all of their B-sides and oftentimes will listen to just those on their own, they're that good. Because I don't have personal experience with most, if not all, of the aspects touched on in the darker reaches of Suede's music, I can't personally relate to much of it even though I continue to enjoy the hell out of it. There still are, however, many, many of their songs that mean a lot to me for reasons having to do with love, loss, uncertainty, confusion, and yes, even happiness. Just like the Smiths, Suede are often unfairly labeled as a "depressing/gloomy" band, but they have their fair share of songs about the various joys of life, love, and music. Perhaps more than most bands from my own generation that I'm into, they've had the strongest impact on my own music-making and as such, deserve their lofty position in my hierarchy of favorite bands.
