Suede Grow Hard On 'Coming Up'.
Every man and every woman is a star--Aleister Crowley
What could they have been thinking of? Replacing the axe-hero for
the '90s, Bernard Butler, who left the band in a macho hissy fit over the
length of his guitar solos, with a mere 17-year-old kid? Surely the
singer, that cheeky Brett Anderson, the man who literally ruled the first
half of '90s British rock like a dandified sovereign--and whose band, some
might say, paved the way for Britpop in the decade's second half--was in
the midst of some smack-induced trance when he made that decision
(hey, if Damon Albarn said it, it must be true, right?). When it was first
released in the Commonwealth last year, it thus seemed that Coming
Up was destined to be Suede's (I refuse to use the ridiculous "The
London" US preface to their moniker--there's only one Suede, and talent,
not inane legalities, should be the final deciding factor here) final bow,
an ignominious footnote of failure to their once-promising career.
Well, as a famous American TV personality once uttered, "Surprise,
surprise!" Not long after the album's initial release, the ever so fickle
British rock press who had prophesied Anderson's demise were lining up to
kiss his butt once again, and with good reason. As its phallic title
implies, this is an album all about renewal and potency, the return of a
wicked erection after a bout of enfeebling illness. Falsely labeled by
some as a "comeback," Coming Up is rather a return,
following the layered art-rock of their sophomore effort Dog Man
Star (a monument to the brilliance of the doomed Butler/Anderson song
writing team), to the more basic glam-rock roots of their eponymous debut.
After seeming a bit of a hair-swinging Butler wannabe on tours to support
an album he didn't appear on, newbie guitar slinger Richard Oakes makes
his recording debut here in fine style, supporting head potentate
Anderson's singular reworking of his main influences--David Bowie, Marc
Bolan (T. Rex) and Scott Walker--with plenty of high voltage riffing a
la Bowie's former "Spiders From Mars" cohort, the late and lamented
Mick Ronson.
The lead-off track, "Trash," an anthemic glam-rocker, is a fine statement
of purpose by which to define Suede II, as it were, an uncomplicated
sing-a-long tune in which Anderson returns to his long-favoured thematic
motif: the finding of glamour in the gutter, the extraordinary within the
ordinary, the jewel in the pile of shit. "We're tra-a-a-sh you and me /
We're the litter on the breeze . . . it's in everything we do," Anderson
sings coyly over a hooky guitar line from Oakes, aided and abetted by
atmospheric keyboard flourishes from the newest Suede recruit, the
vampiricly stylish Neil Codling. "Filmstar," the next track, is even more
striking, as Anderson narrates a tale of vacuous '90s super celebrity
backed by a Ronson-esque, neo-metallic guitar riff heavier and more
overtly macho than anything Suede has heretofore attempted. This
is the sound of the band symbolically putting the boots to their doubters
and detractors and having a great time while doing it.
Anderson's trademark romantic balladry is also in peak form throughout
Coming Up. "By The Sea" depicts the struggles of two lovers who
decide, against all odds, to reject the living death of work-a-day life,
while "Picnic By the Motorway" which musically evokes Bowie's "Space
Oddity," finds Anderson cleverly switching that song's theme of physical,
otherworldly escape for one of innerwordly psychic oblivion: "Don't you
worry," the narrator reassures his despondent lover, "I'll buy us a bottle
and we'll drink in the petrol fumes." Cheeky middle-class types such as
Blur's Damon Albarn (a.k.a. "Mr. Elastica") would no doubt have to revert
to cynicism and irony in order to relate such scenarios, but Anderson, who
comes from the working class world he describes, eschews any such
distancing devices, identifying totally with the characters he creates.
What makes Suede a great band (and Coming Up a great album) is
Anderson's ability to transmute everyday life into something special, to
invert its values and substitute an aesthetic vision all his own, drawing
the listener in and making him or her--perhaps unwittingly--share in his
truly alternative vision. "Lazy," another great glam-rocker, could
serve as the anthem for Anderson's world of poetic misfits and starry-eyed
losers, being an anthemic rejection of a life wherein work has
become the primary defining source of meaning and personal identity.
Here, the narrator and his lover lay in bed watching the rat-race go by,
its empty hustle and bustle "reminding us there's work to be done. But
you and me," he drawls laconically, "all we want to be is lazy."
In Suede's world, it's the "drag acts" and the "drug acts," the "shaved
heads" and the "rave heads" who Anderson extols on the album's
centerpiece, "Beautiful Ones, who count most: by remaining useless, and
thus outside the utilitarian system which envelops us at the end of the
millennium, they retain control over themselves, are able to fashion
themselves according to rules of their own imaginative making, rather than
merely taking up membership in the lockstep horde of corporate clones.
They are, therefore, special, entrusted with the task of keeping
the creative human spirit alive under the most stultifying and deadening
of external conditions.
Coming Up is an exaltation of and tribute to these, the world's
unrepentant gutter-dandies, and also a rocking riposte to those who ever
doubted that Suede, by any name, are one of the finest rock bands of the
1990s.