Suede The Best Of (Nude)
5/5
By: Matt Tomiak
‘Won't someone give me some fun?’ The clarion call from Suede’s 1992 debut single The Drowners’ remains tantalizing almost two decades down the line; a preening repudiation of the gloomy stranglehold grunge held had over alternative music at the start of the last decade. It was the first in a consecutive run of at least half a dozen truly exceptional releases penned by Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, a short-lived songwriting partnership built around seamy, glamorous guitar music totally removed from the highly lucrative bleak blueprint established by Cobain, Vedder et al across the pond.
Pumped full of spiky swagger, including copious allusions to illicit suburban thrills and framed in a defiantly British vernacular - ‘Oh Dad, she’s driving me mad!’ trilled Brett Anderson on ‘Metal Mickey’, Suede were, its fair to say, an eye-opener. The Londoners’ standing as key players in
the nascent movement was immediately guaranteed and cemented with the 1993 Mercury Music Prize for their eponymous debut LP, but lacking the self-aggrandizing populism of many of their brasher peers, casual observers are likely to place Suede on Britpop’s second tier. Five years since and some redemptive reunion shows their initial dissolution and we have a bumper two disc thirty-plus track compilation which attempts to rectify this situation.
The Best Of isn’t the first Suede overview: 2003’s Singles provided a satisfactory outline at the close of the first phase of their career, but crucially overlooked their often superb b–sides. CD2 of The Best Of makes ample amends, providing evidence of the strength of material which first saw the light of day backing up better-known hits. The greatness of ‘The Wild Ones’ and ‘Stay Together’ is well-acknowledged, but so is the taut, razor wire glam of ‘Killing Of A Flashboy’ which first turned up on the flipside to ‘We Are The Pigs’, as menacing and quintessentially British as Richard Attenborough’s sharply-attired young hooligan Pinky in ‘Brighton Rock’. The soaring ‘To The Birds’ and ‘My Insatiable One’ (later covered by Morrissey) are great too. As is the devastating ‘The Living Dead’, which alludes to the hard drug use that would plague the band whilst chronicling a litany of trampled dreams and broken promises, all the while exhibiting a Bowie influence more brazen than almost anywhere else in the Suede canon but utterly justifying such a lofty reference point.
‘Trash’, ’Filmstar’ and ‘Beautiful Ones’ demonstrated their glorious pop credentials on 1997’s Coming Up and would become their most successful offerings in terms of Top 40 showing, but it was another track from that album, ‘Lazy’, that was perhaps their most underrated single. A panoramic sweep of Mike Leigh-esque everyBrit observation, it detailed in celebratory and defiantly non-patronising fashion the lives of commuter town figures, the instantly familiar ‘barking mad kids and lonely dads.’
It’s been a while in arriving, but The Best Of is a fitting testament to one the all-time great British singles bands.
Artists in this article: Suede
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