Itโs the late 1650s and these are dark days in England. As many as 200,000 people have died in the civil wars and their aftermath, including a now decapitated king. The regicide and Butcher of Drogheda, Oliver Cromwell is also among the dead, but his corrupt puritan regime will joylessly stagger on for a while longer. The theatres are still shut, no sports are permitted. Drinking is frowned upon and many inns have closed. Cursing, immoral dressing and working on the Sabbath are gravely punished. Christmas is banned. The writer John Milton has been a loyal supporter of the new order, and rewarded with the position of Secretary for Foreign Tongues. He will go into hiding when the regime falls, and the regicides are hunted down by the dead kingโs son but that has yet to pass. For the moment, Milton is writing his epic Paradise Lost. Or rather, given he is now completely blind, he is dictating it wholesale to friends, family and amanuenses. In this sprawling work, he recounts the Fall of Man โ Adam and Eve ejected from Eden โ parallelled with the destiny of Satan, the rebellious once-beloved angel, expelled from heaven, โhurled headlong flaming from the ethereal skyโ.
It’s the mid-1990s and these are dark days in England. The Tories have been in power since 1979 and the country has been gutted, deindustrialised and sold off. Thatcher has been ousted but the corrupt puritan regime will stagger on joylessly for a while longer. With John Majorโs government mired in sleaze and hamstrung by incompetence, Labour are poised to finally topple them, but leader John Smith dies of a heart attack and is replaced by public schoolboy Tony Blair, with rictus grin and โmodernisingโ plans already in place. Throughout this age of conservatism, culture has been repeatedly revived by young people themselves, via DIY guerilla means, but they have been under concerted pressure, culminating in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This sought to crush outdoor impromptu dance events, increasing police powers in an effective war against soundsystems, raves and electronic music. Something had to give.
The desire for change and breakthrough was organic and essential. The way it transpired, less so. It was easy to be carried along by the momentum of โRock โnโ Roll Starโ and the enjoyably androgynous disco of โGirls And Boysโ, especially given the angst of Grunge was now consuming itself. Definitely Maybe became the fastest-selling debut ever in the UK, up to that point, while Parklife sold over a million copies. Yet the โmovementโ that followed was a contrivance from the beginning, cobbled together by a largely moribund press, under the risible, vacuous title of โBritpopโ. It would not be long before the welcome charisma, swagger and hedonism of Oasis became a self-parody, the goodwill squandered with coked-up recording sessions, sleb-strewn parties, bloated egos, paparazzi skirmishes and creative redundancy, all draped in the Union Jack. Their spirit was always key to their appeal, unapologetically defiant underdogs, but it was always way ahead of their sound, with its plodding funkless sexless bassless rhythms (only โColumbiaโ contained the slightest hint that anything like the Haรงienda had once existed), thick walls of execrable guitar, paint-by-numbers lyrics lacking any of the hilarity and charm of their interviews, and the aping not of The Beatles (whose inventiveness would have been a godsend) but the also-ran fag-ends of glam rock.
After a volte-face from baggy/ shoegazey origins, there was something similarly off with Blur, a boisterous stage school callowness that eclipsed islands of brilliance (โTo the Endโ, This Is a Lowโ etc.), at least until heartbreak and Pavement saved them. The other bands who made up the numbers were mostly journeymen, trading on authenticity while simultaneously pilfering earlier superior fare, from The Kinks to Wire; an unnecessary regressive betrayal of the underground youth movements at the time and of youth itself. Though rewritten now in the latest profit-driven Ticketmaster wave of revisionist nostalgia, the prevailing insistence then that we all somehow should have been born earlier was particularly revolting. Certain bands and their disciples seemed determined to convince us all that weโd somehow missed out on our youth because weโd been born too late to see The Small Faces in their prime, and so pranced around like extras in Quadrophenia, a copy of a copy of a copy. Added to this was a bourgeois media set, who covered their origins and banality by promoting and cosplaying their own jaundiced projections of working-class culture. Not the inventiveness and glamour of earlier ages โ say Roxy Music, for instance, or post punk or even the scene around Factory Records โ but laddish posturing, leering misogyny, football chants with none of the soul of โthe beautiful gameโ, mindless hero worship and mimicry, the narrowest of sonic palettes, proud philistinism, and knuckleheaded mad fer it babble. Britpop canโt be blamed for the fall of Rome alas but the transition of Londonโs image from a place where countless new musical genres were being broadcast on pirate frequencies from tower blocks, where bottom-up art scenes could afford to thrive and move through the city, to a two-tier priced-out Richard Curtis-spun Stage English playground of nightmares happened during this watch.
Even in the false dawn of Britpop, however, there was a sign of hope, even redemption. A blazing comet descending at the exact moment Britpop was ascending, a band crashing to earth in the grandest way possible. Its name was Dog Man Star.
There used to be a clichรฉ that the correct answer to โBlur or Oasis?โ was โPulpโ, which however pretentious it sounds bore the mark of truth. If you answered โSuedeโ, the reaction was interesting. Eyebrows raised. You were suddenlyโฆ suspect, questionable. The word even sounded like a basement password leading to untold debaucheries. It carried a loucheness, the faint air of being disreputable, like wearing a green carnation or reading The Yellow Book during the Victorian Fin de siรจcle (the band inherited a queer literate Wildean quality from The Smiths, who were themselves, standing on a continuum), the suggestion of being a denizen of some orgiastic netherworld and donning a skin-suit of respectability for the daylight hours. There were worse ways to be or appear. It might even have felt like a badge of honour.
One of the more infuriating aspects of the class system is the fact that the ritualistic performance of authenticity, even when it is blatant stolen valour from the poor, is more highly prized and rewarded than actual authenticity. Though stylistically disparate, bands like Suede, Pulp, the Manics and so on came from working class backgrounds and shared a proud and voracious appetite for culture. They were shamelessly erudite, glamorous misfits and attracted similar followings. Their authenticity was expansive (in literary, political, even sexual ways) and went in a deliberate multitude of directions. It might lead you to Scott Walker or Albert Camus or Sylvia Plath or J.G. Ballard or whoever. And yet this curious expansive quality, always present in the self-educating side of working class culture incidentally, was seen as less real than a bunch of rugger buggers and finishing school girls caterwauling about drinking booze and doing lines in someone elseโs accent.
Commentators have pointed to Suede as the beginning of Britpop, which is like blaming the defendant in a libel case for being sued or a victim of witchcraft for having a hex launched against them. The term would prove to be a dread millstone for them until Dog Man Star made a nonsense of the claims of paternity. Whoever owned this changeling, it was not theirs. In an interview with the author Adelle Stripe, Brett Anderson pointed out a crucial differentiation that separated Suede from the pack, “I was documenting Britain and they were celebrating Britain.” They had marked the beginning of a wave of genuine excitement and possibility, with three astonishing, brash and provocative singles (โThe Drownersโ, โMetal Mickeyโ and โAnimal Nitrateโ) and a lot of delightfully doe-eyed โfuck meโ poses on magazine covers, all cut-glass cheekbones and fringes and incendiary cover lines asking for trouble. They hailed from the right side of glam (Bowie was undeniably a forefather) and while they had a swagger, as much as decadent goth-peacocks can, there was something very appealing in their disconnection from the braggadocio of earlier rock icons. They were as coy or even sub as they were seductive and bold, being sexually ambiguous at a time that badly badly needed it.
It was the fourth single though, โSo Youngโ, that pointed the way ahead. An incredibly atmospheric nocturnal cityscape of a song. You didnโt need to see the video, as it was its own video. Impressionistic, unmistakably romantic, naรฏve even, in love with being young, where even the invitation of “letโs chase the dragon” sounds irresistible. The sinister magic wears off though. You end up chasing the original hit, and the innocence therein, but you canโt get it back, itโs gone forever, and eventually, if you keep going and you do, you might not even get yourself back.
The origin of โpostlapsarianโ, meaning to be post-romantic, is โafter the fallโ. It seems to fit Dog Man Star perfectly. At the time, it must have felt like a disaster. A terminal case of second album syndrome. The extraordinarily talented guitarist Bernard Butler had left in acrimonious circumstances before the albumโs completion, after separate tour buses and recording sessions, private outbursts and theatrical public salvos. Much of these incidents seem understandable in retrospect, especially when throwing grief and substance abuse into the mix. In a wider sense, itโs unrealistic to expect band relationships to be a campfire jamboree. Artists are beautiful monsters, thatโs the whole point of them. Yet the loss of such a crucial force so early feels tragic, the kind of change that can never be reversed, hence postlapsarian. Though in truth, in Dog Man Star we hear them mostly recording in freefall, with the ground an ominous rumour.
The postlapsarian condition is perfectly captured in the albumโs cover. The image is โSad Dreams On Cold Morningsโ from the feminist artist Joanne Leonardโs Dreams And Nightmares (1971). In the series, Leonard features romantic imagery glimpsed through the windows, reflecting on their unreality, and how far women fall when they reach for these false promises as she sees them, leaving them entrapped or abandoned. The enigma and androgyny of Suedeโs first album cover (a Tee Corinne photograph from the book Stolen Glances) is repeated here but thereโs a palpable sense of loss, even dejection.
How then does Dog Man Star feel not only like Suedeโs finest album but the beginnings of a redemption of that entire period? It does so because it encapsulates the fall as few have before or since, the fracturing upon landing and then the reconstruction, the salvation from the fragments. It is a dark, cracked album and both qualities add to its power. The fact that the mixes feel wrong at times, the sense of it being both expertly sequenced as a voyage, neatly bookended, and yet incomplete, wanting and wanton, actually works in its favour. One form of the band is disintegrating, the next has not yet formed. That old line from Gramsciโs prison diaries springs to mind, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is terrible in politics is not necessarily terrible in art. Dog Man Star is an album that gives “a great variety of morbid symptoms” a good name. Perfection would have been a mistake. It feels like Kintsugi, the Japanese tradition whereby gold seams are used to join broken pieces of pottery, making them far more fascinating and attractive than just another pristine manufactured piece.
It’s a challenging listen for sure, from the off. Inspired by Buddhist chants in a Japanese temple, the drone of โIntroducing The Bandโ is designed to shake off the tentative. It sounds like apparitions walking through the Great Smog of 1952. Renowned as a hook-laden singles band, the song sets expectations that this album is an album. A journey. The first part of which is to swim through the swamp of the production that Butler loathed. Yet as diverting as the alternate versions included on the deluxe edition are โ the more exposed, vaguely Doors-esque โSquidgy Bunโ version or Enoโs epic version, which sounds like itโs in search, and deserving, of a film โ the final choice was correct and admirable in its contrariness. Inspired by Orwellโs line, from 1984, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face โ forever”, the track is as far from the cheery mockney pantomime of โParklifeโ as humanly possible. Itโs dystopian, oppressive but not resigned.
The extended passage of Orwellโs is worth including as it hints at questions of power and dominance even sadistic pleasure that Suede were tuned in to: “There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always โ do not forget this, Winston โ always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.” The lyrics of the song teeter on the razorโs edge of parody but the playful teasing of sexual roles and BDSM is compelling, and the drone acts as a guide, making the rock & roll/totalitarian analogies more Diamond Dogs than The Wall. Humans are never just political creatures but rather there are many other desires and impulses simultaneously at play; very much Suedeโs kingdom back then.
Given that ‘Introducing’, admirably, was the sound of commercial suicide, โWe Are The Pigsโ was an invigorating assurance that the band had not lost or abandoned their talent for resplendently grubby choruses and flamboyant statements. The vision remained dystopian though. Suede always dealt in urban imagery โ flyovers and laudanum, cursed love affairs and sunsets viewed from sinking tower blocks. The romance has ebbed here a little, the menace increased, though itโs delivered with glee, somewhere between Lord Of The Flies and โCome To Daddyโ. It’s a hymn to anarchy and destruction but the nuclear references, a recurring echo through Andersonโs lyrics, remind us that what are bands of marauding pig-faced rioters compared to growing up in supposedly sane societies where the apocalypse was only a four-minute warning away?
It would be wrong to say Dog Man Star is bereft of romance. โHeroineโ opens with Lord Byronโs “She walks in beauty, like the nightโฆ” Yet the romance is never simple, and never was for a band skilled in portraying both the night before and the morning after. The song plays on the similarities of โheroineโ and โheroinโ (there are at least three different types of eye rolling throughout), and the subject is really isolation and the replacement of love with the pathos of pornography, a development that has since consumed the Western world. Byron is the perfect foil for this twist, given if thereโs a real-life embodiment of Miltonโs anti-hero Satan, itโs this particular Romantic poet, an infamous figure cast out for his transgressions.
Another change, compared to its predecessor, is that the finest moments on Dog Man Star are its quietest and most delicate. Thereโs a newfound confidence not to strut but to let the songs exist as their own little worlds. This is evident in โDaddyโs Speedingโ, a warped hymn to Hollywood and James Dean, killed driving his Porsche Spyder, nicknamed โLittle Bastardโ, along Route 446. Dean is a fitting character to focus on. Sexually charged and ambiguous stories swirl around him, a free but tormented figure in a corrupted time. Itโs an unusual song combining show tune theatricality and dreamy-then-phased vocals (prompted by Lennonโs sleepy/acid period) with ghostly chamber music, never quite settling, brilliantly so, climaxing with a whirling wall of feedback, a crash and the roll of a wheel. Beginning with what sounds like a drunken saxophonist falling down a lift shaft, โThis Hollywood Lifeโ is song that finds its way to the corruption behind the mask of glamour, where the monsters are not aberrations, dreams are bait, and celluloid faith is no less venal than any other. “Forget it, Jake. Itโs Hollywood.”
Politics do play a part throughout, but they are explored where they truly manifest and matter, which is in peopleโs lives rather than polemic โ race in the relationship of โBlack And Blueโ, class and empire in โThe Powerโ. Growing up in poverty shadows much of Suedeโs work but itโs always poetic, resistive and idiosyncratic, as hard as it gets, because thatโs what itโs actually like (Andersonโs first excellent book Coal Black Mornings is especially strong on this) rather than the caricature itโs depicted as from outside. Sexuality is another major theme and attraction of the group. While hardly Coil, Queercore or Paris Is Burning, Suedeโs shapeshifting sexual attractions, identities and gender roles was welcome at a time of โacceptableโ mainstream prejudice towards LGBTQ people and worse (Section 28, the unsolved murders of Michael Boothe and others, the moral panic of AIDS, the poisoned soil that led to David Copelandโs bombing of the Admiral Duncan among other atrocities, and so on). The fragile and thus inflated masculinity revived by Britpop, encouraged by ladsโ magazines, was one of the most depressing spectacles of the era and had real impacts upon peoplesโ lives, at a time when so-called โgay-bashingโ was not uncommon and intolerance was rife. The freedom exalted in so many Britpop anthems could be a deceptively exclusive thing.
The soul of the album is โThe Wild Onesโ. It feels related to โStay Togetherโ, a magnificent stand-alone single of the time that serves perhaps as Bernard Butlerโs magnum opus. Where โStay Togetherโ is a Busby Berkely production, โThe Wild Onesโ benefits from its relative intimacy, even though the vocals were aiming for Jacques Brel territory. Itโs romantic but itโs a wise even scarred kind of romance. And itโs worth noting that Anderson wrote the albumโs lyrics while living in Highgate, a stoneโs throw from the place where the most mysterious of the Romantics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, went to overcome his opium addiction and ended his days. No longer are they intoxicated by being young and fabulous, instead โThe Wild Onesโ is a desperate plea for a love not to leave. โThe 2 Of Usโ continues this mood of the sweetest melancholy, and can be read, regardless of their wishes, as a broken love song between Anderson and Butler. Every choice in life, it suggests, involves the negation of another path, lost possibilities, and there is no avoiding this one chooses the false harbour of safety and stagnation. Fucking up rarely sounded so serene.
While the extended roaming outro of โThe Wild Onesโ has a darkly psychedelic mood, reminiscent of Janeโs Addiction or The Cure, โThe Asphalt Worldโ is the best example of their ability to create and sustain a soundscape. Itโs majestic but never loses a whispery closeness. And, as a strong contender for their finest moment, itโs amazing that while the band and album seemed to be falling apart, all the disintegrating pieces just happened to land into shapes that were mountainous, temple-like.ย ย
Collapse is inadvisable. Thereโs every chance Dog Man Star was simply a freak of nature. Never let a resident genius, a Marr or Butler or whoever, leave. Few bands survive such a loss. Or at least let him or her stay to see what their vision is. And yet, this anomaly exists. Adversity is not something that should be courted, there are many who unjustly cannot escape it, but thatโs not to say the friction does not have results. The light and heat of atmospheric re-entry. Blur ascended a level when the wheels began to come off โ the trilogy on 13 (โCaramelโ, โTrimm Trabbโ and โNo Distance Left To Runโ) marking new heights and depths, both being intrinsically connected. Even Oasis made their deepest, most interesting third of an album with the beleaguered Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, peaking with โGas Panic!โ, before retreating back into the sheeeeiiiiiiiite. Dog Man Star accelerates past both. In which direction is superlative. The idea of up and down is nonsense in space where everything is relative. You can soar downwards or fall upwards. Everywhere is exiting heaven. Itโs the energy and mass that matters and what it leaves behind when it finally crash-lands. Satan, patron saint of jaded romantics, is always falling through the skies. And his message, as dictated by a blind writer centuries ago is still as true as ever, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” Next year, when tired old relics are once more dusted off in stadia at great cost and to ever-diminishing effect, remember the treasures to be found in the wreckage elsewhere, not just back then but right now, all around us. If Suede created this at a hopeless time, thereโs always signs of hope, always something gloriously plummeting to earth.
