Some of the more disparaging reviews of Suede’s second album accused it of being pretentious, overblown and pompous – none of which was inaccurate. It was indulgent, and brilliantly so; and it was precisely that epic sense of scale and high drama that made it stand out so elegantly against its Britpop peers.
In fact, 1994’s Dog Man Star was a direct reaction against the more jingoistic, Carry On Up The Charts-elements of the scene; the arty, literate, gritty-glamorous child of an irreversibly broken home.
For those enchanted by the neon-lit sleaze and raw sexuality of the band’s self-titled debut, this was Suede through the looking glass – Lewis Carroll was inspiring frontman Brett Anderson at the time – the crashing, existential comedown after the party.
Anderson was taking a lot of acid. He merged the resultant psychedelia leanings with a David Bowie/Scott Walker element to create tormented vignettes of lost, lonely, paranoid souls looking at society from the outside.
But the progressive element really flourished as a result of two planet-sized egos colliding and going supernova. Things were already strained between Anderson and guitarist Bernard Butler before they entered London’s Master Rock studio to work on the record.
Butler, an avowed Pink Floyd fan and brilliant musician, had great prog designs for the project. Originally he planned penultimate track The Asphalt World as a challenging 25-minute song, eight minutes of which were to be pure guitar solo. The band wrestled him down to just over nine minutes.
The recording process broke the camel’s back and marked Butler’s sour, irreparable exit from Suede. He quit after failing to have producer Ed Buller sacked, and a session musician finished tracking in his absence.
As messy and entirely fun-free as the experience proved, the album is a genuine work of art, its seamless flow also inspired by an obsession with Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love.
From the meditative trance of opener Introducing The Band to the portentous, swirling guitars drawing black clouds over the Orwellian dread of We Are The Pigs, it’s a flawed but beautiful masterpiece. They even throw an entire orchestra at closing track Still Life, a bold and utterly glorious Life On Mars move in any year – but all the more so in the cheery indie-pop knees-up era.
Daddy’s Speeding, meanwhile, builds to a claustrophobic, cacophonic conclusion that screams Floyd from its very core; the howls from guitars and Moog depicting the horrific car crash that killed James Dean.
Said car crash may be the perfect metaphor for inter-band relations during Dog Man Star’s creation. But a brilliant, intense work of dark and progressive beauty staggered out of all that wreckage.
The 30th-anniversary edition of Dog Man Star is available via Demon Music Group.
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