The Butler Did It

You can't explain what goes on in bands. I'm not going to stand here and try and explain what went on in Suede," says Bernard Butler, before explaining, more or less, what went on in Suede.
"I can't remember. It's just like the breakdown of a marriage. Oh, what went wrong? I'll tell you what went wrong: on the 23rd of May 1986, you said this to me and that was the end of our marriage . . . It just doesn't work like that. People kept asking us the same old boring questions about what went wrong. 'They said this about you. What do you think?' Well, you know. We broke up. We pissed each other off and they (the rest of Suede) slagged me off. It's a load of rubbish that they don't mean but unfortunately I've got to recover from it. But I know I've got a clear conscience."
That distant rumble you heard in the distance was the sound of personalities clashing, of egos colliding, of a musical partnership dissloving. The demise of Suede Mark 1 was a bruising, fractious affair and Bernard Butler, then the boy wonder guitar hero of the '90s, has the scars to prove it. Splitting up is hard to do, no matter what, but splitting up in public adds an unsavoury element which benefits no-one except the circulation figures of the music press, who - let's face it - had been obsessed with the band from the very start anyway.
"When the Suede thing happened," he explains, "there was an avalanche of press. We did far too much. It didn't allow us to grow, really. It didn't allow us to go on making music because we spent so much time in the early '90s doing interviews or waiting for Brett to come back from doing them.
"And spending all week recovering from some stupid thing that he'd said . . . which he never meant in the first place. By the time we did have the time to make more music, Brett wanted to just sit around and relax and party."
Except for the small matter of Brett's smack habit, the full extent of which only became apparent during a photo shoot at the time when, gaunt and inelegantly wasted-looking, he was the picture of ill-health. On top of that, there was Damon Albarn's pointed reference to the "blizzard of cocaine" on the scene, which was widely interpreted as aimed not just to all the people doing lines but to the white trash lifestyle of Anderson in particular. Did Butler read all this and weep?
"I didn't read the press that much," he answers, "but, yeah, it was pretty disillusioning because there was a great spark at one point between the two of us and it just fizzled out through a mixture of the music business crashing down on us and cocaine. All through a lack of focus and a lack of communication."
Was he involved in all that as well?
"Well, you know, I hung around with my people, Brett hung around with his. It was a different scene. Everyone wants to know 'Oh, did Brett take heroin?'. I'm like, 'I can't remember'."
Surely, it was a factor in his leaving the band?
"If you wanted to know all about the demise of Suede, I'd have to sit you down for about 3 weeks and you'd be bored sick after the first half hour. All I'm going to say is that is that I made great records and I'll point that out at every opportunity. When we weren't going to make great records together I decided to abandon ship. Neither of us wanted to make the kind of records that the other did. The result is one album called Coming Up and one called People Move On. That's all there is. There's no juicy gossip. In Europe and America, people never ask me about Suede. They ask me about individual songs on the new album."
Indeed, "that bloke who left Suede" is now Bernard Butler, Solo Artist. Now signed to Creation, he has just released the lush, epic-sounding People Move On, an album full of Spector-esque walls of sound, string sections, horn sections, cathedral-like keyboards and lots of twiddly guitar bits. And the odd folky ballad. And what's more, the boy can sing as well, even if his voice has not yet settled to one distinct pitch. Nevertheless, it's a bold, ambitious record that is not as hung up on notions of '90s cred and street suss, whereas the last Suede album, great and all as it is, so patently was.
In the intervening years between then and now, Butler had a high work-rate but a low profile. Session work with the likes of Aimee Mann, Brian Eno, Paul Weller and, of course, those 15 minutes with The Verve came and went but the project that showed up most prominently on the press radar was his collaboration with soul queen David McAlmont. However, the rapid disintegration of this partnership was offered as proof that Butler was impossible to work with, that he had a temperament as volatile as Mount Vesuvius. A pattern seemed to be emerging.
At the time of the Suede split, Butler was portrayed as a kamikaze pilot dive-bombing the mothership of British pop. How dare he press the self-destruct button just when the nation's Great White Hopes were about to enter the next dimension? Then, when Suede Mark 2 re-grouped with Richard Oakes, the original of the species was then forgotten about, missing presumed working with Sparks and suchlike.
Butler's fall from grace with the gentlemen of the press bore an uncanny resemblance to the treatment received by Johnny Marr, one of his heroes and main influences, when he quit The Smiths. Did Marr give any advice to Butler when the proverbial shit hit the guitar player?
"He did, yeah," he replies. "I didn't know him but I got a surprise phone call one night when I came home all depressed. 'This is Johnny Marr. I hope you're all right'. I nearly fell over. I had to ring him back just to check that I wasn't hearing things. He's been very good to me personally. He's had to face enough shit of his own.
"He's one of those people who has taken so much shit off other people in the past," continues Butler. "He was despised when he left The Smiths. He got blamed for all of it. But he kept his mouth shut. People kept asking him questions but Johhny wouldn't answer. He just left it. He knew The Smiths had made great records and it just ended. There was nothing more to be said."
Now that the dust has settled on the whole Suede spat, the main accusation levelled at Butler these days is that he has descended down into the ' A' minor 7th circle of Muso hell.
"The old cliche is that I was a jobbing session musician," he says, "that me and Johnny Marr were hired by an agency and got sent out every Monday morning to go and play guitar with whoever. What actually happened was that people, like Aimee Mann, would ring me up on a Friday night and say 'I'm in London and going into the studio tomorrow morning, do you want to come along?'. I'd never even met her before. We wrote a song the next day. . . then I never saw her again!
"But I'm learning a lot with every person I work with. I have a choice: I could either stay in and watch the TV or go and make a record, and I'd rather go and make a record. There are loads of advantages in doing the so-called 'session man-for-hire' thing: there are a million gadgets in the studio that I would probably never have used. I get to meet a producer that I would probably never have met, with a different set of values - for instance, I've worked with the guy who produced Blue Lines and All Saints. Also, it's not my deal. If something goes wrong, he has to sort it out, it's not my concern. It's just a lot more interesting than being in a four-piece rock group working with the same musicians and the same producer for the same record company."
Because he's been more of a utility squad member than the star striker on his post-Suede work till now, most people's image of Butler is a snapshot frozen in time somewhere around his 21st birthday. However, he is now the man, rather than the boy, with a thorn in his side, having got married and had a kid and moved into the proverbial singer's Hampstead home. And what's more, he himself professes that he never had any desire to be granted residency in Tir Na nÓg.
"I really hate it," he groans, "when you get pop stars trying to talk about teenage things when they're 30. It's as if they never did the things like bunking off school when they were a teenager and are trying to make up for it now. When I was a teenager I wanted to be older; I wanted to be in my 20s.
"Some people have said to me that I'm very young to be going on about the things that I do but I'm 27. To the public, I was this young guy of 21 and now I'm 27. I was in Suede and then I made this other record. But for me there were five long years in between. Musically, too, I did loads of other things but they were all ignored, which is fine by me. Basically, I've matured. . . I hate that word because it makes you sound like an old fart. But I'm not going to be dishonest about it. When you get to 27, you suddenly find that you can't run for the bus anymore and you can't drink 20 pints anymore, you can only drink 7."
Is that what the title of the new album is getting at?
"It's one of the meanings that can be got from it," he answers. "It got to the point where I could draw an analogy between what was happening in my life and what I was trying to do musically. I could easily be judgmental about things that happened in my past but I realized that if I did do that it would stifle my future. "The alternative is to say to myself, if that hadn't happened I wouldn't have got to where I am today. If I hadn't made mistakes I wouldn't be able to work out what I could do right in the future."
Whatever about his own future, Bernard Butler is a trifle pessimistic about the prospects for rock'n'roll in general, given its current state of affairs.
"I don't want to go on tour and play the same 12 songs in the same order every night with the same encores," he winces. "It's just so dull, dull, dull. Nobody ever talks about it. Nobody ever talks about how sterilised most modern rock groups are. Most of the suppposed alternative groups are more sterile than Bon Jovi. People didn't do it ten years ago. The Smiths never did it. New Order didn't play the same set night every night."
Now that the euphoria over Britpop has died down and the obituaries have been filed, how does Butler feel about the end of the movement?
"I think it's great," he replies. "There's egg on the face of an awful lot of people who made an awful lot of terrible records and terrible statememts during that time."
Does he think there's too much money involved in the music industry now?
"Since Oasis there has been. That's not their fault because they are a totally different entity to a lot of these other groups. They have this knack of connecting on a very basic scale. But because of Oasis, people realized 'oh, look, guitar music sells'. Whereas in the '80s, nobody took any notice. In the last few years, you can sell any old rubbish with a guitar or get played on Radio 1. Suede were the first guitar band to get played on Radio 1 in years. Bands nowadays are spending so much time out on the road trying to flog their album - or their t-shirts - that they're forgetting to make the follow-up so it takes them years to get around to it."
For his own part, Bernard Butler will be flogging his new album and t-shirt at a venue near you in the autumn. n
* People Move On is out now on Creation.